Rent Too High?

There’s an algorithm for that, says an Eagle student researcher.

Across the Pacific Northwest, renters have spent the better part of a decade watching housing costs climb relentlessly upwards. Demand is high and supply, everyone agrees, is tight. Inflation has, without doubt, heightened owners’ expenses. But research from an EWU student suggests something else may also be at work — something less about conditions and competition than computer coding and collusion.

Allison Zimmerman is an Eastern grad student and full-time planner at SCJ Alliance, a Lacy, Washington-based public infrastructure consulting firm. Working alongside Matthew Anderson, director of the Urban and Regional Planning program, she published a 2025 report that pulls back the curtain on how, in cities like Seattle, digital property management platforms such as RealPage have quietly helped landlords tilt the rental landscape toward ever-increasing costs. Their findings, published in the journal Urban Science, suggest that RealPage’s AI-driven pricing tools, by coordinating rents across competing properties, may have effectively enabled landlords to participate in price-fixing schemes.

The findings, published in the journal Urban Science, suggest that RealPage’s AI-driven pricing tools, by coordinating rents across competing properties, may have effectively enabled landlords to participate in price-fixing schemes.

 

The mechanics are simple, Zimmerman and Anderson argue. Landlords sign up for RealPage, whose AI ingests granular data — vacancies, lease dates, unit specs, competitor pricing — from all participating landlords in a given market. The platform then recommends the highest rent each should demand. In Seattle neighborhoods such as South Lake Union and Belltown, landlord participation rates reached near 80 percent, meaning the vast majority of renters were, in effect, negotiating against a single, computer-driven intelligence.

“RealPage tells all of their clients where everyone is living, how many vacancies are out there and what landlords are charging,” Anderson explains. “When they tell all of their clients to increase the rent, renters have no option other than to accept it.”

RealPage recently settled a federal antitrust lawsuit aimed at ending its algorithmic pricing practices, but Zimmerman worries the story still hasn’t broken through to those who are most affected. “I wish people were more aware,” she says. “The rent-fixing lawsuit is a big deal and impacts a lot of people, but I think very few people, especially renters, actually know about it.”

Closer to home in Spokane, at least, lawmakers are clueing in. The city earlier this year, specifically citing Zimmerman and Anderson’s research, passed an ordinance banning algorithmic rent-fixing, effective January 2026. It’s a first step, but one that the authors hope might restore a bit of fairness to the pricing of much-needed rental housing.