Our algorithms driving up the rent from American public media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Amy Scott.

Many large property owners use rent pricing software to figure out what to charge their

tenants.

And that practice has come under scrutiny.

After an investigation last fall from ProPublica into the software company RealPage and its rental

pricing algorithm, several lawsuits have accused RealPage of colluding with landlords to

artificially inflate rents and limit the supply of housing.

The Department of Justice is also investigating.

ProPublica's Heather Vogel has been following the developments since her story came out.

She explained how the algorithm works.

What it does is it collects the actual lease transaction data from a group of competitors

that are in the same geographic area.

And it feeds that information into an algorithm that then spits out a recommended price for

the landlord that's looking to price their available apartments.

And how has that contributed to higher rents in some markets, according to your findings?

Well, what critics are saying and some legal experts is that this process of this algorithm

allows competitors to essentially all raise their prices at the same time, which inflates

prices in the market above where they would be otherwise.

And that there is actual coordination that's happening between the landlords via this algorithm.

There were more than two dozen lawsuits that that's where I stopped counting federal lawsuits

and I trust lawsuits that were filed after our investigation.

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