Housing

States can pursue legal remedies under anti-trust laws when landlords collude to raise rents or use deceptive practices to institute extra fees, even if the FTC backs away from these cases.

By Caroline Nagy, AFR/AFREF Associate Director of Housing Policy.This piece was originally published on Shelterforce on April 28, 2026.

The growing dominance of corporations within the housing sector has contributed to the continued rise of unaffordable rents, junk fees, and other tenant abuses. These excesses have sparked a resurgence of antitrust and consumer protection enforcement actions against extractive Wall Street landlords and the tech platforms that enable them, including the 2024 lawsuit against RealPage. This antitrust case and those that followed have demonstrated the power of antitrust tools to take on corporate landlord monopolies that are harming millions of tenants nationwide.

Corporate landlords loved RealPage, a popular tech platform that offered a rent-setting algorithm which enabled landlords to collude with one another to reduce competition in local housing markets, increase rent prices, and add in junk fees. The Department of Justice (DOJ) and eight states sued RealPage in the first antitrust lawsuit aimed at rental pricing in recent years. This antitrust action has been followed by successful lawsuit settlements against mega-landlords Invitation Homes and Greystar.

In response to the RealPage scandal, California, New York, and many cities passed laws to ban rent-setting algorithms. While these bills are now under threat of federal preemption, states have another tool to fight rental price-fixing and other unfair, deceptive, and anticompetitive landlord practices: existing federal and state antitrust and consumer protection laws. State attorneys general are empowered to enforce federal antitrust laws, specifically the Clayton and Sherman acts, as well as state laws that protect consumers from unfair and deceptive practices.  

The pivot to state enforcement of antitrust and consumer protection laws comes as the current administration has largely abandoned consumer protections and price-fixing enforcement. The federal RealPage prosecution ended with a whimper when the Trump administration’s DOJ granted the private-equity-owned firm a highly generous settlement, under which RealPage faced no fines and made no admission of guilt. The administration also sought to preempt any state and local laws regulating AI in a December 2025 executive order, which theoretically would include state and municipal bans on algorithmic rent-setting. While the executive order is of highly dubious legality, Congress has also proposed legislation to preempt AI regulations, including though a failed attempt to include an AI ban in the One Big Brutal Bill of 2026.  

In this environment, here’s how state attorneys general can step up and use existing antitrust and consumer protection laws to advance housing affordability. 

Price-Fixing

The Sherman Act bans monopolies and contracts, combinations, or conspiracies that unreasonably restrain trade or commerce. It also empowers state attorneys general to bring antitrust claims on behalf of residents harmed by monopolistic practices. 

The existence of an algorithmic rent-setting platform matters less than the anticompetitive behavior its users engage in to disadvantage renters. In a separate lawsuit, former New Jersey Attorney General Matt Platkin argued that RealPage and 10 of New Jersey’s largest landlords violated the Sherman Act by sharing competitively sensitive nonpublic business information with their competitors, both through RealPage and directly with one another. RealPage thereby created a virtual smoke-filled room used by landlords to coordinate and set rents higher than what a competitive market would have generated. (Despite the DOJ’s settlement, this lawsuit is still ongoing.) 

The RealPage case is part of a broader antitrust strategy against unlawful information exchanges that lead to anticompetitive outcomes. In a similar case, the DOJ and six states sued Agri Stats, a livestock industry data analytics firm. Chicken, turkey, and pork processors subscribed to Agri Stats and shared their competitively sensitive internal business information with each other, effectively allowing these companies to collude and drive down the prices they paid to farmers—a violation of the Sherman Act. 

State attorneys general should continue to monitor RealPage’s activities following the DOJ settlement, as well as any new entrants into the rental data market, for any signs of price coordination or other anticompetitive practices. They should also be on the lookout for other business data aggregation services that enable corporate landlords to collude on price-fixing schemes that harm renters, such as through junk fees for ancillary services. 

Mergers

While the Sherman Act targets cartel-like behavior such as price-fixing by existing companies working together, the Clayton Act was intended to prevent the emergence of monopolies through mergers or interlocking boards. Section 7 of the Clayton Act prohibits mergers and acquisitions that could “substantially … lessen competition, or … tend to create a monopoly” and allows state attorneys general to sue to prevent anticompetitive mergers. 

The Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) 2023 merger guidelines help states identify mergers  that are likely to generate anticompetitive outcomes. The guidelines explicitly include mergers involving data and platform services that can facilitate collusion, including “pricing algorithms, programmatic pricing software or services, and other analytical or surveillance tools that track or predict competitor prices.”  

In 2024, eight states and Washington, D.C., joined the FTC in successfully preventing the merger of grocery store chains Kroger and Albertsons. Kroger dropped the deal after the antitrust enforcers secured a preliminary injunction. State attorneys general should be similarly aggressive in opposing mergers of corporate landlords, housing industry data aggregators, and homebuilders. 

Junk Fees

Junk fees are additional costs that corporations impose on people on top of an agreed-upon price that are also either deceptively presented or exceed the value of the services they claim to be for, or both. Tenants nationwide pay egregious amounts in junk fees each month. An Urban Institute study found that corporate landlords added an additional 10 to 30 percent to renters’ monthly housing costs in junk fees, with charges including “receipt convenience fees” for the so-called convenience of paying rent online and mandatory “valet trash fees.” These fees are frequently imposed on renters after they sign their lease, leaving them with no easy way to refuse. The FTC Act bans “unfair or deceptive acts or practices,” and all 50 states have laws that do the same. Junk fees qualify, and these laws allow state attorneys general to take action against corporate landlords that impose them. 

Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser joined the FTC in 2025 to sue Greystar for violating the FTC Act, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, and the Colorado Consumer Protection Act by misrepresenting total monthly rental costs and failing to disclose junk fees to tenants before renting. More states should follow Colorado’s lead. 

As the cost-of-living crisis escalates, state attorneys general are increasingly using long-standing antitrust and consumer protection laws in new ways to crack down on landlord abuses. With uncertain federal prospects on the horizon, state attorneys general may not always find a willing litigation partner in the FTC. Nonetheless, nothing in the Sherman or Clayton acts prevents state attorneys general from initiating antitrust and consumer litigation on their own or in partnership with other states. Ultimately, we should look to the states to take the lead in holding landlords accountable.

This piece was originally published on Shelterforce.