CEO Dana Jones pushed again in an announcement on Tuesday, saying RealPage isn’t liable for an undersupply of leases, elevated demand for properties or inflationary pressures shaping the market.
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Property administration software program big RealPage broke its silence on Tuesday morning concerning the category motion lawsuit towards it and a federal prison antitrust investigation into its Yardi software program.
Within the assertion, RealPage CEO Dana Jones asserted that “false and misleading claims” have been reported concerning the corporate’s income administration software program and denied that the corporate is liable for widespread lease will increase.
“The time is now to address a number of false claims about RealPage’s revenue management software, and how rental housing providers operate when setting rent prices,” Jones mentioned. “Housing affordability should be the real focus. RealPage is proud of the role our customers play in providing safe and affordable housing to millions of people. Despite the noise, we will continue to innovate with confidence and make sure our solutions continue to benefit residents and housing providers, alike.”
Quite a few class-action lawsuits allege that landlords used RealPage’s Yardi software program to coordinate a marketing campaign to lift rents to unprecedented highs by utilizing RealPage’s algorithms to share rental value knowledge with different suppliers. The lawsuits allege that the price- and occupancy-sharing agreements amounted to a “cartel.”
The lawsuits additionally title a number of rental housing operators, a few of whom have already settled, similar to Pinnacle Property Administration Providers — one of many largest property managers in the USA — and Condo Earnings REIT.
The identical claims laid out by the lawsuits have reportedly impressed the Division of Justice to launch a prison investigation into RealPage, with reviews indicating that the DOJ is trying into the chance RealPage helped facilitate value fixing at among the giant rental properties whose homeowners use the software program. The prison investigation got here after the DOJ filed a quick in help of the collective class motion lawsuits towards RealPage shifting ahead.
“Put simply, RealPage allegedly replaces independent competitive decision-making on prices, which often leads to lower prices for tenants, with a price-fixing combination that violates” antitrust regulation, the DOJ mentioned in help of the renters’ case.
In its assertion, RealPage pointed to housing affordability as the true drawback and argued it shouldn’t be held liable for the persistent undersupply of rental items, elevated demand for rental housing, and inflationary pressures presently shaping the housing market.
It additionally asserted that RealPage clients set their very own costs, have the discretion to just accept or reject software program value suggestions, should not punished for denying software program beneficial rents, and settle for suggestions at broadly various charges that they declare are decrease than has been reported.
Within the assertion, RealPage identified that its value suggestion software program makes suggestions in each instructions, up and down, and that it by no means recommends a buyer withhold vacant items from the market. It claimed that clients utilizing their software program maintained a rental emptiness price effectively beneath the nationwide common, however didn’t present a particular statistic.
“RealPage revenue management software offers prospective residents and housing providers more options and flexibility in lease terms, aids compliance with Fair Housing laws, does not use any personal or demographic data to generate rent price recommendations, and helps ensure that prospective residents have access to the best pricing available to everyone,” the assertion reads.
A few of these claims ran opposite, nonetheless, to remarks made by RealPage executives at a 2021 convention, which had been first reported by ProPublica in 2022.
“Never before have we seen these numbers,” Jay Parsons, then a vice chairman at RealPage, talking a few current 14.5 % bounce in condo lease costs. Parsons then requested a colleague if their software program had performed a job, based on ProPublica.
“I think it’s driving it, quite honestly,” Andrew Bowen, one other RealPage govt answered. “As a property manager, very few of us would be willing to actually raise rents double digits within a single month by doing it manually.”
