On Friday September 8, a lawsuit was filed against Yardi and some clients who use Yardi’s Revenue IQ (formerly RENTmaximizer) software. The lawsuit alleges Yardi conspired with its clients through Revenue IQ to exchange competitively sensitive and non-public information in order to illegally inflate rent prices and suppress lease supply.
Yardi and the Revenue IQ software does none of this.
First, Revenue IQ does not “mandate” anything, including advertised rent (called ‘asking rent’) or price increases. In fact, Revenue IQ regularly adjusts prices upward and downward based on supply and demand. Many clients also use Revenue IQ to prioritize steady occupancy rather than rent growth, and the software includes settings to help clients comply with various rent control requirements and state-of-emergency rent cap programs.
Second, Revenue IQ is not “a black box” that makes collusive pricing decisions, and Revenue IQ does not use (and has never used) confidential, competitor, or non-public rent data for adjusting asking rents. On the contrary, asking rent adjustments are individualized and based only on:
- A client’s own property unit availability, prospect traffic, and leasing activity.
- The asking rents for comparable properties that the client selects, which come from the client’s own research, public information collected through surveys, and information from public websites.
- The over 200 Revenue IQ configurations that clients can set, adjust, and readjust based on each client’s own individual priorities, goals, and objectives, and clients can even choose to use only their own property data for making asking rent adjustments.
In sum, there is nothing illegal about revenue management, and the allegations in the complaint have no merit. Yardi stands behind Revenue IQ and will vigorously defend this ill-conceived lawsuit.