A little over a month after the Batton 2 commission lawsuit defendants filed motions to dismiss the suit brought by homebuyers in Illinois, the plaintiffs have shot back.
In responses filed on Monday, the plaintiffs argue that the court should not grant the defendants’ motions. The motions filed by Compass, eXp World Holdings, Redfin, Weichert Realtors and United Real Estate claim that the homebuyer plaintiffs are simply trying “to parrot the allegations they made in an amended complaint,” which was filed in the Batton 1 suit that consists of the same plaintiffs but a different group of brokerage defendants.
According to the plaintiffs’ response, however, this argument is not good enough.
“Defendants’ motion advances arguments that are either improper to resolve at the motion to dismiss stage, conflict with Batton I, or rely on extreme minority positions that conflict with controlling Seventh Circuit or Supreme Court precedent,” the filing states.
“Plaintiffs here, all homebuyers, suffered direct injuries because the anticompetitive conduct at issue forced them to pay artificially inflated commissions and artificially inflated prices for their homes, as well as prevented them from discovering or negotiating broker commissions (even though the commission rates were known to sellers).
“These rules — especially the rule concerning concealment of commissions — uniquely harm buyers, who are at an information disadvantage to home sellers and who are the ones who actually select whether a buyer-broker is involved or not in the transaction, who that buyer-broker is, and the reasons they were chosen.”
Additionally, the plaintiffs claim they have “adequately alleged the existence of an anticompetitive agreement here.”
“Plaintiffs allege that Defendants and their co-conspirators, including the National Association of Realtors (NAR) and other brokerages, entered into horizontal agreements — codified in NAR’s handbook and Defendants’ own rules and procedures — to abide by NAR rules,” the filing states.
The plaintiffs also took the opportunity to respond to Weichert Realtors’ and United Real Estate’s motions to dismiss due to lack of jurisdiction, which claimed that the venue for the suit was improper as the firms are not based in Illinois, an argument that the plaintiffs’ attorneys were not having.
“The Defendants in this case set their sights on Illinois’s valuable real estate market, deliberately recouping ill-gotten profits from Illinois homebuyers who paid them artificially high broker fees and causing those buyers to pay inflated home prices. Defendants reaped these gains by reaching into Illinois to establish franchise agreements or other contractual relationships with Illinois residents who, in turn, brokered Illinois home sales using Defendants’ brand names and other associated benefits,” the response stated.
“Defendants’ agreements required their franchisees or agents to implement the unlawful restraints of trade that are at the heart of this lawsuit. Those unlawful restraints were agreed upon and set out by the National Association of Realtors, another Illinois resident, of which Defendants, subsidiaries, franchisees, and/or individual agents were members. For years thereafter, Defendants benefited from the inflated revenues generated in Illinois by those unlawful restraints.”
The plaintiffs argue that this conduct “satisfies the requirements for specific jurisdiction over defendants via their contractual relationships in Illinois.”
In addition to the five remaining brokerage defendants, Howard Hanna and Douglas Elliman were named as defendants when the Batton 2 suit was filed, but each have since been dismissed. HomeServices of America, which was a defendant in the Batton 1 suit, was also dismissed from that case earlier this year.
The discovery process for each of the Batton suits is not scheduled to be completed until May 2026.
