DOJ and State Attorneys General Settle Landmark Algorithmic Price-Fixing Case Against RealPage

On November 24, 2025, the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and a coalition of state Attorneys General announced a landmark proposed settlement with Texas-based software provider RealPage Inc. The settlement resolves a high-profile civil antitrust lawsuit originally filed in August 2024, which accused RealPage of violating Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act by using its proprietary revenue management software to facilitate algorithmic rent-setting and price-fixing in some of the nation's largest rental markets.

The DOJ and state AGs alleged that RealPage's software (including YieldStar and LRO) collected nonpublic, competitively sensitive, real-time lease data from competing landlords. The software's algorithms then used this shared pool of competitor data to recommend rental prices, effectively aligning pricing strategies, restricting rent decreases, and suppressing independent competition. This practice allegedly resulted in artificially inflated rents for millions of American tenants.

Assistant Attorney General Abigail Slater of the DOJ's Antitrust Division stated:

"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."

Key Settlement Terms

The proposed consent judgment, which requires court approval, imposes several major corrective measures on RealPage’s software operations for a duration of seven years:

• Ban on Real-Time Data Training: RealPage is prohibited from using active lease data to train its predictive pricing algorithms. It may only use historical, backward-looking lease data that is at least 12 months old.
• Geographic Modeling Restrictions: RealPage's pricing models are barred from analyzing or reporting rental pricing data at a granularity narrower than a state-wide level.
• Redesign of Software Features: RealPage must modify its software to ensure it does not make identical pricing recommendations to different property owners within the same local market, and must remove features that restrict rent decreases or align pricing among competing landlords.
• Prohibition on Information Exchange: RealPage is barred from conducting market surveys to gather nonpublic data, and is prohibited from discussing or facilitating discussions on pricing strategies or trends based on nonpublic data during meetings for property managers.
• Compliance Oversight: A court-appointed monitor will oversee RealPage's compliance with the terms of the settlement.
• No Financial Penalties or Admissions: The settlement does not include any financial penalties or findings/admissions of wrongdoing against RealPage.

This proposed settlement is widely viewed as a major precedent for algorithmic pricing and coordination under antitrust law, demonstrating that regulators will treat the ingestion of competitors' real-time data by pricing algorithms as a significant antitrust risk.