U.S. senators Elizabeth Warren and Ruben Gallego have recently sent a letter to the Department of Defense calling for an investigation into whether landlords are using RealPage software to rent gouge military families. Over the past two years, RealPage and corporate landlords have faced numerous lawsuits and investigations for wildly inflating rents in cities across the country.
The RealPage scandal broke, in 2022, when ProPublica reported that corporate landlords were using a RealPage software program that helped them to collude and dramatically raise rents. Soon after the exposé was published, numerous antitrust lawsuits and investigations started up. Recently, the Department of Justice and several state attorneys general filed a lawsuit against RealPage and a group of corporate landlords.
In December 2024, the Biden administration released a report that found landlords who use RealPage software and other algorithm-based technology to set rent prices add an average cost of $70 per month for tenants – or $840 per year. No small sum for poor and middle- and working-class renters. In total, the report estimated that algorithm-based software cost American renters more than $3.8 billion.
In other words, RealPage and the corporate landlords that use Big Tech software programs are fueling the housing affordability crisis in California and other states, which also worsens homelessness. A prominent UC San Francisco report found that sky-high rents are triggering homelessness in California.
Corporate landlords using RealPage software operate in multiple states across the nation, including California, New York, Massachusetts, Arizona, Illinois, and Washington. Washington D.C. has also been impacted.
It’s no surprise, then, that several corporate landlords that used RealPage software also shelled out millions to kill Prop 33 in California – the November 2024 ballot measure aimed to repeal statewide rent-control restrictions, allowing cities to pass new rent-control policies. AIDS Healthcare Foundation, the parent organization of Housing Is A Human Right, sponsored Prop 33 – for years, AHF has been battling the real estate industry to protect the public’s health.
Tellingly, the California Apartment Association, the powerful front group for corporate landlords, and California YIMBY, which abandoned the housing justice movement and hard-working tenants to join forces with corporate landlords to kill Prop 33, are virtually silent about the ongoing RealPage scandal.
So now Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Sen. Ruben Gallego have sent a letter to the Department of Defense, urging the agency to look into whether landlords using RealPage’s software are price gouging military families. Many other senators joined the letter, including Bernie Sanders, Rev. Raphael Warnock, and Andy Kim.
“The Department of Defense has a responsibility to protect military families from predatory private housing companies and ensure that taxpayer dollars meant for military families are not being pocketed by unscrupulous landlords,” the senators wrote.
The RealPage scandal reveals another disturbing fact: Big Tech and Big Real Estate are teaming up to squeeze every last penny out of hard-working tenants. It only underscores the need to end statewide rent-control restrictions in California and other states: rent control is the only tool that will protect tenants against predatory corporate landlords and tech companies.
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