REIT's $56M Deal Extends RealPage Settlement Wave
Equity Residential became the second firm this month to strike a deal in a class action that accused it and dozens of other landlords of working together to coordinate rents.
The publicly traded REIT agreed to pay $56M to resolve the civil case in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee that ensnared dozens of landlords and RealPage, the software provider accused of helping landlords artificially inflate rents.
Equity Residential, like two other landlords that have resolved their claims in the suit, denies any wrongdoing and said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that it believed “there are numerous defenses, both factual and legal, to the allegations against it.”
The REIT will absorb the cost through a first-quarter increase to its loss contingency reserve, and it doesn’t expect the settlement to impact funds from operations or have a material impact on its financing plans. The settlement payment will be made within 30 days of the court’s approval, according to the SEC filing.
Equity Residential agreed as part of the deal to some restrictions on its business operations, including rules related to the disclosure and use of nonpublic data in RealPage’s software. But the Chicago-based REIT said in the filing that the requirements “are consistent with its existing practices and will not require material changes to current operations.”
Shares in the REIT are up modestly this week following the April 13 filing disclosing the settlement. The stock paid out a $2.77-per-share dividend in 2025, and it has traded relatively flat in 2026.
Equity Residential didn’t respond to Bisnow’s request for comment Thursday morning.
The REIT ended 2025 with 312 properties and 85,190 units, with assets concentrated in California and primary Northeast coastal markets like Washington, D.C., and New York. It was a net seller in 2025, raising $1.1B through the sale of 11 properties while it purchased nine for $637M. Management repurchased $300M in shares last year.
The class-action suit consolidates all but one of the civil suits against Equity Residential and other landlords, with a separate case proceeding in Washington, D.C. Federal prosecutors have also accused RealPage and a group of landlords, not including Equity Residential, of antitrust violations in an ongoing lawsuit.
Camden Property Trust reached a deal earlier this month that included a $53M fine to resolve its portion of the antitrust suit without admitting any wrongdoing. Mid-America Apartment Communities cut its own $53M deal in the case in January.
In October, a group of 27 landlords that included AIR Communities, Greystar, Brookfield Properties and other major firms reached a deal to settle their portion of the claims for a combined $141M.
RealPage, which is backed by private equity firm Thoma Bravo, reached a deal with the Department of Justice in November to settle the claims against it, but related charges against multifamily operators in the case are still pending.
The lawsuits followed a 2022 ProPublica investigation that accused landlords of creating local rent-setting cartels by feeding competitively sensitive data into RealPage’s software that suggested rental rates for individual units, then known as YieldStar and now called AI Revenue Management.
Class-action attorneys and federal prosecutors allege that RealPage’s software improperly used that data to suggest inflated rents to operators, who were also allegedly pushed away from cutting rents below the suggested price.
RealPage denies the allegations and says it is being used as a convenient scapegoat for the nation’s housing crisis. The case raised eyebrows in the brokerage world for seemingly targeting common business tactics, and the federal antitrust settlement ultimately allows RealPage to continue selling the AI Revenue Management tool with some minor tweaks that the company says were mostly in place before the deal was reached.
