"Legal Battles: U.S. Renters Challenge Corporate Landlords"

U.S. renters are taking corporate landlords to court, alleging the use of software to deliver inflated rent hikes. Tenants at Portside Towers in New Jersey are involved in a class-action lawsuit against RealPage and 34 co-defendant landlords, with the U.S. Department of Justice filing a statement of interest in the case. The software, according to tenants, eliminates empathy and sets artificially high rents, leading to allegations of antitrust violations. RealPage claims its tools use anonymized data and increase landlord revenues, but tenants argue they discovered the software's impact after reading a 2022 ProPublica investigation. Meanwhile, asking rents in the U.S. have ticked down, but well-located landlords on the East Coast may still have pricing power.