By SAJE Staff
July 15, 2026
Most US businesses are regulated by federal antitrust laws, which protect consumers by preventing companies from conspiring with each other to fix prices or keep new competitors from entering the market. Antitrust laws also apply when companies want to merge: federal regulators review and approve merger deals to ensure they will not undermine fair market competition.
But because of a loophole in US antitrust law, there is no mandatory review for mergers between real estate investment firms. And that’s a real problem for renters.
In May, AvalonBay Communities and Equity Residential, two real estate investment trusts (REITs) that own more than 180,000 apartments nationwide, announced plans to merge. As the American Prospect reported in June, these two REITs have already been accused of price fixing and consumer fraud, with Equity Residential agreeing earlier this year to settle a class action antitrust lawsuit brought by renters for $56 million. (The Debt Collective and Los Angeles Tenants Union have been organizing with tenants in Equity Residential buildings to hold the company accountable.)
According to Renee Tapp, an assistant professor of planning at the University of North Carolina, a merger between AvalonBay Communities and Equity Residential would create rental housing monopolies in at least seven communities, including Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo.
So why are corporate landlord mergers exempt from antitrust review? For a long time, regulators have assumed landlords are “price-takers” in a competitive housing market. In other words, rents are determined by overall supply and demand, and landlords passively accept the prevailing market price. But as more housing is snapped up by large corporate investors, this idea no longer holds water. In fact, research has found that corporate real estate investors are able to leverage the large number of units they control to drive rents higher. And because their investments tend to be highly clustered in specific neighborhoods, these companies can have a significant effect on local rents, prices, and even homeownership levels. One study estimated that for every standard deviation increase in institutional investment, rents rise by 1.68% in the immediate term, and in the long-term adjacent homeowner amenities decline.
The corporate consolidation of real estate means old ideas about rental market competitiveness don’t really apply anymore. A merger between Equity Residential and Avalon Bay would create the largest multifamily landlord in the US, and these companies share market segments, consumer bases, and investment geographies down to the neighborhood level in the cities in which they own rental units, and often control a locally significant share of rental housing. These companies deserve the same standard of scrutiny as mergers between any other corporations.
