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 The DOJ’s investigation represents the second time the federal law enforcement agency has looked into RealPage’s rent-setting software. In 2017, the DOJ flagged a proposed merger in which RealPage sought to buy its biggest competitor, a company called Rainmaker Group, which made rent-setting software known as LRO, or Lease Rent Options.

RealPage’s then-CEO, Steve Winn, said the $300 million purchase would allow RealPage to double the number of apartments it was pricing, from 1.5 to 3 million units.

After the acquisition was announced in early 2017, the DOJ requested additional information from the companies involved. Federal regulators scrutinize mergers above a certain size — right now, it is transactions valued at $101 million — and typically allow them to proceed after only a preliminary review.

But the government can request more information from companies and even seek to block the merger in court if it believes it could substantially harm competition.

A paralegal specialist who worked on the original DOJ probe into RealPage said it was narrowly focused on the impact on competitors who made software with a similar purpose. The paralegal said she was unaware of any complaints by those companies about the proposed merger.

Merger review guidelines used by both the DOJ and FTC say the agencies “normally evaluate mergers based on their impact on customers,” which include both direct customers and final consumers. But the paralegal said the investigation did not involve talking to tenant advocates or renters.

“The focus of the investigation was ‘talk to competitors, talk to large rental companies,’” said the paralegal, who did not want to be named because she was not authorized to speak about the investigation. “That was the limited focus.”

ProPublica found that in the Seattle ZIP code it examined, some of the 10 largest property managers used RealPage’s original pricing software and others were clients of the competitor it acquired.

Though some career DOJ staff members were concerned about the merger, political appointees leading the agency at the time under Trump chose not to challenge it in court, according to the source with knowledge of the matter.

The investigation fell at a time when the DOJ’s Antitrust Division was preparing to sue to block a proposed merger between AT&T and Time Warner, which promised to take up a lot of the division’s resources. “It was a resource constraint issue he was trying to balance,” the source said of Makan Delrahim, the former assistant attorney general charged with overseeing the division at the time. In addition, RealPage did not have the same reach then as it does today, the source said.

Delrahim declined to comment on Tuesday about the first RealPage investigation, saying he was bound by government ethics restrictions from discussing nonpublic aspects of the case and referring questions to the current administration.e said that given that it had been almost five years, his “memory is fuzzy at best.” But he added that in general, “as evident from my past record, I was not shy about greenlighting cases that I felt were meritorious even if difficult or unprecedented.”

Antitrust prosecutions by the division fell to 

The DOJ declined to comment on Tuesday.

Klobuchar’s recent letter to the DOJ mentioned the 2017 merger, saying that such consolidation can make markets “more susceptible” to collusion and encouraging the department to consider looking at RealPage’s past behavior to see if any of it was anticompetitive.

RealPage says its customer base across all its products — which also include other types of software, such as accounting — has exceeded 31,700 clients.

Marketing materials dated 2021 on the company’s website said its so-called revenue management products, formerly called Yieldstar and LRO, are “trusted by over 4 million units.”

ProPublica also detailed how RealPage’s User Group, a forum that includes landlords who adopt the company’s software, has grown to more than 1,000 members, who meet in private at an annual conference and take part in quarterly phone calls. Klobuchar’s letter raised specific questions about the group, saying the senators were “concerned about potential anticompetitive coordination” occurring through it.