The settlement does not include any compensation for renters impacted by the use of a property management system that drove up rental prices.
RALEIGH, N.C. (CN) — A federal judge approved a settlement between the federal government and the largest U.S. landlord Monday.
The federal government and eight states sued RealPage in August 2024, claiming it supplies major landlords with a software that deprives renters of fair competition and allows landlords to fix prices in the rental market. It later revised the suit and tacked on six property management companies, including real estate giant Greystar Management Services.
RealPage’s revenue management software shares information between landlords to generate price recommendations for units, the Justice Department said, and encourages landlords to decrease renter benefits and focus on increasing profits.
The government and the company reached a settlement in August 2025, which U.S. District Judge William Osteen Jr., a George W. Bush nominee, approved Monday. The agreement dismisses the claims against Greystar, but the feds still have claims against other landlords named in the suit.
Greystar has also reached a settlement with nine states in the case — California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oregon and Tennessee — to pay them $7 million, but it has yet to be approved by the court.
In the judgment, Greystar — which manages over 820,000 rental units and is headquartered in South Carolina — agreed to cease using a revenue management product that uses nonpublic data to make rental pricing recommendations beginning April 1. It must then notify the federal government of the new revenue management product it begins using.
The rental company is also prohibited from disclosing private rental data to other property managers or owners, soliciting that information, or using any private data it obtains, including through market surveys, call-arounds, industry meetings and shared documents. Greystar is also barred from participating in RealPage meetings and using any RealPage rental data that it previously had.
The settlement agreement doesn’t include any compensation for renters impacted by Greystar’s business practices. In the United States, around 80% of multifamily rental properties use RealPage’s management software.
The company has to hire an antitrust compliance officer and submit annual reports for five years swearing that it has complied with the agreement and detailing its current revenue management system. It also has to cooperate with the federal government’s ongoing case against RealPage.
If the federal government finds that Greystar violated the terms of the agreement within four years, it can request a court order requiring the real estate giant to comply with the terms for an additional four years or face contempt or additional remedies.
Landlords Camden Property Trust, Cushman & Wakefield Inc., Pinnacle Property Management Services, Willow Bridge Property Company, LivCor and Cortland Management remain as defendants in the case, as does RealPage.
“American greatness has always depended on free-market competition, and nowhere is competition more important than in making housing affordable again,” Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in a statement when the proposed settlement was announced. “We will continue to vigorously pursue President Trump’s pro-consumer agenda.”
Also pending is an agreement between Cortland Management and the federal government asking the court to issue an order ending Cortland’s participation in the case. Cortland will not set rental prices or generate pricing recommendations using nonpublic data, the parties said, or by using private data from another Cortland property that has a different property owner. The rental company would also be barred from sharing private data with other property managers or soliciting that information from other properties, but a federal judge has yet to greenlight that settlement.
The federal government has also proposed a settlement agreement with RealPage, which has yet to be approved by a judge. In filings, the government says it will limit RealPage’s use of nonpublic data and restrict its ability to source and share that data between landlords, preventing them from contacting nearby landlords to make recommendations for rental prices. If the settlement is approved, the DOJ said, a landlord’s own data should dictate recommended rental rates, not shared data from their competitors.
The agreement “protects American renters by prohibiting the use of competitively sensitive information in RealPage’s software to set rental prices, and by ending anticompetitive practices to align pricing among competing landlords,” the DOJ said while weighing the competitive impact of a settlement.
Representatives for the DOJ and Greystar did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
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