The DOJ is ridiculous. All pricing of rental prices is done with data. When an individual landlord prices their rental, they do based on what the other ones in the neighborhood have rented for. When a real estate licensee does it, they look at the data, and recommend a price based on that data. Most states require them to produce a report with that data to give to the client.
So why is having an algorithm look at the rental data illegal, but an individual person look at the data not?
And large landlords often use dynamic pricing based on an algorithm. So is it equally illegal when the large landlords drop rental prices in a building as vacancy increases and the market softens? These algorithms go both ways. Sometimes they raise prices based on the data, and sometimes they drop those same prices, even dramatically, when the data says to do so.
