A judge will decide by the end of the month whether to enforce Wendy Maitland’s noncompete with Town Residential, which would effectively block her from continuing much of her work at Brown Harris Stevens.
The judge overseeing her case has called for a Aug. 29 hearing, during which arguments can be made to determine if the firm’s former president of sales should be banned from doing any real estate-related business for any customer or client with whom she did business during her tenure at Town, according to legal documents. It would also prevent her from soliciting any employee, customer or client of Town at BHS, where she recently signed on as a resale and new development broker.
The injunction would remain effective at least until Maitland’s case against the brokerage is heard at trial later in the year.
Representatives for both BHS [TRDataCustom] and Town were not immediately available for comment.
Maitland will have to make arguments as to why a temporary restraining order should not be issued against her.
Maitland had previously argued that the agreement should be scrapped, claiming that the “financial chicanery” that allegedly went on at the company under former co-owner Joseph Sitt of Thor Equities amounted to breach of contract. She also claimed that enforcing the agreement would deprive her of her only source of income.
Her most recent contract, dated 2014, stated that, for two years after the end of her employment with Town, Maitland could not participate in any activities involving real estate development, brokerage, leasing or sales in Manhattan and Brooklyn.
“Real estate brokerage in the upper end of the real estate market is virtually all that I know,” she said in a previous legal filing. “It is the only way for me — a single mother of two children and the chief support of my widowed elderly mother — to earn the income necessary to provide adequately for my family and myself.”
Attorneys for Town contended in legal papers that Maitland has plenty of money to support her family. A screenshot of her personal bank account allegedly captured in March — and included in court documents — shows a savings account balance of $1.54 million.