HousingWireHousingWire
The on-again-off-again legal battle between Top Agent Network (TAN) and the National Association of Realtors (NAR) is now off. On Monday, the parties notified Judge Vince Chhabria of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, that they had agreed to dismiss the suit without prejudice.
According to the filing, the parties are going to bear their own attorneys’ fees, costs and expenses.
TAN filed the lawsuit in May of 2020, claiming that the purpose of the suit was to “stop NAR and its affiliates from conspiring to shut down competition, disrupt the relationship between real estate agents and their clients, and take away a family’s freedom to choose how to market their home for sale.”
The suit argued that consumers should have a choice in whether or not they market their home on their local MLS. This choice is allegedly removed due to NAR’s Clear Cooperation Policy, which requires agents to list the property on the MLS within 24 hours of marketing it.
“While most home sellers prefer to market through the MLS — which generally puts a listing before the most eyeballs the fastest — at any given time a significant percentage of consumers prefer not to do so,” the fourth amended complaint, filed in October 2024, stated.
“Many consumers wish to preserve their privacy and do not want to host viewings or have their property widely available for viewing on a listing website. Other consumers engage in limited off-MLS marketing to ‘test the waters’ to determine the appropriate price for their home listing on the local MLS — MLSs retain listing data and overpricing a home on the MLS and failing to achieve a quick sale can lead to a lasting drop in the property’s value.”
The suit was dismissed with prejudice in 2021 after a lower court ruled that TAN failed to state a claim with prejudice in its third amended complaint and the plaintiff appealed the ruling to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. In August 2023, the appeals court chose to vacate the lower court’s ruling by ruling that the allegations made in TAN’s suit were nearly identical to those made in a suit filed by The PLS.com, which had been allowed to proceed.
The suit was reopened in December 2023 by Judge Chhabria and TAN filed its motion for reconsideration in May 2024, which Chhabria granted in late July by noting that the plaintiff had “adequately alleged antitrust injury.”
San Francisco Association of Realtors, which was an original defendant in the suit, was voluntarily dismissed in 2024.
While the dismissal of the suit marks the end of this chapter in the legal battle between TAN and NAR, since the suit was dismissed without prejudice, TAN could refile the suit if they so choose.
