BATTLING RENT-SETTING SCHEMES BY CORPORATE LANDLORDS

Tenant organizations, a local union and a Jersey City councilman lead the fight

As everyone who lives here knows, New Jersey is in a housing crisis. There are too few homes to buy or apartments to rent, prices are out of reach for working and middle-class families, and those luxury apartments going up around all the train stations are crowded with young singles sharing apartments with strangers.

Clearly the situation is about to get worse. Elon Musk’s budget slashers have arrived at HUD (Department of Housing and Urban Development), planning hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts to the programs that help first time homebuyers and low-income families keep a roof over their heads. And a private equity CEO, Bill Pulte, was tapped by Trump to head the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which oversees Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, agencies that together support 40 to 50 percent of U.S. mortgages.

About one-third of households in New Jersey are renters. In Essex County 55 percent of households rent; in Hudson County it’s 68 percent. And New Jersey is the seventh most expensive rental state, according to the 2024 report, Out of Reach, by the National Low Income Housing Coalition. It takes an income of more than $79,000 to afford a two-bedroom rental at what HUD terms a fair market rent of $1,980.

Rents have been going up significantly in the last year and one reason has been the influx of Wall Street money buying up homes and apartment complexes. Shareholders of these corporate landlords demand ever-increasing returns, which can only come from raising rents or cutting back on the maintenance of the buildings.

At the Democratic gubernatorial candidates debate at Rider University last month Newark Mayor Ras Baraka said Wall Street firms like Black Rock and Blackstone were “driving prices up on the market, making it hard to buy housing and driving up homelessness 24 percent.”

Many of these corporate owners are setting rents using sophisticated computer systems and policies operated by a company called RealPage. In early January, in the final days of the Biden Administration, the Justice Department and ten state attorneys general filed an antitrust lawsuit against six large corporate real estate landlords and RealPage, charging them with price fixing, setting rates way above what a competitive market would allow. In New Jersey, RealPage is also the target of state legislators, local government officials and candidates, as well as tenant groups, largely centered around Jersey City.

Tenants at the huge 527-unit Portside Towers complex in Jersey City have been fighting the buildings’ corporate owner, Equity Residential, for several years, arguing it has been illegally ignoring rent control laws. Equity Residential is the fifth largest publicly traded real estate company, and its stock is owned by a plethora of Wall Street investment giants such as Black Rock and State Street.

Three or four years ago Portside tenants were outraged by sudden rent hikes of 30 to 40 percent, and they formed two tenant organizations. Kevin Weller, who heads one of them, told The New Jersey Democrat that he was slapped with a $1,500 rent increase after living in his building only a year. His neighbor, a teacher who had been in the building 18 years, had her rent doubled and she was forced to move.

The tenants started investigating what was happening and determined there were two problems. Rent increases should have been limited by rent control laws, which the company was ignoring. And their landlord was using a computer system run by RealPage to set rents, which ProPublica was then exposing as a way for landlords to squash price competition, coordinate rents and keep them artificially high.

Tenants showed up repeatedly at city council meetings, demanding enforcement of rent control laws and an end to use of computer rent setting systems. Although the city’s Rent Leveling Administrator initially ruled against the tenants, in October 2023 the full Rent Leveling Board, in a 6 to 0 ruling, agreed that the buildings were indeed subject to rent control. Tenants could be due refunds going back to 2016. The company has fought this in court, and this past summer the tenants filed a $400 million lawsuit against Equity Residential.

Pressed by this angry wave of tenant protests, the Jersey City Council joined the fight against RealPage. This past June, Councilman James Solomon, along with the local service employees’ union, SEIU-32BJ, introduced a city council resolution urging the state legislature to ban rent-setting computer programs. The council voted 7 to 0 in support of the measure.

“If rent-setting software has the power to rig the housing market for the wealthiest property managers in the country, then we as elected officials have a duty to take that power away and level the playing field for working families," said Solomon, who is now running to be Jersey City’s mayor.

New Jersey legislators have now joined this fight. The measure gaining the most ground is A4872, introduced in September by Assembly Deputy Speaker Yvonne Lopez (D-Middlesex). It prohibits landlords from colluding on rents through a coordinating software system. In October she held a packed committee hearing in Trenton on the bill with Jersey City tenants and mayoral candidates speaking in support. The Assembly Housing Committee has voted up the bill and it was sent to the Appropriations Committee, where supporters are hopeful it will be voted on in the next month or so.

But to pass such legislation “you need Phil Murphy to say this is an important thing for the public and this is part of controlling rents and affordability,” Steve Fulop, Jersey City’s mayor since 2013 and a Democratic gubernatorial candidate, told The New Jersey Democrat. Fulop says he is “a huge supporter of legislation” to address this problem.

Nationally, over 30 lawsuits have been filed against RealPage and various landlords, including Equity Residential, and are now consolidated in a class action lawsuit in Tennessee. Several Attorneys General including Arizona and Washington, D.C. filed their own cases. The Washington, D.C. Attorney General sued 14 landlords, including Equity Residential and RealPage for colluding to “illegally raise rents by participating in a centralized, anti-competitive scheme, causing District residents to pay millions of dollars above fair market prices.” He called it a “housing cartel.” Equity Residential noted in its February 13, 2025 SEC filing that it is subject to these lawsuits.

This past August the Justice Department filed its own anti-trust lawsuit against RealPage. Then in early January, just before Trump was sworn in, DOJ added six corporate landlords to the lawsuit. Ten state Attorneys General have joined the lawsuit and their active engagement may be necessary to pursue the case if Trump’s DOJ does not.

“While Americans across the country struggled to afford housing, the landlords named in today’s lawsuit shared sensitive information about rental prices and used algorithms to coordinate to keep the price of rent high,” said then Acting Assistant Attorney General Doha Mekki of the U.S. Justice Department’s Antitrust Division said in January.

A number of these companies manage significant properties in New Jersey

For example, Cushman Wakefield has residences in Newark, and a 1,155 unit residential complex in Jersey City. Willow Bridge has many apartment buildings throughout New Jersey. But there are likely many other companies involved as RealPage is the predominant computer price setting software firm in the industry.

New Jersey Attorney General Matt Platkin’s office did not have a comment on whether it was investigating the issue or planning to join the lawsuit. “As a general rule, we don't confirm or deny the existence of investigations,” a spokesman said.