RealPage software is used to set rental prices on 4.5 million housing units in the U.S. A series of lawsuits allege that a group of landlords are sharing sensitive data with RealPage, which then artificially inflates rents. The complaints surface as housing supply in the U.S. lags demand. Some of the defendant landlords report high occupancy within their buildings, alongside strong jobs growth in their operating regions and slow home construction.
A group of renters in the U.S. say their landlords are using software to deliver inflated rent hikes.
“We’ve been told as tenants by employees of Equity that the software takes empathy out of the equation. So they can charge whatever the software tells them to charge,” said Kevin Weller, a tenant at Portside Towers since 2021.
Tenants say the management started to increase prices substantially after giving renters concessions during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The 527-unit building is located roughly 20 minutes away from the World Trade Center, on the shoreline of Jersey City, New Jersey. A group of tenants at the tower is involved in a sprawling class-action lawsuit against RealPage and 34 co-defendant landlords. The U.S. Department of Justice filed a statement of interest in the case in December 2023, arguing that the complaints adequately allege violations of the Sherman Antitrust Act.
In November 2023, the attorney general of Washington, D.C., filed a similar but more narrow complaint against RealPage and 14 landlords that collectively manage more than 50,000 apartment units in the District.
“Effectively, RealPage is facilitating a housing cartel,” said Attorney General of the District of Columbia Brian Schwalb in an interview with CNBC. His office filed the complaint on antitrust grounds. They allege that landlords share competitively sensitive data through RealPage, which then sets artificially high rents on a key slice of the local rental market.
Office of the Attorney General for the District of Columbia, November 2023
“Rather than making independent decisions on what the market here in D.C. calls for in terms of filling vacant units, landlords are compelled, under the terms of their agreement with RealPage, to charge what RealPage tells them,” said Schwalb.
RealPage says its revenue management products use anonymized, aggregated data to deliver pricing recommendations on roughly 4.5 million housing units in the U.S. The company says its tools can increase landlord revenues between 2% and 7%.
“Just turning the system on will outperform your manual analyst. There’s almost no way it can’t,” said Jeffrey Roper, a former RealPage employee and inventor of YieldStar.
YieldStar is one of three key revenue management tools offered by RealPage. The software balances prices, occupancy and lease lengths to help property managers optimize their portfolio’s yield. The company feeds data from its models into a newer tool dubbed “AIRM” that considers the effect of credit, marketing and leasing effectiveness.
RealPage told CNBC that its landlord customers are under no obligation to take their price suggestions. The company also said it charges a fixed fee on each apartment unit managed with its software.
RealPage was acquired by Miami-based private equity firm Thoma Bravo for $10.2 billion in 2021. In court filings, Thoma Bravo has claimed that it is not liable for the alleged acts of its subsidiary outlined by plaintiffs in the class-action complaints.
Renters told CNBC they discovered how revenue management software is used in real estate after reading a 2022 ProPublica investigation. Equity Residential investor materials show that the company started to experiment with Lease Rent Options between 2005 and 2008. RealPage acquired the product in 2017.
“How could we possibly know?” said Harry Gural, a tenant in an Equity Residential property located in the Van Ness neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Gural says he has been involved in legal matters against his landlord’s pricing practices for more than seven years.
Affiliates of Equity Residential are contesting a separate decision made by a local housing authority in Jersey City regarding prices set on the Portside Towers property. The company has filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging the decision, stating that the decision could result in millions of dollars in refunds for tenants.
Equity Residential and other defendant landlords declined to comment on ongoing RealPage litigation.
Redfin reports that asking rents in the U.S. ticked down to $1,964 a month in December 2023, a decline from recent highs. Prices are coming down in markets such as Atlanta and Austin, Texas, where home construction is high. But analysts believe low rates of homebuilding on the U.S. East Coast could give well-located landlords more pricing power.
“Guys like us that own 80,000 well-located apartments, we’re still in a pretty good spot,” said Equity Residential CEO Mark Parrell in a June 2023 interview with CNBC. Watch the video above to learn about the rising tide of lawsuits against U.S. corporate landlords.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this article misstated when Equity Residential purchased Portside Towers.
Cedric Bobo discusses a new program for Black student-athletes to transition into the commercial real estate market.
Diana Olick | CNBC
When Darius Livingston graduated from the University of California, Davis, two years ago, he knew his football career was over. Like most of his former teammates — and the majority of college athletes — he wasn’t going pro.
Instead, Livingston went into commercial real estate, thanks to lessons he learned from a paid internship program that teaches young students of color the fundamentals of finance, with a particular focus on real estate investing.
The program, Project Destined, is a social impact platform founded by former Carlyle Group principal Cedric Bobo.
Bobo made a name for himself in real estate investing and then decided to pay it forward. He launched the finance program in 2016 primarily for high school students. Then he broadened it to colleges, seeing the opportunity for both internships and jobs before and after graduation.
Eager to diversify their workforces, some of the largest real estate development, finance and management firms have signed on to fund the internships and mentor the students. That includes names like Boston Properties, Greystar, Brookfield, CBRE, Equity Residential, Fifth Wall, JLL, Skanska, Vornado and Walker & Dunlop.
The program has trained more than 5,000 participants from over 350 universities worldwide and has partnered with over 250 real estate firms.
And now, it’s gearing some of its efforts specifically toward Black student-athletes.
After doing a pilot program recently with student-athletes from UC Davis, Bobo has announced a partnership with the Black Student-Athlete Summit, a professional and academic support organization, to offer paid, virtual internships to 100 student-athletes from nine Division I schools. It includes 25 hours of training.
“Program participants will also join executives to evaluate real-time commercial real estate transactions in their community and compete in pitch competitions to senior industry leaders,” according to a release announcing the partnership. “The internship includes opportunities for scholarships and networking.”
Livingston went through the UC Davis pilot in his last semester of college, then got internships with Eastdil and Eden Housing. He is now an acquisitions and development associate at Catalyst Housing Group, a California-based real estate development firm and a financial backer of the new partnership.
“I think, for me, it was really a realization that I probably won’t be a first-round draft pick, and that’s OK,” explained Livingston. “It’s really being exposed to other opportunities. That’s why I’m so blessed to have Project Destined come along and expose me to the commercial real estate industry and the mindset that I deserve to be an owner in the communities that I live in.”
That right of ownership has long been Bobo’s mantra and was the crux of his pitch as he announced the new arm of his program to hundreds of students at the Black Student-Athletes Summit at USC. He wants them to understand that they can create change in their own neighborhoods by owning and managing real estate. More important, he wants them to know that ownership is possible.
“Our program is not just about how we see you all,” Bobo said of the real estate executives who were on hand for the announcement. “It’s how you see yourselves.”
While the graduation rate for Black student-athletes is improving slowly, a lot of students who were showered with resources in school find themselves struggling once they finish their athletic endeavors and get out in the workforce.
“A lot of these kids may think they’re a first-round draft pick, and that is a percent of a percent of a percent of a percent, so it’s really being real with yourself and knowing that you deserve much more than what you’re simply exposed to, and that’s just sports,” Livingston said.
Financial support for the program comes from real estate firms including BGO, Brookfield, Catalyst Housing Group, Dune Real Estate Partners, Jemcor Development Partners, Landspire Group, Marcus & Millichap, Virtu Investments and The Vistria Group, among others.
“The expansion of this platform is a natural evolution of this collective effort and will provide tangible pathways for thousands of Black student-athletes to pursue future careers in commercial real estate,” said Jordan Moss, who is also a former student-athlete at UC Davis and the founder and CEO of Catalyst.
Project Destined also has been working with the NBA and the WNBA to give professional athletes more options after they’re finished with their athletic careers.
Livingston said he thinks athletes make the best employees.
“We play to win,” he explained. “It’s the competitive nature. We want to outwork our opportunities.”
