Thoma Bravo’s RealPage and the justice department reached a settlement agreement in an antitrust case that had accused the company of monopolizing the market for rental property software and fostering a price-fixing conspiracy among residential landlords around the U.S.
According to the proposed settlement, which has to be approved by a federal judge in North Carolina, RealPage has agreed to stop enabling the sharing of nonpublic pricing data between competing landlords and to stop using that data to train its artificial intelligence models for determining rental prices.
“Competing companies must make independent pricing decisions, and with the rise of algorithmic and artificial intelligence tools, we will remain at the forefront of vigorous antitrust enforcement,” said Assistant Attorney General Abigail Slater of the justice department’s antitrust division.
RealPage, based in Richardson, Texas, helps residential landlords market vacant apartments, screen prospective tenants and set rents, among other functions. It serves more than 24 million units around the world, according to the company’s website, making it one of the largest software providers to the multifamily industry.
In a statement, RealPage said the settlement, which doesn’t require the company to admit wrongdoing, will allow it to continue without customer disruptions.
“This resolution with the DOJ was necessary to provide certainty and finality for RealPage and its customers to avoid protracted litigation,” said Stephen Weissman, an outside lawyer for the company.
A group of state attorneys general who sued alongside the justice department last summer didn’t sign on to the settlement, meaning that those lawsuits are continuing.
The lawsuit was filed toward the end of the Biden administration and represented the first big collusion case based on an algorithm. Justice department officials over the last several administrations have discussed the potential for companies to collude electronically, a fear that has been supercharged by the use of artificial intelligence.
In January, the justice department added a number of major landlords, including Greystar Real Estate Partners, to the lawsuit. Greystar agreed to settle in August, saying it would stop using algorithmic pricing software that relies on nonpublic data and would cooperate with the justice department’s case against RealPage. A group of other landlords remain defendants in the case.