The Real Brokerage is bowing out of the legal battle over broker commissions.
The firm reached an agreement to settle its case in a pending class action lawsuit known as Umpa for $9.25 million.
The company said it agreed to change some of its operations related to clients’ ability to negotiate commissions, including “clarifications about the negotiability of commissions, prohibitions on claims that buyer agent services are free, and the inclusion of listing broker compensation offers in communications with clients.”
Real, which said the deal does “not constitute an admission of liability,” said it would develop training resources around its new policies.
The settlement would free Real, its subsidiaries and roughly 16,000 agents from the claims in the case, filed in late 2023 by a homeseller echoing claims residential players colluded to keep commissions high. Homesellers secured a win in the Sitzer/Burnett case, an antitrust lawsuit filed in Missouri that ended with a landmark verdict against the National Association of Realtors, Keller Williams and HomeServices of America.
NAR last month reached an agreement to pay $418 million to settle a slew of antitrust lawsuits, including Umpa and Sitzer/Burnett. Critically, that agreement — which is pending court approval — only covers brokerages that handled under $2 billion in deal volume in 2022; Real transacted $12.1 billion.
Redfin, @properties, Brown Harris Stevens and the Agency were among other brokerages excluded from the deal.
Under NAR’s settlement terms, large brokerages belonging to NAR could opt in by paying the average of their total volume from 2020 to 2023 and multiplying it by 0.0025, a prohibitively expensive sum for most large brokerages.
Compass settled separately for $57.5 million; if it had agreed to the terms of the NAR agreement, it would have had to pay approximately $509 million.
Real’s proposed settlement still needs court approval. Once preliminary court approval comes, the firm will have 30 days to deposit the agreed amount into a qualified settlement fund.
Umpa is the only commission lawsuit that named Real as a defendant, according to HousingWire.
“We chose to settle this lawsuit to direct our energy to our agent community,” Poleg said in a statement.
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