Blackstone settles with Department of Justice in RealPage lawsuit

On December 23, 2025, the Department of Justice announcedthat it had reached a settlement in its lawsuit against the private equity landlord Blackstone’s LivCor subsidiary. The DOJ’s lawsuit alleged that LivCor and other landlords were “participating in a scheme to set their rents using each other’s competitively sensitive information through common pricing algorithms.”

Per the terms of the consent decree, Blackstone would agree to 

• Refrain from using any anticompetitive algorithm that generates pricing recommendations using its competitors’ competitively sensitive data or that incorporates certain anticompetitive features;
• Refrain from sharing competitively sensitive information with competitors;
• Accept a court-appointed monitor if it uses a third-party pricing algorithm that is not certified pursuant to the terms of the consent decree;
• Refrain from attending or participating in RealPage-hosted meetings of competing landlords; and
• Cooperate with the United States’ claims against other defendants.

On the settlement with Blackstone, Assistant Attorney General Abigail Slater stated “Landlords across America are on notice that the competition laws protect renters from the harms caused by competitors sharing competitively sensitive information or aligning prices, whether through an algorithm or otherwise.”

The settlement is part of a wave of recent settlements in relation to the property management software RealPage. RealPage is a property management software owned by the private equity firm Thoma Bravo and has been accused offacilitating price collusion between competing landlords, resulting in inflated rental prices, landlords sharing private information about tenants, and having a negative impact on the country’s housing market. In August 2024, the DOJ announced a lawsuit against RealPage, and in January 2025, the DOJ amended the suit to include  six corporate landlords by name for using the software. In addition to Blackstone, the DOJ’s amended lawsuit included two additional private equity landlords, Cortland Management and Greystar. Cortland settled with the DOJ in January 2025 and Greystar in August 2025.  In November 2025, the DOJ also announced a settlement with RealPage itself. 

The DOJ lawsuits against three corporate landlords (Cushman and Wakefield, Willow Bridge Property Company, Camden Property Trust) still persist. There have been several other recent  settlements related to RealPage. These include Greystar and 25 other landlords settling in class action lawsuits against them for a total of $141.8 million. In November 2025, Greystar also settled for $7 million with 9 states that launched lawsuits against the corporation for using RealPage. RealPage also settled with the state of Nevada in November 2025. There still remains ongoing litigation against RealPage through state lawsuits. 

The software is also banned in over 10 major cities and is banned statewide in the large rental markets of New York and California. As the movement against RealPage continues into 2026, the corporation still finds itself in hot water, and will also have to deal with the impact that years of negative press has had on the corporation in addition to the potential financial losses created by the local and statewide bans on the software. Institutional investors should ask how the corporation plans to overcome these blows to the public image of RealPage (and the pension funds that choose to invest in it), after several years of controversy.