Rage against housing software won’t lower rent

In Massachusetts, like so many other states, housing affordability is one of the top political issues that will reshape the elections come this November.

Rather than examining their own policies or local communities’ refusal to accept or build new housing, state legislators have convinced themselves that greedy landlords, aided by property management software, are the real culprits.

Bills in both the Massachusetts House and Senate would outlaw “algorithmic rent-pricing software” like RealPage and Yardi, used by property owners to administer their leasing contracts. This software is used to manage vacancies, communicate with tenants, and update rental contracts based on valuations and market conditions.

New Jersey signed a similar ban into law earlier this month, and three other blue states already have their own versions on the books. These bans follow a 2024 lawsuit by the Department of Justice and blue state AGs against RealPage for alleged collusion.

The fundamental claim is plausible: property owners are using algorithmic software by companies like RealPage to evaluate and price their units and tenant contracts, and these landlords are colluding to jack up rents and drive prices higher.

It’s a tempting thesis, but it’s hard to square with the facts.

Since June of 2025, asking rents in Boston have fallen 4.1%, following 13 consecutive months of decline, according to Realtor.com’s June 2026 Rent Report. That’s even more than the national average decline of 1.5% in the past year, which now stands at 4% lower nationally than the 2022 COVID-era peak in rental pricing.

From 2020 to 2022, as pandemic shutdowns and work-from-home policies changed the way Americans lived, rents became higher as a result. But those numbers are falling.

If more property owners are adopting algorithmic software like RealPage and Yardi, and the claims about price-fixing and collusion are true, wouldn’t we only see prices rise?

The academic research on AI pricing software and rising rents has yet to find a causal link.

But what has been studied quite prominently, though, is the impact of restricted supply and increasing demand for more apartments and homes. If you build less, and demand increases, the prices will follow. It’s a simple tenet of undergraduate economics, and something Bostonians can quantify.

From January to March of this year, the city of Boston greenlit just 432 new housing units, the lowest number since 2010. Last year, that number stood at 549 units. The Texan capital of Austin, meanwhile, has issued nearly 12 times that number while rents have fallen by nearly 8% in just one year.

While politicians blame property owners and their tech, it doesn’t change that Boston isn’t building enough housing to keep up with the demand.

Is there less development because of greedy landlords and their fancy software? Or because builders can’t get permits or permission fast enough to house more people?

Though the government attempted to make a case against pricing algorithms, still no court has found RealPage or any other housing software company liable for collusion or higher rents. And no jurisdiction that has passed such bans has seen any meaningful decline in rental prices.

Legislators have mistaken faster math for collusion. The plain fact is that a ban on software wouldn’t lower anyone’s rent. It would only choke off the supply that’s actually bringing rents down.

Blaming the technology makes for a tempting political target. It’s a lot easier to ban a piece of software than to fix zoning and get elected representatives to liberalize development.

If state lawmakers can stop raging against the machine and instead look for actual fixes to increase housing supply, they might actually bring down the cost of renting a home.

Otherwise, Massachusetts residents are in for a hard time.

Yaël Ossowski is deputy director of the Consumer Choice Center.

Published in the Boston Herald (archive #1, #2)