As ProPublica reported last year, breaking the story, Parsons and RealPage leadership have been helping corporate landlords hike rents to price-gouge renters while presumably pocketing hefty corporate salaries. This reporting has spawned 30 tenant lawsuits, with the DOJ opening an investigation earlier this year and recently joining a class action suit on the side of the tenants. Parsons has even publicly bragged about RealPage’s Yieldstar rent price algorithm and its success in driving up rents, saying at a conference in 2022, “Never before have we seen these numbers,” prompting a colleague to add, “I think [Yieldstar] is driving it, quite honestly,” citing apartment rents that had increased by “as much as 14.5 percent.”
However, when cited by media outlets, Parsons regularly argues that private equity and institutional investors have no culpability for rising rent prices (blaming a supposed lack of supply of housing), even as he and RealPage sell their services to these same landlords on the promise that they can increase rental profits. (If RealPage can’t help you increase rent, why would you trust it with setting prices?)
Furthermore, RealPage is a dues-paying member of the National Multifamily Housing Council, a landlord lobbying group dominated by notorious uberwealthy conservative villain (and Justice Clarence Thomas benefactor) Harlan Crow, which represents “nearly 2,000 abusive private equity firms, developers, banks, and real estate software companies.” Clearly, from the kind of company they keep, Parsons and other RealPage executives are committed not to evenhanded economic analysis of the housing crisis, nor just to creating nifty technology products. Rather, they are focused on helping corporate landlords price-gouge renters and reap massive profits by slowly draining ordinary Americans of resources and keeping financial stability out of reach for most of us.