OPINION:
Every campaign season needs a villain. In 2026, it is the corporate landlord.
The Financial Times recently analyzed a decade of campaign language in competitive congressional races and found a surge of attacks on private equity and corporate landlords in 2026.
More than two dozen battleground candidates have pledged to curb institutional investors’ home purchases. Big banks used to absorb this kind of rhetoric.
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Candidates in the Southwest have gone a step further. They have indicted landlords’ software.
Deb Haaland, New Mexico’s Democratic nominee for governor, promises to “ban rent fixing,” which her platform describes as stopping corporate landlords from using artificial intelligence to inflate rents.
Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, the Democratic nominee for governor, vows to “ban algorithmic price collusion by corporate landlords.”
The same list promises 40,000 more attainable homes. Only one of those pledges would put a roof over anyone’s head.
Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes won her office in 2022 by 280 votes. In a recent debate, she cited her lawsuit against real estate software company RealPage and nine landlords among her credentials. The Goldwater Institute filed a records request for a simple count of the consumer complaints her office had received about algorithmic rent pricing. Her office refused, arguing that any such records would be confidential.
An antitrust case does not need a pile of tenant complaints, but an attorney general who campaigns on one should be able to say how many renters asked for help.
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, vetoed a bill that would have banned algorithmic rent pricing technology. He wrote that the Colorado Antitrust Act already prohibits collusion and the bill “could result in further diminished supply of rental housing.”
Mr. Weiser’s office has been suing RealPage under existing antitrust law since 2024. Call it the algorithm placebo.
Collusion is a legitimate worry, but it has been illegal since the Sherman Act of 1890. The Justice Department sued RealPage under President Biden and reached a settlement under President Trump, with no admission of guilt from the company.
However, the consent decree, which a federal judge approved in May, puts guardrails around data use and installs a court-appointed monitor to address concerns. The department itself told the court that rivals using the same software is not, on its own, necessarily anticompetitive.
In a 2026 working paper on the impact of algorithmic pricing on the rental market, Sophie Calder-Wang and Gi Heung Kim showed that algorithmic pricing makes landlords more responsive to market changes. “During the great recession from 2009 to 2010, the adopters of the algorithm lowered rents and increased occupancy, compared to comparable non-adopters in the same submarket,” the authors wrote.
In 2024, San Francisco became the first city to ban rent-setting software. Two years later, the San Francisco Standard reports, the city has not brought a single enforcement action, and asking rents for apartments rose 14% from March to July as the AI boom drew workers into a market starved of housing.
No ordinance can shield a city that will not build from a surge in demand. University of California, Davis Graduate School of Management professor Hemant Bhargava told the paper that banning pricing software is “barking up the wrong tree.”
The disease is scarcity. Washington has spent decades subsidizing housing demand while local rules have kept supply from catching up. Realtor.com estimates the national home shortage at 4.03 million homes in 2025 and lists zoning restrictions and permitting hurdles as headwinds for builders.
Where builders build, rents fall. Realtor.com reports that rents in the 50 largest metro areas have now fallen year over year for 38 straight months as new supply reached the market. Denver rents are down 4.1% from a year earlier, and nearly 72% of listings there offer concessions such as free rent, the highest share of any big metro.
Phoenix rents are down 1.9% too. Whatever software those landlords use, it has not stopped them from cutting prices.
Worse, this placebo may not be inert. Mr. Polis warned that Colorado’s bill could drive away the people who provide rental housing. Developers price every new legal risk into the decision to break ground.
To her credit, Ms. Haaland’s plan also promises to cut red tape and shorten approval timelines for housing projects. That is the part of her agenda that could actually lower rents. It is also the part that will not fit on a yard sign.
“Ban the algorithms” is politically convenient. It names a villain and claims a victory without approving a single permit, but outlawing software tomorrow will not produce the homes that are missing today.
• Patrick M. Brenner is president of the Southwest Public Policy Institute.
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