RentPath announced today that it has terminated the agreement to be acquired by CoStar Group following the FTC's decision to sue to block the transaction.  The FTC filed suit because it believes that RentPath presents a strong competitive alternative to CoStar and the merger would have eliminated that competition to the detriment of customers.  The Company believes termination of the agreement is in the best interests of its customers, employees and all of its stakeholders.  The Company's Chapter 11 plan remains backed by its lenders including well-known alternative asset management firms with billions of dollars under management and strong track records of successfully investing in businesses in similar circumstances. The lenders are committed to the Company's long-term vision and believe that management's renewed focus on delivering significant value to customers through RentPath's core apartment search platform and other high growth products will also benefit investors and other stakeholders.

"RentPath provides tremendous value to our customers across the multifamily industry.  In fact, our value proposition has never been better than it is today.  Our traffic and leads have never been higher, and they continue to grow rapidly -- traffic growth in the second half of 2020 has exceeded 40% year over year for the RentPath network.  We have a range of high growth products that complement our core apartment search websites, and we are excited to emerge from restructuring and continue to build on this foundation," said Dhiren Fonseca, RentPath's CEO.

"RentPath has made significant progress and is on an upward trajectory despite an undoubtedly challenging 2020.  The market for real estate technology businesses continues to be very strong as recent M&A transactions have highlighted. RentPath has developed and positioned its products to occupy a fundamentally critical point in the residential rental value chain.  RentPath has unique assets and extensive relationships, which recent activity has shown will realize full value in the market," said Stephen Spencer, Managing Director at Houlihan Lokey and advisor to RentPath's lenders.

"On behalf of all of our colleagues at RentPath, I'd like to thank our customers and partners for their continued loyalty and support," said Fonseca. "We look forward to continuing to extend and expand our relationships with our customers, and provide an efficient platform for property owners and operators to achieve and maintain maximum occupancy rates in 2021 and beyond." 

RentPath / ApartmentGuide.com has announced they will soon include apartment community names within their search engine marketing strategy.  Previously, the ILS had refrained on advertising on property names of their clients, but this practice will change on February 25th.  Below is the notice given for this change:

Our primary job is to help you acquire leads. We want to do this in a way that both complements your business strategy and is completely transparent to you. With that in mind, we are updating how we buy search advertising to drive traffic to your listings.

Every month, we spend millions of dollars in search advertising to match apartment seekers with communities that best fit their interests. These ads serve as a gateway into our websites and help us generate leads for our customers.

Traditionally, we have bought ads matched to generic keywords commonly used by renters searching for apartments. As a practice, we have not bid to place search ads for our clients’ specific property names. We avoided this practice due to the objection of some clients.

However, we have tens of thousands of clients, each with different needs, and many have recently asked that we buy their brand terms on their behalf.

As a result, effective February 25, we’ll update our algorithms to include the potential to buy these brand terms. Anyone who clicks on these ads will be directed to the corresponding property detail page on our sites. From there, they can submit leads directly to the community.

We’re excited to deliver these leads to you. Should you have any questions, please contact your RentPath sales representative, your concierge representative or email us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..