WA Attorney General sues company, landlords for alleged rental inflations
The Washington State Attorney General announced a lawsuit against a software company and nine landlords for allegedly artificially inflating rental prices.
Attorney General Nick Brown held a press conference in Seattle Thursday morning about his latest lawsuit.
Brown claims that RealPage, a software company, colluded with nine landlords, which impacted around 800,000 renters across the region from 2017 to 2024.
'RealPage and landlords conspired to artificially raise rents for thousands of people in multi-family housing in Washington,' Brown said. 'Washington needs a competitive market to help with our critical shortage of affordable multi-family housing. RealPage's unfair practices are drowning renters and pricing more and more families out of stable houses in Washington.'
According to Brown's lawsuit, landlords would share sensitive, non-public information to the software company, which would then feed into the firm's algorithm that favors higher rental prices.
Brown said the company would tell landlords to keep prices high even if they had empty units.
'Every step of their pricing method favors setting rents at the very top of the market, artificially pushing that ceiling higher. That's price fixing. It's illegal and it hurts Washingtonians,' he said. 'The company advises its client landlords to automatically accept the higher pricing recommendations. It tells landlords to keep prices high even when occupancy is down.'
The lawsuit lists RealPage, and nine local landlords as the defendants, including Greystar, Cushman & Wakefield/Pinncale, LivCor, LLC, UDR, Inc., Quarterra Multifamily Communities, LLC, LaSalle Properties, LLC, MG Properties, LLC, and Sares Regis Management Company, L.P.
KIRO 7 News reached out to landlords for their response. We're still waiting to hear back as of Thursday.
The Attorney General said his office filed the lawsuit in King County Superior Court after pulling out of a federal lawsuit involving RealPage.
'We filed this case in state court because we believe that state law protects a greater number of Washingtonians and tenants than the federal case had,' he said.
Jennifer Bowcock, senior vice president of communications for RealPage, shared the following statement with us:
'Washington State AG Nick Brown decided to recycle misleading and inaccurate allegations from predecessor cases, despite our efforts to constructively engage with his Office to help resolve their misunderstandings. RealPage's revenue management software is purposely designed and built to be legally compliant and has always used data legally and responsibly, and we have a long history of working constructively to show that.
RealPage's revenue management software uses data responsibly, aids compliance with Fair Housing laws, rent control laws and state of emergency price gouging laws and does not use any personal or demographic data to generate rent price recommendations.
We believe the claims brought by Washington State AG Nick Brown are devoid of merit and will do nothing to make housing more affordable. Washington State should stop scapegoating pro-competitive technology, and we encourage Washington State's public leaders to focus on meeting the greater demand for housing with more supply.
Washington State's residents deserve real solutions to increase access to affordable housing.'
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