News and blog

DOJ updates case against Thoma Bravo’s RealPage to include six of largest landlords

January 30, 2025

The Department of Justice announced it filed an amended complaint to its antitrust lawsuit against RealPage (owned by Thoma Bravo) to sue six of the largest U.S. landlords for their alleged participation in a nationwide rental price-fixing scheme. According to the complaint, the six landlords allegedly coordinated their rents with each other through use of RealPage’s pricing algorithms and direct communication with competitors about rents and occupancy, among other tactics. Of those six landlords, three are owned by private equity firms: Blackstone, Greystar Real Estate Partners, and Cortland Management.

The ongoing class action lawsuits and Department of Justice (DOJ)  lawsuit against Thoma Bravo-owned RealPage have been written about extensively by the Private Equity Stakeholder Project (PESP). RealPage was purchased by Thoma Bravo (a Chicago-based private equity firm) for $10.2 billion in 2021. More than 30 US public employee pension funds have invested a total of over $ 6 billion in Thoma Bravo’s Funds XIII and XIV, the specific funds that acquired RealPage. 

Since 2022, RealPage, a corporation for property management software has been the subject of negative press after an exposé by ProPublica titled “Rent Going Up? One Company’s Algorithm Could Be Why,” which revealed that the algorithmic pricing software could be responsible for artificial rent increases. After the article’s release, tenants and housing advocates across the country began working to hold RealPage accountable for what some believe to be price-fixing and anti-trust behavior. In addition to fighting for local ordinances to ban the usage of the software, which has been successful in cities such as San Francisco and Philadelphia, tenants also joined over 30 class action lawsuits against the company. Politicians such as Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders released statements about RealPage and urged the DOJ to investigate the corporation as well. In 2024, the Department of Justice along with eight Attorneys General announced a lawsuit against RealPage stating that “by feeding sensitive data into a sophisticated algorithm powered by artificial intelligence, RealPage has found a modern way to violate a century-old law through systematic coordination of rental housing prices — undermining competition and fairness for consumers in the process.” 

Now, the Department of Justice and their additional plaintiffs have amended their antitrust lawsuit against RealPage, by specifically suing six of the largest US landlords for their alleged participation in rental price-fixing.  On January 7th 2025, the DOJ stated they had added two more Attorneys General to their case, and were also pursuing six specific landlords who utilized RealPage. In addition to the three private equity landlords, the landlords Camden, Cushman, and Willow Bridge are included in the suit. 

On their website, the DOJ states that the amended complaint alleges “that the six landlords actively participated in a scheme to set their rents using each other’s competitively sensitive information through common pricing algorithms.” The DOJ alleges that senior managers of the landlords directly communicated with each other about sensitive topics such as rent. The six named landlords are also accused of participating in Realpage hosted “user groups” where they could share best practices on modifying RealPage’s pricing methodology, and also conducting “call arounds,” where property managers called competitors to find out sensitive information such as rental prices and occupancy rates. 

Cortland Management, which was the subject of a 2024 FBI raid at their Atlanta headquarters, apparently in relation to the lawsuits,  already agreed to a settlement agreement. As the country’s largest landlord with over 350,000 properties, PESP has reported on Blackstone’s mistreatment of tenants on multiple fronts, including a report co-written with Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE) titled Blackstone Comes to Collect: How America’s Largest Landlord and Wall Street’s Highest, which examined how Blackstone took advantage of rent hikes, and increased evictions in California. 

The allegations against RealPage are becoming more specific as the DOJ investigation continues. Pension funds should ask Thoma Bravo what it will take for the company to permanently ditch the rent-setting component of its software. Thoma Bravo’s RealPage is being attacked by the legal system, local ordinances, and the media, could possibly signal an abdication of pension fund board’s fiduciary responsibility to pensioners.

Sign up to our newsletter to receive news and updates from PESP

Click here