Colorado tenant advocates call for rental price-fixing investigation

Two Colorado nonprofit groups called publicly on Attorney General Phil Weiser this week to “root out collusion and price fixing among large landlords” amid national and state scrutiny of software that’s allegedly used by property owners to artificially increase rental prices.

The nonprofits — law firm Towards Justice and the housing group Community Economic Defense Project — said Wednesday on the social platform X that companies that manage thousands of apartments in Colorado have been accused of price-fixing in lawsuits and investigations elsewhere in the United States. They urged the Colorado Attorney General’s Office to start its own investigation.

Their call for Weiser to intervene comes as lawyers and legislators, including in Colorado, have sought to curtail alleged collusion among large property owners and RealPage to set rents. RealPage, headquartered near Dallas, designs software that uses a pricing algorithm to help users set rents based on certain data.

Weiser spokesman Lawrence Pacheco declined to comment on the groups’ requests or say if the Attorney General’s Office plans to open an investigation.

The nonprofits’ call follows reports that the U.S. Department of Justice has stepped up its own probe of RealPage and property owners, including at least one with extensive operations in Colorado. The U.S. attorney general in Washington, D.C., has filed a separate lawsuit against RealPage and a group of landlords, several of which own thousands of properties here.

“We live in a moment of unprecedented high rents and displacement,” Zach Neumann, the executive director of the Community Economic Defense Project, said in an interview. He noted Denver’s recent record-setting eviction filings: “Most of the people being evicted in Denver are being evicted because they can’t afford to pay. It just seems very frustrating to us that large corporate landlords are using a tool that allows them to coordinate rents and to push prices up even more.”

A spokeswoman for RealPage did not return an email seeking comment Wednesday, nor did a representative for the Colorado Apartment Association. RealPage previously has denied wrongdoing, and in June it launched a website to push back against what it called “factual inaccuracies” about its product.

RealPage’s software collects data — such as lease terms, occupancy levels and rental prices — from its clients and generates suggested rents for property owners’ units on a daily basis, according to lawsuits filed against the company and the landlords with which it works.

One lawsuit, filed in federal court in Denver in late 2022 by a renter, accused the company and its clients of participating in a “price-fixing cartel” to illegally and artificially inflate rents. That suit has since been folded into larger litigation now based in a federal court in Nashville, Tennessee. Two companies have settled in that larger case, including the Denver-based Apartment Income REIT, which operates as AIR Communities.

The national watchdog group Accountable.US earlier sent two letters to Weiser’s office, as well as to attorneys general in other states, urging an investigation into potential price-fixing involving large property owners and RealPage. Accountable.US noted in one letter that several of the property owners facing allegations in the Washington, D.C., lawsuit also own thousands of apartment units in Colorado.

Neumann said his group estimated that the vast majority of large corporate landlords in Colorado used RealPage’s software.

Earlier this year, Colorado lawmakers attempted to ban the use of RealPage’s algorithm-based software in setting rents. After the bill passed the state House, a group of moderate Democrats joined with Senate Republicans to neuter the measure by inserting an amendment offered by RealPage’s lobbyist. House Democrats rejected the change, and the Senate refused to strip the amendment, sinking the bill.