Property management software firm Yardi Systems was sued in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington on September 8 over its revenue management software product, currently called Revenue IQ. The suit also names 18 multifamily property management companies. It is a class action complaint that alleges that setting rents based on the anonymized sharing of pricing data violates the Sherman Antitrust Act.
Yardi was sued by Mckenna Duffy, a resident of the State of Washington, who rented apartments from Pillar Properties starting in 2021. The law firm of Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro, LLC filed the complaint. The plaintiff is seeking class action status with the class being every renter in the United States who rents from a property using Yardi’s revenue management product.
The suit against Yardi parallels one launched against property management software provider RealPage last year. That suit was prompted by an article critical of RealPage’s revenue management software product published in Pro Publica. The article also prompted a group of four U.S. Senators to call for the Department of Justice to investigate RealPage.
The suit against Yardi alleges that the defendants’ continued use of Yardi’s pricing algorithms constituted a conspiracy to “artificially inflate price in the nationwide market for multifamily rental housing.” It also alleges that the defendants engaged in an unreasonable restraint of trade by entering “into a continuing agreement to regularly exchange detailed, timely, competitively sensitive, and non-public information about their operations.”
The suit quotes Yardi’s marketing literature as saying that the use of their revenue management product could result in achieving rent levels of up to 6 percent higher than if not using it. It asserts that these higher rents constitute an injury to the plaintiffs and asks for relief in the form of triple damages plus attorney’s fees. It also asks that defendants be enjoined from continuing their alleged anti-competitive behavior. It asks that the case be tried before a jury.
Judge Robert S. Lasnik, appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1989, has been assigned to the case.
The property management companies named as defendants in the suit are Bridge Property Management, LLC, Calibrate Property Management, LLC, Clear Property Management, LLC, Dalton Management, Inc., HNN Associates, LLC, Lefever Mattson, Manco Abbot, Inc., Morguard Corp., Pillar Properties, LLC, Summit Management Services, Inc., Creekwood Property Corp., Legacy Partners, Inc. and Jones Lang Lasalle, Inc. Property management companies listed as co-conspirators in the suit are Alco Management, Inc., McWhinney Property Management, LLC, KRE Group, Inc., Towne Properties, and Tribridge Residential, LLC.
