D.C. Attorney General Brian L. Schwalb said Wednesday that the city has sued a software company and 14 of the District’s “largest landlords,” alleging they colluded to illegally raise rents for tens of thousands of D.C. residents with a price-setting algorithm.
RealPage, a company that provides software to property managers, came under scrutiny last year after a ProPublica investigation found its software may have wrongly inflated rents, and it has faced price-fixing lawsuits in numerous jurisdictions amid a Justice Department investigation.
The suit, filed in D.C. Superior Court, said landlords agreed to use RealPage’s centralized system, which suggests rental prices based on supply and demand, rather than compete against one another. In addition, the suit said, landlords agreed to provide “competitively sensitive data” to RealPage for use in its software, a violation of D.C. antitrust law.
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