Antitrust lawsuit could affect hundreds of Utah renters

SALT LAKE CITY — An antitrust lawsuit has been expanded to include six of the nation’s largest landlords who manage well over 100 multifamily rental buildings in Utah.

Alleged collusion and price fixing among landlords

The original lawsuit filed by the U.S. Department of Justice and eight other states claims that RealPage Inc. violated antitrust laws by colluding with landlords to decrease competition for apartment pricing.

RealPage is a property management software that uses rental data to suggest prices to landlords.

The federal government recently expanded the lawsuit to include six of the nation’s largest landlord companies: Greystar Real Estate Partners LLC, Blackstone’s LivCor LLC, Camden Property Trust, Cushman & Wakefield Inc and Pinnacle Property Management Services LLC, Willow Bridge Property Company LLC, and Cortland Management LLC (Cortland).

The extended lawsuit alleges the named companies, “participated in an unlawful scheme to decrease competition among landlords in apartment pricing, harming millions of American renters.”

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Over 1.3 million units are operated by these landlords nationwide.

The amended complaint argues, “that the six landlords actively participated in a scheme to set their rents using each other’s competitively sensitive information through common pricing algorithms.”

“That information has caused landlords, at least seemingly, to collude. To know what rents are, to know what other people are charging. To know how much they can get instead of bidding openly in the marketplace,” said KSL Legal Analyst Greg Skordas.

This, if proven, is a violation of antitrust laws which are established to help consumers receive a fair price.

“We don’t want everyone setting prices based on what everyone else is doing,” Skordas said. “We want them to compete fairly in the marketplace so that consumers can get the best price and not necessarily the providers of service.”

How this may affect Utah renters

The listed landlords manage at least 20% of multifamily units in Salt Lake County and at least 135 multifamily buildings across the state.

Skordas said the results of this lawsuit could affect rental prices everywhere, including Utah.

“It could require landlords to not share information. To not benefit from one another’s information and to just set their prices based on what they think the market will support,” he said. “That could cause rents to go down; it could cause them to go up. Who knows? But that’s what the government is trying to do … just make sure there’s a fair and balanced marketplace.”

Potential consequences of the lawsuit

Proving a violation of antitrust laws can be difficult. Largely because the prosecution has to show that data from competitors—not the market—is influencing landlords to adjust prices.

The DOJ press release claims to have evidence that the listed landlords broke antitrust laws in several ways, including:

• Directly communicating with competitors’ senior managers about rents, occupancy, and other competitively sensitive topics
• Property managers calling or emailing competitors to share, and sometimes discuss, competitively sensitive rental information
• Participating in RealPage “user groups,” where landlords discussed how to modify the software’s pricing methodology, as well as their own pricing strategies
• Sharing information with competitors about parameters in RealPage’s software

If the prosecution proves antitrust laws were broken, it could result in a variety of consequences for the defendants.

“The consequences to an antitrust could include paying back what the losses were,” said Skordas. “Paying back to the consumers what the losses were, paying to the government the cost of the prosecution. It could include significant fines and it could include shutting down these websites and these sources of information. So it’s pretty broad and far reaching.”

RealPage said in a statement that its software “reacts to the market realities; it does not drive them.”

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