BALTIMORE — The Justice Department is suing six of the nation's largest apartment companies - which own hundreds of units in the Baltimore area - for colluding to set rental prices.
Ten states are now suing the apartment landlords "for participating in algorithmic pricing schemes that harmed renters," according to a press release from the U.S. Department of Justice.
The landlords are: Greystar Real Estate Partners LLC (Greystar); Blackstone’s LivCor LLC (LivCor); Camden Property Trust (Camden); Cushman & Wakefield Inc and Pinnacle Property Management Services LLC (Cushman); Willow Bridge Property Company LLC (Willow Bridge) and Cortland Management LLC (Cortland).
Acting Assistant Attorney General Doha Mekki of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division said in a statement:
While Americans across the country struggled to afford housing, the landlords named in today’s lawsuit shared sensitive information about rental prices and used algorithms to coordinate to keep the price of rent high. Today’s action against RealPage and six major landlords seeks to end their practice of putting profits over people and make housing more affordable for millions of people across the country.
The companies allegedly used each other's competitively sensitive information through common pricing algorithms to set their rents.
They used RealPage, a property-management service that was sued by the Justice Department in August for antitrust violations.
The suit claims the companies directly communicated with their competitors' senior managers about rents, occupancy, and other competitively sensitive topics (such as Greystar giving Camden information about its approach to pricing for the upcoming quarter, and Camden and LivCor spending months communicating about their pricing strategies, including plans for certain rent hikes).
They even allegedly shared information about the parameters they use in RealPage's software.
The landlords jointly run more than 1.3 million units in 43 states and D.C.
Cushman & Wakefield manages multiple properties in the D.C. area, as well as Beech's Farm apartments in Columbia.
Greystar manages multiple properties in the Baltimore area, including the new Juniper development at Merriweather, The Crescent at Fells Point, McHenry Row Apartments, and the planned Enolia complex for Morgan State's off-campus apartments.
Willow Bridge manages The Lofts and The Flats in Federal Hill.
A consent decree between Cortland and DOJ has also been proposed, which would require Cortland to cooperate in the federal investigation and litigation, and be barred from using competitors' competitively sensitive data to run any pricing model, among other agreements.
