RealPage

RealPage is an American multinational corporation that provides property management software for the multifamily, commercial, single-family, and vacation rental housing industries. Dana Jones is Chairman of the Board & Chief Executive Officer.

History
RealPage was founded in 1998 with the acquisition of Rent Roll, Inc., a provider of on-premises property management systems for the conventional and affordable multifamily rental housing markets.

RealPage moved its corporate headquarters to Richardson, Texas in 2016, and in 2017 acquired four companies — apartment market data provider Axiometrics, utility and energy management company American Utility Management, revenue management and pricing provider Lease Rent Options and also On-Site, a leasing and marketing platform company.

In 2018, RealPage announced an agreement to purchase electronic payment platform company ClickPay, located in Hackensack, New Jersey.

In July 2019, RealPage acquired utility management company SimpleBills.

In December 2019, RealPage acquired Buildium.

In January 2020, RealPage has agreed to acquire Modern Message, Inc.

In September 2020, RealPage acquired real estate IoT startup Stratis.

In December 2020, private-equity firm Thoma Bravo announced it would acquire RealPage for $9.6 billion, paying $88.75 per share for the company, a premium of 31% for their closing prices at the time. Its shares were reported up 26% that year. The acquisition completed in April 2021.

In January 2021, RealPage acquired bulk Internet provider WhiteSky.

Controversy
In October 2022, ProPublica reported that landlords use RealPage's asset optimization algorithm called YieldStar (later rebranded as AI Revenue Management) to increase rents throughout the United States, naming its users an illegal cartel that encouraged participants to withhold rental units from the market. Overwhelmingly, approximately 90% of property managers/landlords approve price change suggestions by the software. RealPage's software strongly discourages landlord users from negotiating asking rent prices with tenants.

In November 2022, the United States Department of Justice's Antitrust Division opened an investigation into RealPage, which is accused of contributing to higher rent prices throughout the United States. The company's YieldStar software is alleged to use an algorithm to "help landlords push the highest possible rents on tenants."

In November 2023, Attorney General of the District of Columbia Brian Schwalb filed an antitrust price-fixing lawsuit against RealPage and more than a dozen of the largest apartment building landlords in Washington, D.C., accusing them of illegally conspiring to set rental prices artificially high by sharing competitively sensitive data using RealPage's revenue management platform.

In April 2023, more than 20 private civil antitrust lawsuits against RealPage, which had been filed primarily on behalf of renters of multifamily apartments and which alleged that the company illegally conspired to keep prices above market rates, were consolidated in federal court in Nashville, Tennessee. In November 2023, the U.S. Justice Department filed a "statement of interest" in support of the lawsuits, arguing that the use of shared data and algorithms must "be subject to the same condemnation" as other price-fixing schemes. In December 2023, Chief U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw denied RealPage's bid to dismiss the consolidated lawsuits.

On May 22, 2024, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) conducted an unannounced raid on Cortland Management’s headquarters in Atlanta. This action was part of a criminal antitrust investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) into allegations that Cortland has been involved in a conspiracy to artificially inflate apartment rents.