Dive Brief:
- The class action lawsuit against Yardi Systems alleging anticompetitive conduct in the multifamily housing market will proceed to the next stage of discovery after a federal judge denied the software firm’s request for a summary judgment, per an Oct. 13 filing in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington at Seattle.
- In March 2025, Judge Robert Lasnik agreed to temporarily “stay discovery directed to the landlord defendants” and focus on fact-finding related to Yardi. The goal of segmenting the discovery process “was to determine whether threshold Yardi-focused discovery could obviate the need for broader discovery,” Lasnik said in the filing. “It has not.”
- In response to the antitrust allegations in Duffy v. Yardi Systems, Yardi previously said that its software never uses confidential competitor data in its rent recommendations. Multifamily Dive reached out to the Santa Barbara, California-based software company for comment on the new developments but did not get a response by the time of publication.
Dive Insight:
The first phase of discovery focused on the functions of Yardi’s revenue-management software, namely, “what inputs it uses, how it generates pricing recommendations, whether and for what purposes it uses or shares confidential, non-public information, the extent to which clients can control or affect recommendations, how clients configure the software, and the rate at which clients adopt Yardi’s recommendations,” per the filing.
But Lasnik ruled that this limited process did not eliminate the need to examine landlords’ “knowledge, understanding, communications, and conduct,” per the filing. He agreed with plaintiffs that doing so is the next step for the case.
“The Court therefore concludes that the record should be developed through the remainder of discovery before plaintiffs’ remaining claims are resolved on summary judgment,” Lasnik said in the filing. However, the ruling “expresses no view on the ultimate merits of Yardi’s arguments.”
Lasnik also agreed to seal some records related to Yardi’s confidential client, proprietary business and technical information, and denied requests from both plaintiffs and defendants to exclude certain experts.
In the lawsuit filed in September 2023, Washington state resident McKenna Duffy alleged that Yardi exchanged competitively sensitive and non-public information with clients through its rent pricing software, Revenue IQ (formerly called RENTmaximizer), and claimed that defendants engaged in direct conversations with their competitors about pricing via market surveys.
In 2024, Yardi and 10 out-of-state apartment operators named in the suit asked for the case to be dismissed, arguing that the plaintiffs didn’t have standing and were “attempting to manufacture a Sherman Act violation.” Lasnik denied the request in December 2024 and ruled that the landlords and Yardi must face the suit, writing in his statement, “as technology has evolved, so too have methods of price fixing.”
At the end of March 2026, Lasnik narrowed the lawsuit and dismissed claims against those 10 property managers, saying that the court lacked jurisdiction over non-resident LLC defendants who did not undertake “intentional actions expressly aimed at the state.”
Yardi previously told Multifamily Dive that it relies on its clients’ property data and publicly available housing market information to help users make pricing decisions.
“There is nothing illegal about Yardi’s revenue management product, and the allegations against the company are simply false,” a Yardi spokesperson said. “We stand behind our software and will continue to defend vigorously against this baseless litigation.”
Last October, Yardi fended off a class action lawsuit in the Superior Court of California, Alameda County. The state court agreed with Yardi that its Revenue IQ software did not violate California’s antitrust and unfair competition laws because it does not — and by design, cannot — use any client’s confidential pricing information to recommend pricing for any other client.
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