Meanwhile, corporate landlords are under pressure to lower rents nationally. Last month, President Joe Biden called on Congress to pass new legislation to force landlords with 50 or more units to cap annual rent increases at 5% or risk losing certain federal tax breaks. In her first major campaign event, Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris pledged to “take on corporate landlords and cap unfair rent increases.”
Liz Zelnick, director of the Economic Security & Corporate Power Program at the consumer watchdog group, Accountable.us, said her organization has been investigating RealPage for years after it began noticing a pattern: Corporate landlords were posting record profits while raising rents, not just in high-priced cities like Boston and San Francisco, but across the country.
“We recognized that it wasn’t just plain corporate greed; it was corporate greed meets price fixing,” she said. “This is really artificially raising rates across the country in different cities and towns and making it nearly impossible for tenants to find a cheaper building in the city in which they were looking because a lot of these landlords were colluding with one another, within those same cities.”
In California, Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a statement on Friday that renters in Southern California are particularly impacted by companies that use RealPage. As home prices and rents rise, he said, renters have “no other choice” but to pay.
“This means that even if rental home supply was high, rent prices stayed the same, and in some cases, rents went up,” Bonta said. “This conduct is unacceptable and illegal.”
The National Apartment Association declined to comment on the case, citing the pending litigation. For its part, the California Apartment Association said it remains committed to educating its members “about compliance with all relevant laws and regulations.”