Targets of DOJ antitrust lawsuit have Wisconsin presence

The federal government is suing two property management companies that operate in Wisconsin for anti-competitive price manipulation.

Greystar and Willow Bridge are two of six defendants added last week to a Department of Justice lawsuit first filed in August.

At the center of the suit is the software company RealPage. It lets landlords upload detailed data about their rentals, pools that data and uses it to generate “pricing recommendations,” according to the DOJ’s complaint.

The feds say the software “replaces competition with coordination,” and that RealPage’s goal is “ensuring that otherwise competing landlords rob Americans of the fruits of competition — lower rental prices, better leasing terms, more concessions.”

Greystar manages three Milwaukee-area apartment buildings — Deer Run in Brown Deer, the Lydell in Glendale and Evoni in Milwaukee — and two in Madison — Hub on Campus and Sycamore Woods.

Willow Bridge manages the Ruby in Brookfield, Bayshore Place at the Bayshore Mall in Glendale and the Emerald Row Apartments in Oak Creek. It also manages the Moderne and Couture high-rises in downtown Milwaukee.

Those high-rises are owned by BarrettLo, a Milwaukee-based developer. The firm said that “RealPage has never been used at the Couture” and that it has “directed Willow Bridge to discontinue use of RealPage software entirely at all of our properties.”

Greystar and Willow Bridge did not respond to WPR requests for comment.

Complaint outlines potentially anti-competitive practices

A website set up by RealPage in response to “false and misleading claims” says that software users have “100% discretion to accept or reject software price recommendations.”

But the DOJ argues that the software uses “multiple mechanisms to increase compliance” with recommendations. It encourages landlords to toggle an “auto-accept” function for pricing recommendations, the complaint says.

Their prosecution emphasizes that rental data used by RealPage’s algorithm is nonpublic and “competitively sensitive,” submitted by “otherwise competing” landlords.

The company said in September that participating landlords can choose to exclude nonpublic competitor data from influencing the recommendations they get.

Multi-state corporate landlords have smaller footprint in Wisconsin

Besides the two companies with a Wisconsin footprint, defendants include Camden Property Trust, Cortland Management and the Blackstone-owned landlord LivCor. Real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield is also named, together with its property management subsidiary Pinnacle.

According to National Multifamily Housing Council, an industry lobbyist, all but LivCor belong to the 30 biggest property management firms nationally. Greystar is the largest firm in the country, managing almost 800,000 apartments.

The DOJ’s complaint lists almost 200 neighborhood-level rental “submarkets” where more than 26 percent of landlords use RealPage software and those practices “have harmed, or are likely to harm, competition and thus renters.”

Atlanta, Charlotte and several Texas cities are heavily represented on that list. None of the submarkets are in Wisconsin.