While the antitrust fight over RealPage has dominated attention, a quieter case against Yardi Systems, Inc. has been working its way through federal court in Seattle for three years, and it just took a turn that could make it the more consequential of the two. A Washington renter named McKenna Duffy sued Yardi and a group of property managers in September 2023, alleging that they used the software now called Revenue IQ, formerly RENTmaximizer, to coordinate rents across competing properties by routing non-public pricing data through a common algorithm. The proposed class covers leases dating back to September 8, 2019. On October 13, Judge Robert S. Lasnik of the US District Court for the Western District of Washington denied Yardi’s motion for summary judgment and lifted a stay that had kept plaintiffs from taking discovery against the landlords named alongside it.

Plaintiffs advance three theories in the operative complaint. The first is a hub-and-spoke conspiracy in which each landlord agreed with Yardi to use the product and the landlords agreed horizontally among themselves to inflate rents. The third alleges that defendants used Yardi as a conduit to exchange timely, competitively sensitive, non-public information. A second theory alleging unlawful vertical restraints was abandoned, and the court granted summary judgment on that count.

Yardi had persuaded the court in March 2025 to split discovery, confining the first phase to its own products on the theory that examining how the software actually works might resolve the case without dragging in the landlords. That phase closed in November 2025, and Yardi moved for summary judgment on the strength of it, pointing to individualized software configurations, client-selected reference rents, clients’ ability to modify or reject recommendations, and the absence of any direct use of one client’s confidential information in computing another client’s output. Lasnik found the approach insufficient because the arguments reached beyond the technology, noting that Yardi was asking him to draw inferences about the landlord defendants’ knowledge, communications, and conduct, including whether their use of the product reflected independent decisionmaking. The purpose of phasing, he wrote, was to determine whether Yardi-focused discovery could obviate broader discovery. “It has not.”

The parallels to RealPage, Inc. are close enough that the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission filed a Statement of Interest in the Yardi case in March 2024, arguing that landlords retaining some pricing discretion does not defeat a price-fixing claim. Both cases describe a software vendor collecting non-public data from competing landlords, feeding pricing recommendations back to them, and hosting user conferences where competitors discussed strategy. Both rest on the proposition that a cartel does not require the members to talk to each other if they are all talking to the same algorithm.

Where the two diverge is in who is prosecuting. RealPage faced the DOJ, nine state attorneys general, and private plaintiffs at once, and the government case ended in a consent decree filed November 24, 2025 that carried no financial penalty and no admission of wrongdoing. RealPage agreed to stop using competitors’ non-public data at runtime and in model training, to limit itself to data at least twelve months old and not drawn from active leases, to redesign features that limit price decreases or align pricing, to stop reporting pricing data more granularly than statewide, and to accept a court-appointed monitor with access to its source code and runtime logic for up to seven years. The money came from elsewhere. Greystar settled a private class action for $50 million in October 2025 and paid $7 million to nine state attorneys general the following month.

Yardi is privately held and faces no government enforcement action at present, only a Statement of Interest that carries no remedy of its own. That cuts both ways. There is no DOJ on the other side of the table offering a no-penalty consent decree, and private plaintiffs under the Clayton Act are seeking treble damages across a class period now in its seventh year. The RealPage decree suggests what injunctive relief tends to look like in these matters, which is restrictions on data vintage and granularity, feature redesigns, and a monitor. It says considerably less about exposure in a case where the only parties at the table want money.

What happens next depends on a record that does not exist yet. Discovery against the landlord defendants is only now beginning, the expert motions on both sides were denied without prejudice because they were briefed on an incomplete record, and the parties have 28 days to propose a plan for the remainder. Yardi may renew its summary judgment motion once that is done, and Lasnik was explicit that his order expresses no view on the merits of its arguments. We would expect the landlord communications to determine the outcome more than the source code does, which is roughly what the DOJ argued two and a half years ago.