Housing should be considered a human right and there should not be for-profit companies allowed to be renting out apartments. It should only be non-profits whose sole purpose is managing rentals, not these damn rental corporations trying to hoover up every last penny and constantly increasing rates to keep up with “the market”. Every other industry should be lobbying Congress on this, the more of our money goes towards to having to pay rents, the less of it is available for anything else.

Whaaaat? How was this not massive news!? How many people did this affect?

So like if the courts find that the law was broken and the tenants overpaid, do the tenants get a full refund plus interest?

I'm assuming no.

Do you all know about jury nullification? It's when someone murders an executive who was responsible for raising the rents on millions of people, and despite all the evidence the jury still says not guilty.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Through the RENTmaximizer, the rental companies outsourced their pricing decisions to Yardi and artificially eliminated any competition between them, the suit alleged.

Instead of courting renters based on market conditions, attorneys say property management companies used Yardi’s algorithmic tool to automate the pricing process and implement higher prices collectively across a group of landlords.

“Our antitrust legal team has uncovered what we believe to be a clear gaming of the system through controlled, lockstep algorithmic increases to fix the cost of rent — one that has affected millions of renters,” said Steve Berman, managing partner and co-founder of Hagens Berman, in a statement.

Dallas-based apartment manager, owner and developer Tonti Properties is one of the 18 landlords named in the suit.

ProPublica published an investigation last October on landlords’ use of RealPage’s proprietary YieldStar algorithm to push the highest possible rent prices on tenants for apartments across the U.S.

More than 20 lawsuits against RealPage were consolidated in Nashville federal court in April, Reuters reported.

The original article contains 289 words, the summary contains 165 words. Saved 43%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!