Look, I want to walk you through something that just came across my desk that's pretty significant for how our industry operates. According to HousingWire, there's a lawsuit filed in Colorado involving some homeowners, a real estate agent, and REX Real Estate, alleging that back in 2019 an agent threatened to organize a boycott of their property because they listed it with REX instead of through traditional MLS channels. The core issue here is that REX didn't offer buyer broker compensation, and apparently this agent decided to make that a problem for the sellers.
What makes this interesting is the timing and the details. The homeowners claim they didn't even know about this alleged boycott until October of 2023, when a Wall Street Journal reporter contacted them with a recording of the call where the agent supposedly said she wouldn't show the property and would tell other agents to avoid working with REX. The plaintiffs are now seeking compensatory damages, treble damages, and a return of their commission paid to REX, arguing this whole situation restricted competition and hurt their ability to sell.
Now here's the broader context that matters. REX itself has been through the antitrust wringer already, having tried unsuccessfully to take its own antitrust case against NAR and Zillow all the way to the Supreme Court before that company eventually shut down. So in a way, the company that was fighting these battles is now the defendant in a similar kind of claim. The complaint suggests the agent's threatened boycott was coordinated in a way that violated antitrust laws and breached contracts with the homeowners.
It's worth noting that a lot has changed since 2019. The NAR settlement agreement that came down recently actually prohibits agents from boycotting listings based on compensation offers and prevents them from filtering MLS properties based on what a seller is offering to buyer agents. So the practices being alleged in this lawsuit would now be explicitly against the rules.
What I'm seeing locally here in the Bay Area is that these kinds of cases remind us how important transparency and fair dealing are in our business. When agents work outside the system or when there's even a hint of coordination to punish sellers for their choices, it creates real problems not just for those homeowners but for the whole market. These antitrust questions that people thought were settled are apparently still very much alive, and that tells me we all need to be more careful about how we conduct business and communicate with each other.
