A growing movement to ban price-fixing software for rental housing continues to spread across the United States. As a result of the RealPage scandal, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Jersey City, and recently Hoboken have passed ordinances that stop landlords from using Big Tech software that allows them to collude and wildly inflate rents. More cities are expected to do the same.
Just last week, in Hoboken, New Jersey, the City Council voted unanimously to ban landlords from using software that helps them share information so they can all charge excessive rents.
“It will now be illegal for landlords renting residential units in Hoboken to engage in price-fixing through algorithmic rent-fixing,” the city of Hoboken stated, “meaning they can no longer use software, algorithms, or data-sharing platforms to coordinate, recommend, or implement rent prices, lease terms, or occupancy levels among competing landlords.”
The movement to stop the use of price-fixing software started after ProPublica published a 2022 exposé about a cartel of corporate landlords that used a RealPage software program to collude and charge higher and higher rents in numerous American cities. The investigation brought about antitrust lawsuits by tenants in California and other states, and several state attorneys general also sued RealPage — a Big Tech firm based in Texas — and its corporate clients.
Last year, in fact, the Department of Justice, joined by a number of state attorneys general, sued RealPage and corporate landlords that used the firm’s technology.
“While Americans across the country struggled to afford housing,” said Acting Assistant Attorney General Doha Mekki of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division in January 2025, “the landlords named in today’s lawsuit shared sensitive information about rental prices and used algorithms to coordinate to keep the price of rent high.”
Mekki added, “Today’s action against RealPage and six major landlords seeks to end their practice of putting profits over people and make housing more affordable to millions of people across the country.”
And, in February 2025, U.S. senators Elizabeth Warren and Ruben Gallego called for a Department of Defense investigation into whether landlords using RealPage software rent gouged military families.
Tellingly, as corporate landlords Equity Residential, Essex Property Trust, Greystar, UDR, and Camden Property Trust were mired in the RealPage scandal, they were also shelling out major campaign cash to successfully kill a 2024 pro-rent control ballot measure in California. And RealPage delivered $500,000, in 2020, to stop a previous rent control initiative in that state. AIDS Healthcare Foundation, the parent organization of Housing Is A Human Right, sponsored both measures.
Stateline, the news site, noted that mostly cities, not states, are behind the push to ban price-fixing software, which isn’t surprising. In many states, such as California, real estate lobbyists have enormous influence to stop pro-tenant legislation. A 2021 Housing Is A Human Right special report, for example, found that the California Apartment Association, using corporate landlord cash, sent campaign contributions to state and local politicians in 51 out of California’s 58 counties, aiming to buy political influence.
In addition to bans, rent regulations can also rein in predatory landlords using price-fixing software. It’s a point made in a recent white paper published in the Harvard Business Review, and something RealPage and corporate landlords understand, which led to them spending millions of dollars to stop pro-rent control measures in California.
Either way, middle- and working-class tenants desperately need to be protected against corporate landlords using price-fixing software and other predatory business practices. If not, Big Real Estate will continue to squeeze every last cent out of renters, worsening the housing affordability and homelessness crises.
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