The employee at the center of the Move v. CoStar lawsuit granted his personal email access to roughly 40 documents prior to his departure for Move subsidiary Realtor.com, according to the latest filing in the legal battle between the two listing platform giants.
On Tuesday, Move filed an amended motion for preliminary injunction against CoStar and James Kaminsky, the former Realtor.com employee who now works at CoStar’s Homes.com. Move filed the initial version of its motion for preliminary injunction in mid-July.
According to a sworn statement by Howard Pence, the vice president global cyber defense at News Corp, the parent company of Move, the digital logs of Realtor.com’s documents showed that Kaminsky granted his personal email access to 40 documents on Jan. 11 and Jan. 12, his final two days at the company after being laid off on Jan. 10, 2024.
“I am not aware of any legitimate business purpose for a former employee such as Mr. Kaminsky to access Move’s electronic files on the Google Docs account after his employment ended,” Pence said in his sworn statement. “Mr. Kaminsky was not authorized to access the Google Docs account after his employment ended.”
Kaminsky worked on Realtor.com’s News & Insights team until he was laid off in January of 2024. In March of 2024 he was hired by CoStar.
Move is seeking to prevent the documents from being viewed publicly.
The documents and files include: “N&I Audience and Revenue for PMDLT,” “Comms + Econ + N&I Project Call,” “N&I_News Corp Partnerships and Amplifications for Growth,” “Editorial Budget,” and the employment summaries of several Move employees. These summaries include information such as job titles, descriptions, and compensation.
According to the filing, one of the four documents noted in the preliminary injunction is considered “a detailed business plan” for the teams that drive traffic to Realtor.com.
In her sworn statement, Alexandra Holbert, the senior communications director at Move, said that some of the documents “contain a great deal of confidential and proprietary information that could be used to construct and operate a competing News & Insights-type platform.”
In a sworn statement included in the filing Amy Maas, Move’s vice president of editorial and content said that anyone with access to these documents would know what will be published on Realtor.com and when, as well as “how Realtor.com’s stories are performing, and why, who Move’s Communications team is in contact with and what information media outlets are requesting from Move.”
Maas said her team found that Kaminsky had been accessing documents, when a Move employee saw a [email protected] access a document on June 3, 2024.
“I was stunned to learn that a former Move employee was accessing a highly confidential electronic document of Move (and effectively spying on updates to that confidential document in real time), especially with respect to this document because it contains so much valuable, non-public information about our business,” Maas said.
The motion and the declarations do not accuse Kaminsky of sharing any of these documents with other CoStar employees or executives and they do not detail how he may have done that.
In an email, CoStar claimed that Move is hoping to use the amended motion to take attention away from a separate lawsuit filed this week, in which Move subsidiaries Realtor.com, ListHub and UpNest are accused of selling fraudulent leads to real estate professionals. CoStar is not involved in this lawsuit.
“Move’s sense of desperation is palpable. Its latest filing just repeats the same attorney arguments, without any evidence that CoStar has, or has used, Move documents. We have stated from the beginning that Move’s case against CoStar was a PR stunt, and this is just more proof,” Gene Boxer, the general counsel at CoStar Group, wrote in an email. “Move’s continued bullying of a long-serving employee in the process is even worse. We will fight and win this dispute. In the meantime, Move should focus on the lawsuit against Realtor.com for allegedly selling unvetted and fraudulent buyer and seller leads.”
Originally filed in early July, this suit is the latest development in what has become a long-running feud between Homes.com and Realtor.com. The two have spent the past several months debating who holds the title of second-largest listing portal behind Zillow, with Realtor.com alleging that Homes.com’s claims that it is the No. 2 portal in terms of traffic and impressions are false.
Since the suit was filed, CoStar has placed Kaminsky on administrative leave.
