“In the suit, the DOJ claims RealPage's software in question — AI Revenue Management and YieldStar — is designed to make it easier to accept recommended lease rates than to decline them through an auto-accept function. For example, the lawsuit says, a manager can choose to do a bulk acceptance — accepting multiple floorplan recommendations all at once — but cannot do the same when rejecting a recommendation. But even if some incremental changes to the software are made, Bregman said that still may not satisfy the overarching concern of the DOJ, which is the ability to share highly sensitive, confidential information. "That’s their value-add, to give further insight into the market," Bregman said. "There's a lot of publicly available information they can attain ... but this next level, of taking highly sensitive information, including rent concessions and vacancy rates, and putting all of that together to determine what the recommended rate should be: That’s entirely new, and that’s the business model." Even if there are changes to how much information landlords who use RealPage's software can access, the impact of those changes is likely to be marginal, Bregman said. Many landlords already have access to market rental prices through public information. Vacancy rates and concessions of competing properties have generally been more opaque. Looking across the commercial real estate industry, it's possible other aspects of the market will be disrupted because of similar concerns and allegations laid out against RealPage. Bregman said one possibility is property maintenance, with AI determining pricing for things like snow removal, irrigation, plumbing or electrical services. But so much of real estate dealings are local, with RealPage and the claims brought up against the National Association of Realtors — which resulted in a $1.78 billion jury verdict last fall and a $418 million settlement earlier this year by the NAR — being unique national exceptions to that rule, said David Tarter, a longtime real estate attorney and executive director for the Center for Real Estate Entrepreneurship at George Mason University's Costello College of Business. "I think those are the kind of activities that raise the eyebrows of the federal government," Tarter said. "[The NAR case] was essentially an anticompetitive behavior [claim] because the marketplace set commissions and there's no real competition on commission. But there’s not much of that in real estate. A lot of it is hyperlocal." The use of big data and analytics will inevitably increase within real estate, Tarter said, but a big distinction is whether it's private or public information that's being used for analysis” https://lnkd.in/ecz7MvHu