Landlord With Nearly 100,000 Units Will Pay $53M To Settle RealPage Suit

Mid-America Apartment Communities struck a $53M deal to settle its part of a sprawling class-action lawsuit accusing the publicly traded landlord of working with dozens of other landlords to coordinate rents. 

MAA denies any wrongdoing as part of the settlement, but it has agreed not to share certain data, a term the company said it was already following. A judge still needs to sign off on the deal, which is similar to an agreement reached in October by 27 other firms in the same case related to their use of RealPage software.

The fine will be paid in two installments, with the first going out sometime after March 2 and the second due 30 days later, according to an MAA filing Monday with the Securities and Exchange Commission. 

MAA said it was settling the case, which was filed in U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee in Nashville, to avoid redirecting resources away from its core business. The Memphis-based REIT owned 96,568 units at the end of the third quarter, according to filings from October. 

"This settlement resolves the matter and allows MAA to avoid the significant costs and distraction of protracted litigation while bringing certainty in a complex and evolving legal environment," an MAA spokesperson said in a statement to Bisnow. "The settlement requires no material changes to MAA’s current operations."

The lead attorneys for the groups suing in the class-action didn’t respond to Bisnow’s request for comment Thursday morning. 

The REIT will increase its loss contingency reserve to $62.5M in its final year-end financial statements to cover the settlement along with legal and other costs associated with the case. Its fourth-quarter earnings will be posted after markets close Feb. 4. 

The loss reserve will also provide all the cash needed to “vigorously defend” ongoing antitrust suits in Washington, D.C., and Kentucky, the filing says.  

MAA pulled in $554M in third-quarter revenue in 2025, and its properties — spread across Tennessee, Florida, Alabama, Virginia, Kentucky, Utah, Maryland and Nevada — were 94.8% occupied. In the first nine months of 2025, the REIT reported $399M in profits, up from $370M during the same period a year prior. 

Its stock has been flat across the trading week but has slipped nearly 10% over the last 12 months. 

MAA’s settlement follows the same broad outlines of the October deals reached by 27 other landlords in the class-action, which collectively included $141M in fees and a commitment not to share “any nonpublic data” that could be commingled with competitor data in any revenue management software. 

Some of the country’s largest landlords were caught up in the litigation, including Bell Partners, Greystar, Brookfield Properties and AIR Communities, which were all part of the group of 27 to settle. RealPage, the software provider allegedly at the center of the scheme, and at least a dozen landlords remain defendants.

Federal prosecutors, joined by several state attorneys general, also filed an antitrust suit in August 2024 that mirrored the civil cases. They accused RealPage of leveraging its AI Revenue Management platform, previously known as Yieldstar, to help landlords coordinate rents in an anticompetitive price-fixing ring. 

MAA has never used the AI Revenue Management platform for its business but uses RealPage's Lease Rental Options product to help set prices, the MAA spokesperson said.

"MAA has its own internal pricing process unique to MAA, and MAA makes all of its pricing decisions independently," they said. "MAA remains confident it has acted lawfully and responsibly at all times."

RealPage has consistently denied the allegations and made a deal with the federal government in November to resolve its antitrust claims. The deal introduces new guardrails on how RealPage’s software can ingest data and suggest rents but leaves its business model largely untouched. 

RealPage said it was mostly in compliance with the terms of the deal before it was even announced.

The state attorneys general in the antitrust case aren’t part of the federal deal, and a group of them asked the judge in Nashville to reject the 27 landlords’ class-action settlement, saying the fine was minimal relative to the alleged damages.