This is untrue. The escalation would be to the property's management team, which is the same group which configured the tool to use the recommended pricing.
> If there is a disagreement between the participating Lessor and the RealPage Pricing Advisor, the dispute is often elevated to the Lessor’s management for resolution, and specific reasons justifying a departure from RealPage’s pricing level are usually required.
If I take a Playstation to the checkout counter at Walmart and say "Instead of $500, how about $450?", the person at the checkout counter doesn't have the authorization to change the price from the price enforced by the checkout system. They'd have to call over a manager and make the case as to why I should be able to buy it for $450 instead of the enforced price the system already set.
See sections 46 and 47 in the complaint:
46. RealPage and participating Lessors have provided one another with such mutual assurances, agreeing among themselves not to compete on price for the sale of multifamily residential real estate leases. They have effectuated their agreement through two mutually reinforcing mechanisms. First, participating Lessors have agreed to set prices using RealPage’s coordinated algorithmic pricing. Second, participating Lessors have agreed to stagger their lease renewal dates through RealPage, to avoid (otherwise natural) oversupplies in rental properties.
47. RealPage’s coordinated algorithmic pricing allows participating Lessors, in RealPage’s words, to “outsource [their] daily pricing and ongoing revenue oversight” to RealPage, with RealPage pricing participating Lessors’ “properties as if we [RealPage] own them ourselves”—that is, as if RealPage and its participating Lessors were operating as a monopolist.
I think you might be right, it just doesn't seem obvious to me.
So you'll have some group of investors which pool together a bunch of money (like REITs, not always) and buy a building (normally the people who build these things don't hold on to them very long, lots of specialization). This organization is the "ownership".
The ownership usually doesn't know/doesn't want to deal with the day to day management of the property, they're just the financials kind of people. They hire a management company. The management company works with the ownership to understand budgets for the building, expected revenues, etc. Management deals with all the contractors to make the building operate.
Often, the management company then hires a leasing company, or might have a leasing arm of the company. This is then the sales side of the whole business of the building. These people are then in charge of finding tenants and be a bit of the outward customer facing side of the operation. These are the people you'd talk to when you're wanting to negotiate on pricing. However, they don't directly control the prices. Remember, ownership wants to ensure certain revenues for the building, and management is in charge of hitting budgets. So that front line agent just making up numbers all willy-nilly can have a lot of effects on not just that leasing company, but the management company that contracted them, and the ownership company that contracted the management company. That person you're talking to about the lease might be a contractor of a contractor of the ownership of the building, and ultimately it's the ownership's money on the line.
All of these groups are often different organizations and companies, and this structure is just one example out of many. As mentioned, sometimes management teams have their own leasing arms. Sometimes ownerships have preferred leasing partners and will push management to use some other leasing company. So its not always a single "this person always reports to that person" kind of structure, so that's why its pretty vague in these filings.
The first approval is done by the Pricing Advisor (an employee of RealPage) and a second approval is done by a manager at the Lessor's office.