Antitrust

Lieff Cabraser represents lessees nationwide who allege they have overpaid for rent as a result of a cartel among the largest owners of multifamily residential real estate.  These lessors used a common third party (RealPage) to collect and fix rent amounts, increasing rents above competitive levels.

The Lessor Defendants “outsource daily pricing and ongoing revenue oversight” to RealPage, replacing separate centers of independent decision-making with one.  RealPage collects up-to-the-minute data on the historical and contemporaneous pricing from participating Lessors, data that, according to RealPage, is updated “every time [Lessors] make or change a [lease] renewal offer,” spanning over “16 million units,” which is a “very large chunk of the total inventory in the country.”  It standardizes this data to account for differences in the characteristics or “class” of the property in question, and then sets prices for participating Lessors using a common formula.  RealPage touts that it sets pricing for Lessors’ “properties as though we own them ourselves”—in other words, the participating Lessors’ cartel replicates the market outcomes one would observe if they were a monopolist of residential leases, which is the goal of any cartel.