A federal court has closed the book on the massive antitrust case against revenue management firm RealPage, with almost $360M in settlements going to renters.
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The U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee deemed the case’s settlement plan fair and adequate, Multifamily Dive reported. The court dismissed the suit, which alleged that major real estate firms colluded with RealPage to push up rents, with prejudice.
Eleven real estate firms involved in the case agreed to pay a combined $218M in May and remove nonpublic rental data from databases used by RealPage's rent-setting software. That followed a separate $141.8M settlement with 27 firms that the court approved in late 2025.
Texas-based RealPage also reached a settlement agreement with federal prosecutors in November 2025. The court didn’t impose monetary penalties on the company but ordered it to alter how its software suggests rents for tenants.
The case stems from a barrage of class actions filed in late 2022 and early 2023 following a ProPublica investigation that documented how landlords were sharing their internal rent figures with RealPage’s rent-setting software, which used an algorithm to show landlords they could raise rents much more than they were.
Those cases were then combined into one in April 2023.
Peter Carstensen, an antitrust authority and professor of law emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Multifamily Dive he wasn’t sure the settlement agreements would limit these firms from continuing to coordinate with each other.
None of the companies admitted liability or fault as part of the settlements.
In recent years, cities like San Francisco, Philadelphia, Minneapolis and San Diego have banned the use of algorithmic rent-setting software. However, RealPage has pushed back against those efforts.
RealPage has argued that the cities are overstepping their legal authority and that it is being blamed for the nation's undersupply of housing. A provision that would have preempted local bans on rent-setting algorithms was initially included in last year's One Big Beautiful Bill Act, but that was ultimately pulled from the final version of the law.
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