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price gouging
Just After Settling With Trump DOJ, RealPage Sues New York Over Ban on Algorithmic Rent-Setting
"As if we need any more evidence the settlement is BS," wrote one antitrust advocate.
Nov 26, 2025
After securing a corporate-friendly settlement with the Trump Justice Department earlier this week, the real estate software company RealPage on Wednesday turned its attention to the state of New York, suing to block a recently enacted law aimed at preventing algorithmic rent-setting that has helped drive up housing costs nationwide.
The law in question prohibits software companies like RealPage, which is owned by a private equity firm, from enabling landlords to collude and push up rents. Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed the measure into law last month, making the state one of the first in the nation to combat algorithmic price-fixing.
In a legal challenge filed Wednesday in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, RealPage argues the state law is "a sweeping and unconstitutional ban on lawful speech specifically intended" to outlaw RealPage's software.
On the third page of the lawsuit, RealPage cites its pending settlement with the US Justice Department in an effort to bolster its case against New York's law, which advocates hailed as a major victory for renters.
"Especially because RealPage offers [revenue management software (RMS)] that does not reference any competitor’s non-public information when a customer is using the software, there is no plausible basis to conclude that RealPage’s RMS can be used to facilitate any form of collusion among RealPage customers," the lawsuit states. "In fact, this version of the software is specifically permitted by the U.S. Department of Justice under its proposed antitrust consent decree with RealPage."
"As if we need any more evidence the settlement is BS," replied Matt Stoller, director of research at the American Economic Liberties Project.
With sky-high housing costs a central focus in New York—particularly the successful New York City mayoral campaign of Zohran Mamdani—and across the country, RealPage and management companies that use its software have drawn heightened scrutiny. Last week, nine states reached a $7 million settlement with Greystar, the largest landlord in the US, in a lawsuit over the company's use of RealPage software to raise rents.
As part of the state settlement, Greystar agreed to no longer use rent-setting software that relies on private data from other landlords.
Late last year, during the presidency of Joe Biden, the Justice Department sued RealPage over the company's alleged "unlawful scheme to decrease competition among landlords in apartment pricing."
“RealPage contracts with competing landlords who agree to share with RealPage nonpublic, competitively sensitive information about their apartment rental rates and other lease terms to train and run RealPage’s algorithmic pricing software,” said the Biden DOJ. “This software then generates recommendations, including on apartment rental pricing and other terms, for participating landlords based on their and their rivals’ competitively sensitive information.”
On Monday, the Trump Justice Department announced a proposed settlement with RealPage that the company openly welcomed, characterizing the deal as an effective endorsement of the legality of its product. The settlement, in which RealPage does not admit to any wrongdoing, still must be reviewed and approved by a court.
According to a report published last year by the Biden White House, algorithmic price-setting cost renters across the US nearly $4 billion in 2023 alone.
The American Prospect's David Dayen noted Wednesday that RealPage previously "promised landlord clients that it would generate 'revenue lift between 3% to 7%' by feeding rental data in a metro area into an algorithm that recommended price increases."
"Then, RealPage agents would tell landlords that they risked losing access to the platform if they didn’t comply with hiking rents," Dayen wrote. "This was a case of classic price-fixing."
"Not having to pay a nickel or admit wrongdoing is lenient enough," Dayen added, referring to the DOJ settlement. "But there are several loopholes even in the restrictions. RealPage can continue using past data to train AI models, which will inform future price recommendations. Public data can be aggregated and used for this purpose. And RealPage can continue using an 'auto-accept' feature for price recommendations, as long as clients can reconfigure it to opt out. We know from most of digital age history that opt-outs don’t work well."
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'Terrible for Renters': Trump DOJ Settles Price-Fixing Case With RealPage
"Far from stopping illegal practices," said one critic, "it gives a green light to algorithmic price-fixing across the economy."
Nov 25, 2025
The Trump Justice Department on Monday announced a settlement with the real estate software giant RealPage, which the federal government and multiple states accused of illegally facilitating collusion between landlords to drive up rents.
The settlement, which must be reviewed by a court, would require RealPage to "cease having its software use competitors’ nonpublic, competitively sensitive information to determine rental prices," among other mandates.
Abigail Slater, head of the DOJ's Antitrust Division, cast the agreement as a win for competition and for renters. But RealPage downplayed the settlement's impact on its business model, saying the deal's terms "bless the legality of RealPage’s prior and planned product changes"—alluding to the company's voluntary decision last year to let its customers remove nonpublic data when using the software to calculate recommended rents.
The company emphasized that the settlement does not include any financial penalties or admissions of guilt.
"What a total farce," Lee Hepner, senior legal counsel for the American Economic Liberties Project, said in response to the DOJ announcement. "This sham settlement violates the first thing we tell every lawmaker: Fixing prices based on public data sets is still price fixing!"
"This is lipstick on a pig and terrible for renters," Hepner added.
The Justice Department initially sued RealPage last year under the Biden administration, accusing the company of running an "unlawful scheme to decrease competition among landlords in apartment pricing and to monopolize the market for commercial revenue management software that landlords use to price apartments."
"RealPage contracts with competing landlords who agree to share with RealPage nonpublic, competitively sensitive information about their apartment rental rates and other lease terms to train and run RealPage’s algorithmic pricing software," the Biden DOJ said. "This software then generates recommendations, including on apartment rental pricing and other terms, for participating landlords based on their and their rivals’ competitively sensitive information."
The DOJ complaint used RealPage's own words against it, citing the company's description of its products as "driving every possible opportunity to increase price."
A White House report released late last year estimated that the kind of algorithmic pricing that RealPage enables cost renters across the US a total of nearly $4 billion in 2023 alone. The report characterized that estimate as conservative.
Basel Musharbash, managing attorney at Antimonopoly Counsel, warned following Monday's settlement announcement that "far from stopping illegal practices, it gives a green light to algorithmic price-fixing across the economy."
The states that joined the DOJ lawsuit were not listed on the settlement.
Last week, California, North Carolina, and other states announced a separate settlement with the apartment management giant Greystar, one of the companies that used RealPage software to set rents.
Under the state deal, Greystar agreed to pay $7 million in penalties and stop using RealPage’s software or similar products for pricing.
"Whether it's through smoke-filled backroom deals or through an algorithm on your computer screen, colluding to drive up prices is illegal,” said California Attorney General Rob Bonta. “Families across the country are staring down an affordability crisis. Companies that intentionally fuel this unaffordability by raising prices to line their own pockets can be sure I will use the full force of my office to hold them accountable."
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NDP Candidate Avi Lewis Calls for 'Public Options' to Fight High Costs of Groceries, Housing, and Telecoms in Canada
“When people are being gouged at the checkout aisle, on their phone bills, and in their rents, it’s clear that the market is failing,” Lewis said.
Nov 24, 2025
As Avi Lewis moves forward with his bid to become the next leader of Canada’s New Democratic Party, the progressive activist, filmmaker, and journalist, announced his first major policy proposal on Monday: an array of "public options" for groceries, housing, phone bills, and other necessities aimed at combating Canada's cost-of-living crisis.
After two failed parliamentary bids in 2021 and 2025, the Vancouver-based Lewis in September launched his bid to take Canada's leftmost party in a more economically populist direction following a series of defeats under its long-serving, Jagmeet Singh.
He hopes his laser focus on corporate greed, which he says is driving Canada's cost-of-living crisis, will help set him apart from other front-runners, including Edmonton Member of Parliament Heather McPherson and British Columbia union leader Rob Ashton.
“It’s a moral outrage that so many people in Canada can’t afford the basics of a dignified life at a time when corporate profits are only skyrocketing,” Lewis said as he unveiled an array of new proposals Monday. “When people are being gouged at the checkout aisle, on their phone bills, and in their rents, it’s clear that the market is failing.”
Lewis called for the creation of a public not-for-profit grocery store chain that would operate coast to coast to combat the growing crisis of food insecurity.
According to data published earlier this year by the Canadian Income Survey, approximately 10 million Canadians—over 25%—lived in food-insecure households in 2024, nearly doubling since 2021 amid skyrocketing food prices.
Lewis described it as a "market failure" that so many Canadians could struggle to pay for food while Galen Weston, the owner of Canada's largest grocery chain, Loblaw, has a net worth of over $18 billion.
Lewis called for the government to create "a low-cost alternative to the big grocery chains, using a high-volume, warehouse-style model supported by local and regional food hubs." He likened the proposal to Mexico's chain of state-owned grocery stores and the government-run commissaries that provide affordable food to US servicemembers and their families, both of which cost less on average than shopping at major grocery chains.
"Think Costco—but run as a public service," Lewis explained in a policy document.
Lewis proposed a similar solution for the cost of cell phone and internet service, which are higher in Canada than in other peer countries.
Attributing this to "an oligopoly of telecom providers that dominate cellphone and internet services in Canada and gobble up smaller competitors," he proposed that the nation create a network of public telecom providers modeled after SaskTel. This publicly owned company serves the province of Saskatchewan and has led to "substantially lower” prices for customers than in other parts of Canada, according to the nation's Competition Bureau.
To combat the spiking cost of rent and a growing homelessness crisis, Lewis also pledged that his NDP would once again prioritize the construction of public housing, which Canada built prolifically until the early 1990s.
He pledged that under his leadership, Canada would establish a public builder to create a million new units of social, co-op, non-profit, and supportive homes within five years.
Lewis also championed the return of nationwide postal banking as an antidote to the predatory fees and interest rates of Canada's financial institutions.
He plans to leverage the nation's national postal service, which is already the only option for financial services in many remote parts of the country, as a competitive alternative to Canada's six largest banks, which brought in more than $50 billion in profits last year, and to predatory payday loan and check-cashing companies.
Finally, he proposed the reestablishment of Canada's government-owned nonprofit pharmaceutical company, Connaught Labs, which created and cheaply mass-produced life-saving vaccines and other medications like insulin for free public distribution. The company was privatized in the 1980s under former Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney.
"During the Covid pandemic, for-profit pharmaceutical companies made billions while countries competed with one another for vaccine supplies instead of distributing them globally to stop the virus's spread across borders," Lewis said.
He said that his new version of Connaught would invest in the public development of innovative pharmaceuticals, such as mRNA vaccines and cancer immunotherapies, and share that technology with low-income countries.
"It's time to take the power back from the price-fixing corporate cartels that have a stranglehold on our economy and put it in the hands of the people," Lewis said. "It's time to build a new generation of public options to reduce costs and raise our quality of life."
Lewis described his "next generation" of public options as following in the footsteps of those pursued by NDP-led provincial governments.
"Whether it's public auto insurance in Manitoba, the agricultural land reserve to protect food security in British Columbia, a public telecom provider in Saskatchewan, or, of course, Medicare, our party has created public institutions that continue to make people's lives better and more affordable decades after their creation."
"The cost of living crisis we face today demands bold solutions," he added. "That means expanding public ownership to lower bills and improve services while creating good union jobs in the process."
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