Thoma Bravo-owned RealPage’s latest actions: lawsuits and lobbying

As of July 2025, several major cities have passed bans against RealPage, an algorithmic property management software owned by the private equity firm Thoma Bravo. These cities include San Francisco, Minneapolis, San Diego, and Philadelphia. Other cities such as New Jersey’s Hoboken and Jersey City, along with  Missoula, Montana, have been working towards their own RealPage bans. As the Private Equity Stakeholder Project (PESP) has written about extensively,  RealPage has been accused of facilitating 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. The accusations against RealPage have resulted in over 30 class action lawsuits, 22 states proposing over 44 pieces of legislation against the software, and a Department of Justice lawsuit which includes California, North Carolina, and Washington and five other states as co-plaintiffs. States continue to launch their own lawsuits against RealPage with Kentucky recently announcing a lawsuit in July 2025. The pushback against RealPage is a bipartisan effort and despite the new Trump presidential administration, the lawsuits and bans continue to roll in.

In an effort to slow the passage of bans, RealPage filed  a lawsuit against the city of Berkeley, California in April 2025. In March 2025, Berkeley city council had passed a city ban on RealPage and similar algorithmic software. After the ban’s passage, Berkeley city councilmember Ben Bartlett released a news release that stated that “algorithms can uplift or oppress, depending entirely on whose hands they’re in and whose interests they’re designed to serve.” The approved ban would result in a $1,000 fine against landlords who were found in violation of the ban. In April 2025, RealPage announced a lawsuit against the city of Berkeley. Claiming that Berkely’s ban violated the corporation’s First Amendment rights, RealPage released a statement that claimed that the city’s ban was based on “misinformation.”  Despite Berkeley city councilmember Elo-Rivera defending the Berkeley ban and calling it “legally sound,” in June, 2025, Berkeley city council announced that they were pausing the ban on RealPage due to concerns that the city could not afford the potential legal fees from the lawsuit. RealPage’s lawsuit against Berkeley could set a troubling precedent, with the city of Portland, Oregon already halting its ban on the software.

RealPage has also been accused of increasing its lobbying spending in support of Trump’s controversial tax bill, dubbed by Trump and others as the “One Big Beautiful Bill.” The bill included a proposed 10-year moratorium on state and local AI-related bans. States that did not follow the moratorium would lose access to subsidies for broadband internet. In May 2025, US Senators Warren, Sanders, Klobuchar, Smith, and Booker, wrote a letter directly to RealPage’s CEO Dana Jones, asking the corporation for more on “how the Republicans’ reconciliation provision would help the bottom line of RealPage and other large corporations by allowing them to take advantage of consumers.” Citing a lobbying expenditure increase of $4.2 million more in 2024 compared to 2019 by the National Multifamily Housing Council (one of the trade groups that lobbies on behalf of RealPage), the letter also stated that “the net result will be that Americans will lose important protections against the misuse of AI tools.” They continued, stating, “This will directly benefit RealPage and similar companies, at the expense of renters who will be forced to pay higher costs for rent and other daily needs.”

While the tax bill was signed into law by Trump on July 4th, it was without the AI portion of the bill that was struck on July 1st, due to a bipartisan effort from Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell and Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn, who expressed frustration over the Government’s inability to regulate AI in general. The senators pointed out that the ban would have prohibited states from introducing legislation that prohibited the list of “deepfakes” or created more rules around children’s safety and AI. The Senate voted 99-1 on removing the AI portion of the bill. 

RealPage’s lawsuit against Berkeley, along with its  potential lobbying for federal legislation which could negatively impact tenants as a whole, shows that RealPage is not above engaging in certain actions to maintain the rental price-sharing component of its  software. The corporation continues to deny any wrongdoing as the cases pile up against it. Continued investment with  RealPage could signal that investors approve of RealPage’s actions. In addition, the groundbreaking ProPublica article about RealPage was published in 2022, three years ago. As more time passes, the list of negative headlines lengthens. New negative press about RealPage’s lawsuits and lobbying could have a detrimental impact on investors’ bottom line.