US Largest Landlord Co Now Face Collusion Claims On Student Housing

RealPage and leading residential landlords, already facing antitrust litigation over their alleged scheme to drive up nationwide rental prices, were hit with a second proposed class action claiming the conspiracy has had an outsized impact on the student housing market.

In addition to RealPage, a Thoma Bravo LP affiliate, the lawsuit filed Wednesday targets one of the same property managers as the earlier suit: GreyStar Real Estate Partners LLC, the largest US landlord. But it also takes aim at nearly a dozen that aren’t currently involved in the first-filed case.

Related: Rent Going Up? One Company’s Algorithm Could Be Why.

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington alleges that through a complex scheme of intentional data-sharing and collusion, the lawsuit’s 11 housing management company defendants agreed to fix the price of student housing. Attorneys say the defendants accomplished this unlawful agreement with the help of RealPage Inc., a third-party that connected the housing companies to real-time algorithm-driven shared data that includes “over 1 million student beds of in-depth market data” and key performance indicators for nearly 1,000 universities according to its materials.

RealPage specifically designed an algorithm for the student housing market, called YieldStar Student, to help lessors maximize revenue by raising rent prices that they charged students, according to the lawsuit. Attorneys say RealPage specifically touted that its software helped lessors shift from focusing on maximizing occupancy to maximizing profits.