San Francisco made history in 2024 as the first city in the country to ban landlords from using software that sets rents based on nonpublic competitor data. Two years later, the city attorney's office says it has never filed a civil action against a single landlord under that law, even as median rents in the city have climbed to record highs.
The law, formally Section 37.10C of the city's Rent Ordinance, targeted revenue-management tools sold by companies such as RealPage and Yardi that used nonpublic competitor data to recommend rental rates to landlords. As reported by The San Francisco Standard, both the San Francisco City Attorney's Office and the San Francisco Anti-Displacement Coalition say they are unaware of any civil action ever filed against a landlord under the ordinance. The law carries civil penalties of up to $1,000 per offense.
Former Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin, who authored the ordinance in 2024, said the law still served a purpose even without a single lawsuit to show for it. Peskin said the ordinance was effective at naming and shaming a practice that hurt tenants, and argued it helped stabilize rents before a trillion dollars in AI capital was invested in San Francisco. He also said the law would allow the market to work and bring down rents in the city. At the time the ordinance passed, Peskin's office estimated that companies using rent-setting software controlled as much as 70% of San Francisco's rental housing stock.
Rents Keep Climbing Despite the Ban
Whatever the law's symbolic value, the numbers tell a starker story. San Francisco apartment asking rents rose 14% between March and July of 2026 alone, according to the Standard's report, part of a broader surge that has pushed the city's median asking rent for a two-bedroom apartment to record heights. Supervisor Connie Chan, who co-authored the rent-setting software legislation, said she was not convinced all San Francisco landlords had stopped using rent-setting algorithms, and she encouraged affected renters to contact the city attorney or tenants' rights groups.
Chan has continued pushing for more oversight beyond the 2024 law. She supported a state bill that would prohibit retailers from setting prices based on data about individual shoppers, and she has argued that additional AI regulations are needed to protect tenants and consumers more broadly.
An AI Hiring Boom Reshapes the Market
Waymo robotaxis have become a fixture on San Francisco streets during the same period that Anthropic and OpenAI began leasing large amounts of office space in the city, starting in 2024, as part of a wave of high-paying AI jobs that pulled workers into an already tight rental market. The San Francisco Controller's Office has declared that the city is entering an accelerating period of economic growth, primarily driven by the AI investment boom, per its own report, as cited by The San Francisco Standard.
UC Davis Graduate School of Management professor Hemant Bhargava said demand can change rapidly while supply cannot, and he characterized the current rental-price spike as more likely a demand shock than collusion. Bhargava also said that banning algorithms or AI software on pricing has not fixed the problem. Patrick Mendoza echoed that view, saying algorithmic pricing tools are not fundamentally responsible for high rents and that rents have continued to climb in San Francisco despite software bans and insufficient housing construction.
San Francisco's tight rental market resulted from years of underbuilding and restrictive zoning, a structural bottleneck that has left the city vulnerable to exactly this kind of demand shock. RealPage itself has argued that the ordinance would do nothing to make housing more affordable; the company has said its software served 10% of San Francisco rental units as of 2024. Landlords owning hundreds of units can also leave some units vacant while keeping rents high, giving large-portfolio owners flexibility that individual tenants can't easily counter.
Federal Action and a Spreading Movement
While San Francisco's local enforcement has stalled, federal regulators have moved more aggressively. The U.S. Department of Justice sued RealPage over alleged coordination of landlord pricing and market monopolization, and a settlement agreement reached in 2025 placed limits on the company's collection and use of nonpublic data. A 2022 ProPublica investigation was the catalyst that first put rent-setting software on the national radar, and San Francisco's ordinance helped spur other cities and states to adopt their own restrictions on rent-fixing software in the years since — a trend Hoodline covered when Portland passed a similar ban and when a Houston class-action suit targeted RealPage directly.
The article, written by Maggie Angst for the Standard's politics section, frames the central question facing San Francisco tenants: whether a law designed to stop corporate price coordination can do anything against a market being reshaped by a historic influx of AI wealth. For now, the ordinance has generated debate, name recognition, and zero lawsuits — while the rent keeps going up regardless.
