Dive Brief:
- On Friday evening, RealPage announced that it received a letter from the U.S. Department of Justice saying that the DOJ was closing its criminal investigation into pricing practices in the multifamily rental housing industry.
- In a statement, RealPage said it “extensively cooperated with the DOJ throughout its investigation” and was never identified as a target of the investigation throughout the process. The DOJ did not provide an update on its website and did not immediately respond to Multifamily Dive's request for comment.
- The Richardson, Texas-based software and data firm is still facing a civil antitrust lawsuit filed in August by the DOJ and eight states, alleging an “unlawful scheme to decrease competition among landlords in apartment pricing and to monopolize the market.”
Dive Insight:
Last week, lawyers for RealPage asked that the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina dismiss the civil suit brought by DOJ and the eight states.
RealPage is also fighting a group of class-action suits now centered in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee.
“RealPage will continue to aggressively defend itself in the remaining, previously filed civil lawsuits, which we believe are wholly without merit,” RealPage said in the statement released on Friday.
Since a 2022 ProPublica report questioning whether RealPage’s algorithm has allowed the nation’s largest apartment owners to indirectly coordinate rent prices, RealPage has had to fight battles on multiple fronts.
In March, Politico reported that the DOJ had opened a criminal investigation into RealPage and some of the large apartment owners and managers that use the company’s pricing software to determine if the firms were facilitating price fixing.
Politico, which did not name the owners and managers involved, said at the time that the DOJ was concerned that RealPage’s software was being used as a shield for competitors to exchange sensitive pricing data that their rivals would otherwise be unable to access.
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