Experts fear small gains made toward tenant protections during the Biden Administration are likely to disappear under President-elect Donald Trump.
The actions against corporate landlords that came late in Biden’s term have the greatest potential to affect metro Atlanta renters.
This summer, the Department of Justice moved to sue RealPage, alleging its property management software allowed landlords across the country to artificially raise rents.
Then, the Federal Trade Commission also fined corporate landlord Invitation Homes $48 million in a proposed settlement, claiming the company saddled tenants with surprise fees.
These efforts are uniquely relevant to metro Atlanta tenants because of these companies’ presence here, according to Taylor Shelton, a professor in the Department of Geosciences at Georgia State University.
“We’re really ground zero for corporate landlords, especially in the single-family rental market,” he said.
His research earlier this year found Invitation Homes and two other corporate landlords owned more than 19,000 properties in the Atlanta region.
That means the federal crackdown on these corporate landlords’ business practices had the potential to reshape the renting experience for a significant number of local tenants.
But with this election, Shelton said he expects the efforts to stall.
“While the Biden administration was largely too little and too slowly for renters across Atlanta and the rest of the country,” he said. “There will be even less done under a Trump administration.”
Officials in Georgia, a state with few tenant protections, have not shown an interest in curbing these landlords’ power at the local level.
And while several states, including Tennessee and North Carolina, joined the DOJ lawsuit against RealPage, Georgia’s Attorney General Chris Carr was not among them. At the time, his office did not respond to a request for comment to explain why.
The companies targeted in these federal actions have denied any wrongdoing.
RealPage has created a website to dispute claims about its rent-pricing software and has said that it does not promote higher rents. Invitation Homes has stated that its disclosure practices are “industry-leading.”
