According to an amended consolidated class action complaint filed on September 7, multifamily housing operators seeking access to RealPage’s rental pricing tools were obliged to provide “non-public, competitively sensitive data to RealPage’s data pool” and align their rental rates with the pricing structure generated by the software.
Prominent names in the defendant lineup include major apartment landlords such as Equity Residential, Greystar Real Estate Partners LLC, and Lincoln Property Co.
In a parallel amended class action suit, a group of student housing owners also faces allegations of participating in a similar price-fixing arrangement through their use of RealPage’s revenue management tools.
In August, U.S. District Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw denied early dismissal motions by some property owners without prejudice and granted the plaintiffs until September 7 to file updated complaints.
In accordance with the judge’s directives, the defendants recently filed a fresh round of dismissal motions. RealPage and the multifamily housing landlords contended in an October 9 filing that the plaintiffs have failed to sufficiently allege a “plausible horizontal price-fixing conspiracy” and have not provided evidence that each individual defendant entered into any agreement with the software company.
