A federal judge has temporarily blocked New York from enforcing the part of its algorithmic rent-pricing law that penalizes landlords for relying on covered software recommendations. The preliminary injunction is not a final ruling on the statute’s constitutionality, but it prevents enforcement of the landlord-use provision while RealPage’s First Amendment challenge proceeds.
U.S. District Judge Valerie Caproni issued the order Sept. 29 in the Southern District of New York. The 27-page decision targets Section 340-b(3) of the state’s General Business Law, which treats a landlord’s knowing or reckless use of recommendations from a coordinating pricing system as an unlawful agreement. Caproni also denied Attorney General Letitia James’ request to dismiss RealPage’s lawsuit.
The judge described the constitutional question as a close call and found RealPage only marginally likely to succeed. Her core concern was breadth: the provision can reach recommendations based on public market information as well as systems using competitors’ private data. Reuters reported that Caproni viewed algorithmically generated price recommendations as commercial speech and questioned a rule that prohibits ordinary price comparisons merely because software facilitates them.
New York enacted the first-in-the-nation statewide restriction in October 2025. The signed legislation defines a coordinating system as one that gathers prices, supply levels or lease-renewal data from at least two unrelated property owners, analyzes that information and recommends rents, occupancy targets or other lease terms. It prohibits both facilitating an agreement among landlords not to compete and setting lease terms from covered recommendations.
The injunction pauses the second prohibition as applied to landlords. It does not erase the entire statute or resolve whether software providers may facilitate coordination among competing owners. Multifamily Dive reported that the separate restriction on operating or licensing software used to coordinate rental pricing remains outside the injunction described in the court filing.
The dispute also sits beside federal antitrust limits that continue independently. In November 2025, the Justice Department filed a proposed settlement with RealPage requiring the company to stop sharing competitively sensitive information and aligning prices among competing landlords. That remedy focuses on nonpublic competitor data and specified product practices; New York’s broader statute also reaches certain recommendations derived from lawful public information.
Supporters of the New York law argue that shared pricing systems can reduce competition and worsen an already severe housing-affordability problem. RealPage says its recommendations help owners respond to market conditions and that advice based on public data is protected speech. The preliminary order accepts neither position as the final answer; it preserves the status quo while the court examines the statute’s reach.
For property owners, the immediate effect is narrow but important: New York cannot currently impose liability under Section 340-b(3) solely for knowingly or recklessly setting rents or lease terms from covered recommendations. Traditional antitrust law, the federal RealPage settlement and the statute’s separate software-facilitation provision remain relevant. The case now moves into merits litigation, where the state will have to show that its restriction is sufficiently tailored to anticompetitive conduct.
