Homebuyers in Illinois have filed another commission lawsuit. The latest lawsuit was filed on September 26 in the US District Court in Chicago by plaintiffs Dawid Zawislak and Michael D’Acquisto against Stock brokers, HomeSmart International And Understanding Real Estate.
While the National Association of Real Estate Agents (NAR) was not named as a defendant in the lawsuit, but was listed as a co-conspirator, along with several broker-owned MLSs.
Zawislak bought a house in Chicago in 2021 and D’Acquisto bought a house in Bartlett, Illinois in 2022. Like the other commission lawsuits filed by both buyers and sellers, this lawsuit accuses real estate industry players of engaging in “anticompetitive practices that have harmed consumers and homebuyers through, among other things, the commissions paid to real estate agents as part increase and artificially maintain residential real estate transactions.”
At the center of the lawsuit is NAR’s Participation Rule, which required brokers to make a blanket offer of compensation to buyer’s agents to list a property on a Realtor-affiliated MLS.
This rule is no longer in effect due to the terms of NAR’s home seller commission settlement, which went into effect in August.
In addition to the claims of artificially inflated broker commissions, the lawsuit also alleges that NAR and its affiliated MLSs allowed agents to filter properties by commission amount, and that “NAR’s ethics rules allowed buyer agents to sell these filtered properties to buyers with higher commissions to show. .”
The plaintiffs also allege that NAR’s policy “restricts the ability of sellers and seller agents to change the commissions offered to buyer agents after an offer to purchase has been made,” and that the policy has allowed and encouraged buyer agents to telling home buyers that their services were free.
The lawsuit seeks class-action status for a nationwide class defined as all individuals who purchased a home on an agent-affiliated MLS between 2002 and the present. It also proposes an Illinois subclass for all individuals who purchased a home listed on a NAR-affiliated MLS in Illinois between 2022 and present.
The plaintiffs are seeking a jury trial, as well as damages and a permanent injunction to prevent the defendants from “enforcing or reinstating in the future the same or similar anticompetitive rules, policies or practices as those challenged in this action.”
