For the second time in a year, the Colorado House passed a bill Wednesday that would prohibit the use of algorithms that, critics and investigators allege, have been used to hike up apartment rents in Denver and across the country.
House Bill 1004 would ban the use of algorithmic devices that are used to set or recommend rental prices or occupancy levels in rental housing. It effectively targets RealPage, a Richardson, Texas-based software company being sued by the U.S. Department of Justice and the state for allegedly facilitating price-fixing via its algorithm. The software takes rent and occupancy data from property owners and recommends prices and rental targets back.
The bill’s sponsors — Denver Democratic Reps. Steven Woodrow and Javier Mabrey — said the measure was intended to ensure housing providers compete with each other to lower prices, rather than collude to keep rents higher.
“We need competitors to compete, especially on critical terms like price,” Woodrow said during the bill’s initial floor debate Tuesday. “Unfortunately, with the advent of the internet and massive data collection and sharing, certain actors have developed sophisticated price-setting algorithms.”
The bill passed on a party-line 43-22 vote. It now heads to the Senate, where a similar bill effectively died last year.
In April 2024, a group of Senate Democrats and the chamber’s minority Republicans backed an amendment — offered by a lobbyist hired by RealPage — that neutered the proposal.
In a report published late last year, the outgoing administration of then-President Joe Biden found that 45% of renters in the Denver area lived in apartments that used the rent-setting software; those tenants paid more than $1,600 extra for housing every year compared to other renters. That was the second-highest toll of the 20 major metropolitan areas studied; only Atlanta outstripped Colorado’s capital city.
A 2022 ProPublica investigation quoted RealPage executives marveling at rent increases facilitated by their algorithm.
RealPage has denied any wrongdoing. During a February committee meeting, company vice president Mike Semko told state lawmakers that there had “been so many patently false statements made in the allegations against us.” The Colorado Apartment Association has argued that the algorithms can be used to lower prices and that “rental price-fixing does not happen.”
On Wednesday, House Republicans accused Democrats of targeting landlords and of trying to interfere with the housing market. They also pointed to apartment rents in Denver stabilizing in recent months as new construction has come online.
“I doubt that landlords are colluding to lower prices, and maybe it’s OK if they do,” said Rep. Chris Richardson, an Elizabeth Republican. “But prices are coming down.”
Democrats countered that it was the software interfering with the free market and landlords’ ability to compete with each other and lower prices.
“This is about the most important part of anyone’s budget: their housing cost,” said Rep. Bob Marshall, a Highlands Ranch Democrat. “And when we see the writing on the wall — we know we have an organization that is conspiring to withhold supply, which they have admitted, in order to increase rent on renters — that’s inappropriate.”
The bill’s death last year — delivered at the behest of RealPage — sparked infighting among Democrats. But lawmakers say they’re more optimistic about the proposal’s chances this time around: Senate President James Coleman, a Denver Democrat, told reporters earlier this year that his Senate colleagues have now had more time to study the issue and that he was confident the bill would pass.
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