By KATELYNN WINEBRENNER
PHOTO CREDIT Katelynn Winebrenner
The College Park Tenants Union urged the city council in February to investigate accusations that the landlords of six large apartment complexes participated in price-fixing for rents.
Three of the companies named in lawsuits own or manage The Varsity, Union on Knox, Atworth, Monument Village, Domain and Aster, which together make up 1,934 units in College Park near the University of Maryland (UMD).
“Local involvement is necessary to protect tenants from predatory pricing, and we would urge the city council to investigate the nature of RealPage,” Gannon Sprinkle, a co-founder of the union and a former deputy student liaison to the city council, said.
Greystar Management Services, Bozzuto Management Co. and UDR Inc. (United Dominion Realty Trust) are involved in lawsuits that allege they use RealPage, a software company that offers price-setting features based on algorithms.
The average rent in the city is $1,865 per month, which is 20% higher than the national average rent price, according to data from Apartments.com, which is owned by CoStar Group.
“The actual cost of housing is one of the most frequently brought-up concerns,” Dhruvak Mirani, co-founder of the tenants union the 2023-24 student liaison to the city council, said.
In December, the White House Council of Economic Advisers did an analysis of the economic impact of RealPage and found that renters in buildings whose owners use this algorithm pay a national average of $70 more per month. In the D.C. metro area specifically, that figure was $112.
City Councilmember John Rigg (District 3) asked the tenants union representatives to supply the council with more information for a future public discussion. Rigg represents the neighborhood where the apartments are located.
Other investigations into RealPage and property management companies have already begun.
The U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against RealPage and management companies in August.
In addition, Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown filed a lawsuit in Prince George’s County Circuit Court in January against the software company and six of the largest residential management companies in Maryland, including the three that manage the College Park properties.
Legislators also are looking into the impact of this technology.
“It was pretty troubling to me that renters were paying more in rent, really for no reason other than to fuel their landlords’ profits,” Maryland Delegate Julie Palakovich Carr told College Park Here & Now.
Proposed legislation in the Maryland House of Delegates (House Bill 817) and the state Senate (Senate Bill 0609) would prevent the use of algorithmic pricing by landlords in the state.
“The lawsuit that’s been filed here in Maryland is only about one company [RealPage] and six landlords, and this problem is broader than that,” she said. “We want to make sure that no landlord and no technology company are finding a loophole in our state’s consumer protection laws. We want to send a clear signal that other technology companies should not be getting into this space.”
In the meantime, representatives of the College Park Tenants Union are asking for action from the city, Mirani said, citing possible delays in state legislation because of budget discussions.
“The Maryland General Assembly is very busy, probably a little bit distracted, and we’ll need a little bit of support from the people and the municipal governments that are directly affected from issues like this in order to get the political momentum needed to pass a measure like that,” he said.
The fact that most of the affected units are student apartments makes city involvement even more necessary, Fran Riley, a UMD student who is a member of the Tenants Union steering committee, said.
“We’re an easy target, because we have to live near UMD, especially because a lot of students don’t have a car,” Riley said. “We’re kind of a captive audience, and unfortunately, we don’t have many choices of where to live.”
The transitive nature of student tenants also might affect their ability to handle these issues alone, Riley said.
“If you had more of a population that was here long term, it would be easier for them against these practices, because they’d be here for years and years, but for us, we’re here for four years, [and] then we’re gone.”
Without investigating the issue, Mirani said, the city could undermine its recent affordable housing initiatives, like its rent subsidy pilot program, which offers grants to students renting in the complexes near the university.
“The utility of these measures will remain limited,” Mirani told the council, “so long as predatory landlords use technology like RealPage to line their pockets at the expense of your constituents.”
Garrett Derderian, head of external communications for Greystar, said the company does not use RealPage for The Varsity or Union on Knox, and it uses only the software’s non-revenue management tools for Atworth.
UDR and Bozzuto did not respond to a request for comment.
