Move Co., Ltd.The parent company of Real Estate Agent.comis filing a lawsuit Coster GroupRival’s parent company Homes.com, Regarding the alleged theft of portal data and documents.
In a complaint filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in California, Move alleges that former employee James Kaminski, who now works for CoStar, stole trade secrets to facilitate the rapid growth of Homes.com.
“There is nothing wrong with legitimate competition, even violent competition,” the lawsuit states, “but competitors should never be permitted to cheat or steal to gain an advantage.”
Move alleges that Kaminski accessed Realtor.com documents without detection until June of this year, even though he left the company in January and joined Coster in March. The lawsuit says Kaminski accessed Realtor.com information “at least 37 times after being employed by Coster,” violating federal and state computer fraud laws.
The documents that Move alleges Kaminski accessed include information about planned content for Realtor.com, ideas for future articles, metrics showing user traffic, contact lists, a list of Realtor.com employees and their compensation, and other non-public business information.
Kaminski spent nine years at Realtor.com, where he led the news and insights group, before leaving the company in January and joining CoStar two months later, where he now works as an editor, he said. LinkedIn Move alleges in his lawsuit that in his new role, Kaminski leads a team of writers who are developing a product similar to Realtor.com, which Move says is an integral part of Realtor.com’s marketing strategy.
“Upon leaving Move, Mr. Kaminski stole confidential business information and sent it to his personal email account on his last day of access to Move’s computer systems, thereby providing himself (and Coster) with continuous, covert and undetected access to spy on Move’s confidential documents stored in protected computer systems,” the lawsuit states. “Subsequently, in an attempt to cover his tracks, Mr. Kaminski deleted nearly 1,000 files from Move’s computers and erased all browsing history before returning the devices to Move.
“The apparent purpose is to unlawfully facilitate the creation of CoStar’s ‘monetization engine’ by increasing website visitor numbers and thereby increasing CoStar’s revenues and profits,” the complaint continues.
This is the latest development in a long-running battle between Homes.com and Realtor.com, which have been arguing for the past few months over who holds the title of the second-largest real estate listing portal. JiroRealtor.com argues that Homes.com’s claim that it is the second-largest portal in terms of traffic and impressions is false.
Many of these allegations were repeated in the complaint.
“According to all independent third-party sources that Move could identify, ComScore, Nielsen, Similar websitesor SEM Rush “For many years, Realtor.com has been the second most visited residential real estate listing site in the United States behind Zillow and ahead of Redfin,” Move’s complaint states. “In every independent, third-party evaluation, Homes.com ranks last among the top four.”
The company is seeking damages and a jury trial.
“This lawsuit is Realtor.com’s latest desperate attempt to distract from the fact that Homes.com has supplanted Realtor.com as the second-largest portal, according to the parties’ site-centric data collection tools,” CoStar general counsel Gene Boxer said in an email. “The employee in question is a mid-level manager who writes and edits articles about condos. It is fair to say he has no involvement whatsoever in Homes.com’s strategy, nor is CoStar itself pretending to have engaged in wrongdoing, even in Move’s creative writing efforts. This is a PR stunt that is already backfiring. Realtor.com is losing the battle against Homes.com, and attempts to change articles will not change the reality. We look forward to winning in court.”