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Colorado joins Justice Department in suing six large landlords for algorithmic pricing scheme that harms millions of renters

Jan. 7, 2025 (DENVER)—Attorney General Phil Weiser, the Justice Department and a bipartisan coalition of states today filed an amended complaint in its antitrust lawsuit against RealPage (PDF), to sue six of the nation’s largest landlords for participating in algorithmic pricing schemes that harmed renters.

The amended complaint alleges the landlords — Greystar Real Estate Partners LLC (Greystar); Blackstone’s LivCor LLC (LivCor); Camden Property Trust (Camden); Cushman & Wakefield Inc and Pinnacle Property Management Services LLC (Cushman); Willow Bridge Property Company LLC (Willow Bridge); and Cortland Management LLC (Cortland) — participated in an unlawful scheme to decrease competition among landlords in apartment pricing, harming millions of American renters. Together, these landlords operate more than 1.3 million units in 44 states and the District of Columbia.

Cortland manages over 80,000 rental units in 13 states, including many multifamily apartment buildings in Colorado. Even though the Justice Department also announced that it has reached a settlement with Cortland, Attorney General Weiser said Colorado is not in a position to join it at this time.

“Many Coloradans are struggling to afford housing and pay rent. We look forward to learning more about the Cortland settlement and are always willing to consider collaborative solutions. As for the other landlords added to the lawsuit, if they engage in irresponsible and harmful conduct that raises rents, they must be held to account,” said Attorney General Weiser.

The amended complaint alleges that the six landlords actively participated in a scheme to set their rents using each other’s competitively sensitive information through common pricing algorithms. Along with using RealPage’s anticompetitive pricing algorithms, these landlords coordinated through a variety of means, including:

  • Directly communicating with competitors’ senior managers about rents, occupancy, and other competitively sensitive topics.
  • Regularly conducting “call arounds” to share, and sometimes discuss, competitively sensitive information about rents, occupancy, pricing strategies, and discounts.
  • Participating in “user groups” hosted by RealPage to discuss how to modify the software’s pricing methodology, as well as their own pricing strategies, including renewal increases, concessions, and acceptance rates of RealPage rent recommendations.

In August of 2024, Weiser joined the Justice Department in suing RealPage (opens new tab) alleging that the company enables collusion between landlords and distorts the housing market for millions of Americans who rent. The company does this with software it sells to landlords who agree to share competitively sensitive data, such as rents from executed leases, lease terms, and projected future vacancies.

The software combines this massive amount of nonpublic, competitive data collected from competing landlords and feeds it to an algorithm to provide daily, near real-time pricing recommendations back to landlords. Additionally, the software tracks the supply of available apartments, and landlords in markets with heavy demand can use this information to keep properties off the market and drive up rents.

The attorneys general of Illinois and Massachusetts joined the amended complaint, along with the original plaintiff states California, Colorado, Connecticut, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oregon, Tennessee, and Washington.

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Media Contact:
Lawrence Pacheco
Chief Communications Officer
(720) 508-6553 office | (720) 245-4689 cell
lawrence.pacheco@coag.gov