RealPage Settled. Rents Won’t. Here’s Why the DOJ Missed the Point. The DOJ just settled with RealPage over rent-pricing algorithms. Politicians are celebrating. Rents will still rise. RealPage didn’t cause the rent crisis. It reacted to the market we built. Rents exploded in 2021 and 2022 because vacancy collapsed, migration spiked, stimulus flooded households, and we choked supply for decades. The algorithm didn’t invent demand. It measured it. Now RealPage can’t use competitive data newer than 12 months. Sounds strict. Changes nothing. And here’s the funny part: management companies have stopped calling competitors out of fear. We’ve been comparing pricing since rotary phones. Suddenly we’re supposed to “guess” what specials our neighbors are running off whatever they show online. It’s theater. Who actually wins? Not renters. Not small landlords. The big owners? Blackstone, Greystar, AvalonBay. They never needed RealPage. They’ve got internal data science teams and massive portfolios to generate their own pricing intelligence. RealPage gave smaller operators the ability to compete with that sophistication. Now that edge is gone. The field didn’t get leveled. It tilted even harder toward the giants. The cause of the rent crisis is brutally simple: supply shortages. We don’t build enough housing. We don’t build it where people need it. And every attempt to fix zoning or density runs into political buzzsaws. Instead of facing that, we blame the algorithm. The DOJ got a headline. Politicians get to say they acted. Meanwhile the fundamentals that actually push rents higher stay untouched. Pricing optimization won’t disappear. It’ll just migrate into private tools the DOJ can’t see. We blamed the thermometer for the fever. Restricted the tool instead of fixing the disease. Rents will keep climbing in constrained markets for one reason: Not enough Supply. The DOJ settled the wrong problem. The rent crisis continues. What am I missing? https://lnkd.in/epktW3NP