The Rent-Pricing Software Your Company Uses Might Be Illegal Where You Operate Next Year
If your company uses revenue-management software to help set rents, this is the year to actually read what it does with the numbers. A federal settlement and a fast-growing list of state and city laws have turned a pricing tool most property managers thought was routine into a legal question, and the answer depends on details a lot of contracts never spelled out.
What the DOJ settlement actually changed
In its settlement with RealPage, the Department of Justice didn't ban algorithmic pricing outright. It restructured how the tool is allowed to work. RealPage has to stop using nonpublic, competitively sensitive pricing data from other landlords to calibrate its recommendations, can only train on data that's at least 12 months old, and can no longer host the kind of market-survey calls where property managers compared notes on pricing. A court-approved monitor will review the company's code for seven years. The practical takeaway for anyone using a similar tool, RealPage or not: a pricing recommendation built on other owners' current or forward-looking numbers is the specific thing regulators are now targeting, not software in general.
The state and city bans go further
New Jersey's FAIR Act, signed July 20, 2026 and taking effect July 1, 2027, makes it unlawful for landlords to use algorithmic systems that coordinate pricing, lease terms, or occupancy levels using data pooled across properties, and it reaches the software vendors too, not just the landlords who buy the service. New York enacted its own ban on algorithmic rent price-setting in October 2025. At least a dozen cities and counties, including San Francisco, San Diego, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Seattle, and Portland, have passed their own versions, and as of mid-2026 lawmakers in roughly two dozen states have introduced similar bills. Penalties in some of these ordinances run $500 to $7,500 per violation, and a violation can be counted per unit, per month, which adds up fast across a portfolio.
What to actually check
The laws don't prohibit using software to help set rents. They prohibit using software that pools nonpublic data from competing properties to do it. That distinction is where the real compliance work is. A few things worth confirming with whatever pricing tool your company runs: whether it uses your own property's performance data only, or blends in data from other owners' units; whether a vendor's "antitrust compliant" label has actually been checked against the specific wording of the ordinance in your city, since the definitions vary; and whether you can point to a date when any newly required change (like allowing a recommendation to go below a price floor, not just above a ceiling) was actually deployed on your account, not just promised in an email from the vendor. None of that requires ripping out the software. It requires a paper trail showing you looked.
Where this fits with AI in the rest of the business
It's worth separating this from the AI conversation most property management companies are actually having, which is about the admin work: chasing a lease renewal, tracking a maintenance ticket, logging a certificate of insurance. That's a different category of tool. The legal risk in the RealPage-style cases comes specifically from an algorithm making a pricing decision by pooling data across competitors and acting on it with minimal human review. An agent that reads an inbox, drafts a renewal reminder, or flags a vendor's insurance certificate as expired isn't setting a price or coordinating anything between properties, and a person still approves whatever goes out. If your company is looking at AI for the operational side of the business, that's the shape it should take: a person in the loop, one property's own data, and a clear record of what the tool did and why. See how we approach that for property management companies, or what the day-to-day looks like on our property management page.
Sources: Greenberg Traurig, "New Jersey Enacts Algorithmic Rent-Setting Law"; Morgan Lewis, "Algorithmic Rent-Pricing Litigation Expands Under New State and Local Laws"; Reed Smith, "Algorithmic pricing under pressure: DOJ's RealPage settlement changes the rules for rental markets".