It's been over 15 years since I started RentVision out of my property management company. The vision I laid out at the time was that we would develop a predictive leasing platform that optimizes marketing AND revenue management.
While we're mostly known for our dynamic marketing solutions, improving how apartment operators set rent prices has always been a part of RentVision's identity.
Long before lawsuits and regulations dominated the discussion, we built a revenue management software that only used first-party data—your supply and demand—to set prices.
As more states and cities put forward legislation impacting rental pricing software, I want to explain how RentVision Revenue Management is the right solution for apartments going forward.
The Current State of Multifamily Revenue Management
As many of you know, multifamily revenue management and rental pricing software have come under intense scrutiny over the past few years.
It started with the Department of Justice's antitrust lawsuit complaining that one company's apartment pricing software shared non-public data to help property management companies collude in artificially inflating rent prices.
Even after its settlement, we're still seeing revenue management tools and the data their algorithms use being put to question.
Case in point: New York's Pricing Algorithm Law.
What New York's Pricing Algorithm Law Means for Apartments
The core objective of New York's pricing algorithm law is to prevent the coordination of shared data via centralized pricing tools.
The law, which goes into effect on December 15, 2025, prohibits:
- Sharing non-public pricing, occupancy, or demand data among competing landlords
- Using pooled private data to generate rent recommendations
- Operating software that influences pricing across multiple landlords using shared operational inputs
- Creating market-wide pricing effects through algorithmic modeling
The law does not ban:
- Revenue management software
- First-party data analytics
- Forecasting and machine learning tools
- Automated pricing within individual portfolios
New York's not alone. Many other states such as Nevada, as well as cities like San Francisco, Seattle, and Philadelphia, have attempted to push similar legislation impacting rental pricing software.
That rising trend now leaves many apartment owners and operators uncertain about what impacts these potential laws could have on how they set their rent prices.
How RentVision Revenue Management Aligns With Emerging Rental Pricing Regulations
From day one, we built RentVision Revenue Management to be the most transparent and trustworthy pricing tool for apartments. Here's why:
1. RentVision Revenue Management NEVER aggregates private vacancy or pricing data to set a community's rents.
We have always believed this is the morally right way for revenue management software to work.
Sharing private data amongst competing landlords to set rent prices creates circular dependencies that, on the surface, behave closely with the price collusion schemes alleged within many revenue management lawsuits.
I've always believed—even as a landlord—that using market and competitor data to set rents is risky and leads to poorer outcomes. Why? All that does is force a bunch of communities in a market to react to each other's pricing—even though their circumstances are entirely independent.
Ultimately, that not only looks bad on the surface, but it also causes landlords to lag behind what they should actually be charging.
2. RentVision Revenue Management ONLY uses first-party data to set the best price for each individual community in your portfolio.
RentVision Revenue Management produces a superior pricing outcome for renters and operators by ONLY factoring in an individual community's unique supply and demand data, including:
- Property-level occupancy
- Leasing velocity and turn duration
- Availability data, including current AND upcoming vacancies
- Seasonality and historical demand based on web traffic data
RentVision Revenue Management is the price-setting software multifamily needs—now and going forward.
Many operators are seeing the risks of using this data and are worried about the future status of apartment pricing software—especially with the legislation from New York and others.
But if these laws are issued, RentVision Revenue Management would require no product updates to be compliant. It is uniquely positioned to be the price-setting solution that multifamily needs now—and going forward. Not solely based on compliance, but on better, more trustworthy pricing—as we intended it to be when we first began developing it years ago.
If you're looking for multifamily revenue management software that delivers better pricing without using competitor or market data, please reach out! You can email me directly at david.watson@rentvision.com or schedule a demo today to learn more.
Founder and CEO of RentVision