Thoma Bravo’s RealPage enters the “rent now, pay later” market

RealPage now finds itself in hot water due to its 2025 purchase of Livble, a rent payment software that offers a “Rent Now Pay Later” approach to paying rent. The property management software corporation (which is owned by the private equity firm Thoma Bravo) has dominated headlines for several years due to allegations of price-fixing that resulted in more than 30 class action lawsuits and lawsuits from a number of state Attorneys General, as well as a recently settled lawsuit with the Department of Justice. Now, potential price collusion is not the only controversy related to the company. The ethical issues with Livble and similar softwares are discussed further in Rent Now, Pain Later: How “Rent Now, Pay Later” Loans Put Working People at Risk, a new report from the organizations Protect Borrowers and Towards Justice. 

Published in February 2026, the report’s authors state that the report documents the rise of “‘Rent Now, Pay Later’ loans—short-term, high-cost loans that are little more than repackaged payday loans”, and works to expose “predatory creditors capitalizing on sky-high rents by driving families into debt.” RealPage’s software Livble is profiled throughout the report as an example of a software that involves “massive consumer risks,” through hidden fees and a lack of transparency. 

RealPage acquired Livble in July 2025 and claimed the corporation would help to “redefine the rent payment experience through offering an opportunity for tenants to split their rent payments up.” With rising housing and food costs, Livble provides a tempting option for tenants hoping to avoid additional fees or eviction for late rental payments. If a tenant cannot pay their rent in full on the first of the month, Livble offers the opportunity for tenants to borrow money from Livble, use the loan to pay their landlord the full month of rent, and then to pay back Livble in installments with interest. This is a system similar to popular online shopping “buy now pay later” platforms. 

Through partnerships with rental payment platforms Livble offers loans to tenants on the same site tenants traditionally use to pay their rent, making it especially accessible to tenants who may not realize the associated risks with using the loan. 

While the option to split rental payments up may seem enticing to tenants, Rent Now, Pain Later found that using Livble results in additional fees that may add up for tenants over time. Livble charges interest through a “finance charge,” which varies depending on the day of the month the tenant chooses to split their rent. The finance charge translates to an APR of over 100 percent. As the report notes, “these rates are as much as five to six times greater than the interest rates on credit card balances and personal loans.” 

RealPage’s widely used property management software raises another potential problem as Livble has the potential to be more far-reaching.  “As part of the purchase deal, RealPage announced that Livble would be integrated into RealPage’s nationwide rental management software, which serves ‘more than 24 million rental units.’ That change means that the risks associated with Livble may be about to gain massive scale.” 

The authors of Rent Now, Pain Later predict that RealPage and similar corporations will continue to try to financially benefit from the housing crisis as much as possible through engaging in practices that raise rent, excluding potential tenants, then also receiving a financial payoff via additional fees and interest when tenants are unable to pay their rent in full each month. They write, “as the example of RealPage buying Livble illustrates, the rise of Rent Now, Pay Later loans could accelerate a trend of companies in the rental market attempting to become anticompetitive ‘one-stop shops’ that dominate across facets of the rental space and leverage heft in one area to box out competition in another.” 

RealPage’s recent hiring of Zahir Khoja for their newly created Chief Fintech Officer role could also point to a new direction for the corporation. Khoja has experience with “buy now, pay later” software as he previously worked for Afterpay, a popular “buy now, pay later” platform. 

RealPage’s ownership of Livble shows that the corporation’s harmful impact on tenants and the housing market is not just within the arena of price-setting recommendations. Instead, the corporation is engaging in multiple practices that potentially replicate the predatory actions that created the housing crisis in the first place. Institutional investors should learn more about other aspects of RealPage’s offerings besides price-setting to get a clearer understanding of the corporation’s impact on tenants. Investors should also ask Thoma Bravo how the firm will handle additional scrutiny of RealPage beyond the corporation’s rental price-setting components.