The headlines about the real estate industry are everywhere. Compass acquired Anywhere Real Estate to create the largest real estate company by agent count. Zillow and Compass are locked in a Goliath-versus-Goliath legal battle over private listings. A wave of RESPA-related lawsuits alleges undisclosed referral kickbacks between real estate agents and mortgage companies. And then…

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Plaintiffs in the largest buyer commission case (known as Batton) filed a motion to intervene Monday in a smaller commission case, Tuccori v. At World Properties, seeking to block preliminary approval of a proposed opt-in settlement by Anywhere Real Estate (a defendant in Batton) that they say would extinguish five years of homebuyer antitrust litigation…

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Ryan Schneider, the CEO who guided Anywhere Real Estate through significant industry challenges and strategic repositioning, has departed the company per an agreement set as part of its acquisition by Compass in January. The move was not publicly announced by Anywhere, but Schneider updated his LinkedIn profile to reflect his January exit.  Anywhere’s chief technology…

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Keller Williams Realty, LLC has agreed to pay $20 million to settle a class-action lawsuit brought by homebuyers alleging a decades-long conspiracy to fix real estate broker commissions and inflate home prices, according to court documents filed Feb. 2 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. The settlement provides monetary compensation…

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Editor’s note: The COURT REPORT is RISMedia’s weekly look at current and upcoming lawsuits, investigations and other legal developments around real estate. Compass closes Anywhere acquisition In a regulatory filing on Jan. 9, Compass announced that its merger with Anywhere Real Estate was officially closed. The deal has faced much scrutiny from the real estate…

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Stockholders of Compass and Anywhere Real Estate have overwhelmingly approved the proposed merger between the two real estate giants, clearing the way for the $1.6 billion deal to close as early as Friday, Jan. 9. At special stockholder meetings held Wednesday, Jan. 7, approximately 99% of votes cast at Compass’s meeting approved the proposal to…

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Editor’s Note: The COURT REPORT is RISMedia’s weekly look at current and upcoming lawsuits, investigations and other legal developments around real estate. Federal judge rules Trump administration must find funding for CFPB The Trump administration’s latest attempt to block funding and operation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) hit a roadblock on Dec. 30.…

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Anywhere Real Estate is facing legal challenges as its $1.6 billion merger with Compass moves toward a critical stockholder vote, with three lawsuits alleging insufficient financial disclosures in merger documents. According to an SEC filing on Dec. 29, three complaints have been filed by “purported stockholders of Anywhere” in New York and New Jersey courts…

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The proposed deal for Compass to acquire Anywhere was almost certain to draw regulatory scrutiny from the beginning, due to the size and nature of the deal—nearly doubling the size of the company and consolidating somewhere around 500,000 annual transactions and 100,000 agents under one roof. What that scrutiny might look like became more clear…

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A judge has ruled in defendants’ favor over the class certification dispute in the largest homebuying commission case: Batton vs. The National Association of Realtors® (NAR).  Judge LaShonda A. Hunt granted a motion by defendants in the case, who include big brokerages along with NAR, ruling that the plaintiffs’ motions for Class Certification “stricken without…

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