Attorney General Anthony G. Brown announced a lawsuit against RealPage, Inc. (RealPage) and eight of the largest residential landlords in Maryland for colluding to illegally raise rents for hundreds of thousands of Maryland residents. The lawsuit, filed in the Circuit Court for Prince George’s County, alleges that the defendant landlords allowed RealPage to set rent prices. RealPage used a centralized pricing algorithm to inflate prices, costing renters millions of dollars. The lawsuit is one of several lodged by government agencies—including the United States Department of Justice— against RealPage and its landlord users. “RealPage and the named landlords worked together to raise the cost of their apartments, making it hard for Maryland renters to put a roof over their heads,” said Attorney General Brown. “Our Office is committed to holding landlords accountable so Marylanders can afford their rent.” RealPage offers a variety of technology-based services to real estate owners and property managers, including “Revenue Management” products that use non-public, competitively sensitive data—for example, the number of potential tenant visits to a property—to estimate supply and demand, and then generate a “price” to charge that maximizes the landlord’s revenue. RealPage then tracks and enforces each landlord’s compliance with the software’s “prices.” The […]
The post Attorney General Brown Sues RealPage and Residential Landlords for Illegally Raising Rent for Thousands of Maryland Residents through Price-Fixing Scheme Lawsuit Alleges that Six of Maryland’s Largest Landlords Colluded Through RealPage’s Centralized Price-Setting Algorithms to Raise Rent Prices in Violation of the Maryland Antitrust Act appeared first on Southern Maryland News Net.