Shai Stern (Bar-Ilan U Law) has posted “Algorithmic Property” (North Carolina Law Review (forthcoming 2026)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
In August 2024, the Department of Justice sued RealPage, alleging its rentsetting algorithm enabled landlords to coordinate prices without ever communicating. But this case reveals something deeper than an antitrust violation: algorithms have quietly colonized American real property. From screening tenants to underwriting mortgages, computational systems now interpose themselves between owners and the practical exercise of ownership. A gap has opened between formal title and effective power. The algorithm has become a silent co-owner. While legal scholars debated digital tokens and the sharing economy, they missed this capture of the “World of Atoms” by the “World of Bits.” This Article provides the first comprehensive account of “Algorithmic Property”-a regime in which traditional rights persist in form while being mediated, conditioned, and constrained by computational systems. The framework rests on three concepts: the ownership gap between title and control; algorithmic capture of property’s core incidents; and Algorithmic Servitude, where computational burdens run with the land through infrastructure rather than recording. The Article documents this transformation across five domains: tenant screening, rent-setting, property valuation, mortgage underwriting, and access control. It shows why existing law fails: civil rights doctrine cannot reach discrimination it cannot see; antitrust cannot prohibit coordination without agreement; property doctrine lacks categories for burdens that bind without recording. The Article concludes with a structural reform agenda aimed at closing the ownership gap-treating discriminatory algorithms as void servitudes, establishing a “right to a human decision” for high-stakes exclusions, and imposing fiduciary duties on algorithmic intermediaries. If platforms demand the discretion of property managers, they must bear the duties of loyalty. The landlord of the twenty-first century may be a platform; property law must learn to watch back.