They Built A Pricing Cartel In Code And The DOJ Just Pulled The Plug Bisnow just reported that 27 major landlords, including Greystar and Brookfield, will pay $141M to settle claims that RealPage’s rent-pricing software helped them coordinate rent hikes. No one admitted guilt. But they all agreed to stop sharing non-public lease data with RealPage for five years. Now many in multifamily is asking the same question: If a market survey service like HelloData pulls public competitor rents, scraped from listings and websites, could that still get you in trouble? Not for what you collect, but for what you do with it. Scraping public data is legal. It’s the digital version of walking your comps. What crosses the line is when an algorithm starts using that information to sync rents across competitors, especially if everyone’s using the same model, vendor, or auto-accept settings. At that point, regulators stop seeing market intelligence. They see algorithmic coordination. The line isn’t about where the data comes from, it’s about how people act on it. If the tool removes independent judgment, you’ve built a pricing cartel in code. So keeping a human in the loop and documenting that process is critical. The next few years will test every revenue management platform in the country. https://lnkd.in/euRccg_H