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RealPage’s customers have publicly attributed revenue increases to its software. According to RealPage’s website, the former chief executive of the Texas-based property management companyPinnacle said his firm’s revenue rose by 4 percent at the height of a recession in 2009.
“The tool, frankly, really helped us fight through that, not just as a company but as an industry,” Rick Graf, the Pinnacle executive, said in the video on the site. A spokesman for Pinnacle’s parent company declined to comment.
The District of Columbia lawsuit, filed in November, pulled back the curtain on the ubiquitous nature of RealPage’s software: In the district, about 60 percent of units in large buildings are priced using it, the complaint states. That figure jumps to 90 percent in the broader Washington metropolitan area.
“It’s a housing cartel, and that housing cartel is resulting in already high market rents in our city being even higher,” Mr. Schwalb, the district’s attorney general, said in an interview.
Among the landlords sued by Mr. Schwalb’s officewas Greystar, the largest apartment owner in the United States, according to data from the National Multifamily Housing Council.
Greystar did not respond to a request for comment.
After the District of Columbia filed its lawsuit, Attorney General Kris Mayes of Arizona did likewise in February,accusing RealPage and nine landlords of illegally conspiring to raise rents for hundreds of thousands of renters in the Phoenix and Tucson areas. In March, Attorney General Josh Stein of North Carolina began an antitrust investigation into RealPage.
And the Justice Department, beyond its brief in the tenants’ litigation,has signaled broader scrutiny of big landlords. In May, the Federal Bureau of Investigation executed a limited search warrant at the Atlanta headquarters of the real estate management firm Cortland in connection with a Justice Department investigation into potential antitrust violations in the multifamily housing industry.
“We are cooperating fully with that investigation, and we understand that neither Cortland nor any of our employees are ‘targets’ of that investigation,” the company said. Cortland is a defendant in the tenants’ litigation, but it is unclear how the RealPage software is factoring into the federal inquiry, if at all.
A Justice Department representative declined to comment.
The government has a legal advantageover private attorneys in that it canuse civil investigative demands to “pop open the hood” of RealPage’s software, analyzing how its algorithm works before going to court, said Sandeep Vaheesan, legal director at the Open Markets Institute, a research and advocacy group focused on antitrust issues.
Ms. Bowcock, RealPage’s spokeswoman, said property managers “find value” in its software.
But there are signs that some customers are starting to worry about the legal threats. InFebruary, Pinnacle and one other multifamily residential property owner, listed as defendants in the Tennessee federal court litigation, agreed to settle claims in that lawsuit that they inflated rental prices using RealPage’s software
Although a federal judge in Tennessee let the tenants’ litigation move forward, none of the pending lawsuits has gone to trial.To prevail, they will need to present sufficient evidence of collusion, by way of RealPage’s software, to convince the courts to see the information exchange as illegal.
Some antitrust lawyers say those facts need to be fleshed out and tested in court.
“We’re fighting on a hypothetical battlefield right now,” said Douglas Ross, who teaches antitrust law at the University of Washington.
https://archive.is/pW6WV
DOES BLACKROCK OWN THAT COMPANIES STOCK? OR HAS OWNERSHIP SOMEHOW? GUARANTEED THEY DOSINCE THEY'VE BOUGHT A TON OF BUILDINGS AND HOMES. THEY BOUGHT THE HOMES TO RAISE RENT.