The Department of Justice has opened an investigation into whether rent-setting software is facilitating collusion among landlords. (via propublica)
, the Minnesota Democrat who chairs the Senate Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust and Consumer Rights.RealPage’s software works by collecting information from property managers who are the company’s clients, including what rents they are able to charge tenants. That information is fed into an algorithm that then recommends prices daily for each available apartment.
RealPage’s then-CEO, Steve Winn, said the $300 million purchase would allow RealPage to double the number of apartments it was pricing, from 1.5 to 3 million units. Merger review guidelines used by both the DOJ and FTC say the agencies “normally evaluate mergers based on their impact on customers,” which include both direct customers and final consumers. But the paralegal said the investigation did not involve talking to tenant advocates or renters.
The investigation fell at a time when the DOJ’s Antitrust Division was preparing to sue to block a proposed merger between AT&T and Time Warner, which promised to take up a lot of the division’s resources. “It was a resource constraint issue he was trying to balance,” the source said of Makan Delrahim, the former assistant attorney general charged with overseeing the division at the time. In addition, RealPage did not have the same reach then as it does today, the source said.
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