Editor’s note: The COURT REPORT is RISMedia’s weekly look at current and upcoming lawsuits, investigations and other legal developments around real estate.
Rhode Island agent Kyle Seyboth under fire, again
The Delva family—a Haitian immigrant family at the center of the Rhode Island Attorney General’s lawsuit against top agent Kyle Seyboth—has now filed their own federal civil complaint in the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island.
Filed Feb. 9, the suit names Seyboth; his company, Preferred Property Solutions (PPS); Red Balloon Capital; the Seyboth Real Estate Team and associates Chris Messier and Lowell Williams as defendants.
The complaint alleges that the defendants orchestrated a foreclosure rescue scam, in which the family was misled into signing what they believed were refinancing documents, but were actually a deed conveying title of their approximately $400,000 property to PPS for $100,000.
The new federal lawsuit runs parallel to the Rhode Island Attorney General’s ongoing case, which is still in the discovery stage.
In a separate incident, Seyboth was accused of threatening to call U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) on a buyer after a deal turned sour. First reported by GoLocalProv, Seyboth refused to confirm or deny the incident but said that the way the incident was portrayed on GoLocal was “not the way in which things went down.”
In previous reporting, Seyboth has denied wrongdoing, claiming he purchased the property as an off-market investment and allowed the family to remain in the home rent-free.
Zillow and Redfin ordered to produce documents in case against the FTC
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and five states last year filed an antitrust lawsuit against Zillow and Redfin over their $100 million rental listing syndication deal, and that litigation continues to move through the courts.
U.S. Magistrate Judge William Porter recently ordered both firms to produce additional materials, including communications between top executives.
The FTC filed the suit on Sept. 30, 2025 over an alleged anticompetitive agreement. Redfin and Zillow’s deal, according to the FTC, “(transformed) Redfin from an independent and vibrant competitor that markets and sells its own ILS (internet listing service) multifamily advertising into one of several websites that provide nothing more than a copy of Zillow’s ILS listings.”
A hearing on Zillow and Redfin’s pending motion to dismiss is scheduled for Feb. 25.
Standoff in HomeServices of America case
In one of the spin-off buyer commission cases, defendant HomeServices of America and plaintiffs seeking damages for alleged commission-fixing and conspiracy are at a stand-off over the sharing of depositions from a related case.
According to a filing in federal court in Southern District of Florida on Feb. 9, HomeServices and lawyers representing recent homebuyers have failed to reach an agreement on depositions of five plaintiffs in the largest and original buyer case, known as Batton (which is being litigated by the same lawyers who are suing HomeServices), as well as restrictions on further depositions by the company’s lawyers.
A conference to resolve the dispute is scheduled for later this month.
The back-and-forth underscores how the litigation continues to pull resources from big real estate companies. The original Batton case has splintered into at least four separate lawsuits, all on different tracks and timelines with almost a dozen defendants, including the National Association of Realtors®. Buyer lawsuits are not fully covered by settlements companies struck with sellers, although the allegations are largely the same.
Keller Williams became the first large brokerage to settle the buyer cases, paying $20 million to end the litigation earlier this month.
Class-action suit against Liberty Financial dropped
The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) class-action lawsuit filed against MC James Mortgage Corp, doing business as Liberty Financial, has come to a swift close.
On Feb. 10—less than a month after the suit was filed—plaintiff David Torres voluntarily dismissed the case without prejudice in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.
