Homes.com and CoStar Group have become embroiled in another lawsuit, this time as the defendants, over an alleged breach of contract.
REcore Solutions LLC—the vendor who provides licensing services for California Regional Multiple Listing Service (CRMLS) and other MLSs—announced it has filed a lawsuit in San Bernardino County against Homes.com and its parent company CoStar for a breach of contract relating to failed payment, and is seeking monetary damages.
In a release, REcore alleges that for “two years following the CoStar acquisition of Homes.com, the company representatives verbally committed to paying for access to the MLS listing data, acknowledging the significant value provided by listing brokers and MLSs.” Later, however, REcore said Homes.com “applied for an IDX data feed, claiming to qualify as a participant broker.”
According to REcore, its fee structure “requires entities that use MLS data to generate revenue, without representing buyers or sellers, to pay for those usage rights,” and these profits are then distributed back to the original listing brokers. The system “ensures brokers contributing valuable information and data to the MLS are fairly compensated for any monetization of those contributions.”
In the release, REcore reported that Homes.com and CoStar signed the REcore license agreement, which became effective January 2024 and “included a fee structure requiring licensees who monetized the MLS data, rather than using it to obtain buyer and seller clients, to pay for those usage rights.” The agreement stated that Homes.com would pay approximately $2 per MLS listing record displayed on its portal, and according to the filing included a “capped Monetization Fee of $500,000 per year if the listings were used for commercial advertising purposes.”
However, REcore alleges that CoStar has failed to pay the full amount agreed to. As the filing stated, “defendants triggered the Monetization Fee through their ‘Boost’ advertising program and substantial listing traffic on Homes.com—but failed to pay.”
“After more than a year of REcore’s efforts to negotiate a resolution, the company was left with no choice but to protect MLS data and the listing brokers who supplied it by filing a lawsuit against Homes.com and CoStar,” the release continued.
CoStar did not immediately respond to RISMedia’s request for comment.
The lawsuit also names Delaware-based corporation TEN-X, Inc., which is a licensed California real estate broker owned by CoStar. Despite being licensed, REcore alleges in the filing that Ten-X “has not represented any buyer or seller in any real estate transaction utilizing the CRMLS database, and as a result Ten-X has not contributed in any way to the network effect for the benefit of CRMLS.”
“CoStar, through their ownership of a broker Ten-X (a firm that does not actually provide any brokerage services to any buyer or seller using the CRMLS database), seeks to receive, and then monetize for their own profit the full access to all the CRMLS listing records without providing any corresponding network effect benefits to CRMLS,” the filing continued. “Defendants want to free ride on all the work, efforts, expenses, costs and skills of CRMLS and its listing brokers without providing any corresponding benefit back to these same brokers.”
As part of the legal actions being taken, REcore also stated it will terminate the Homes.com and HomesPro data feeds as of Nov. 1, 2025. The company also noted that no other participants are joining in the lawsuit, and it is unaware if Homes.com failed to pay for data from other MLS participants.
In addition, REcore reported in the release that the first round of payments to CRMLS brokers, which were scheduled to begin in 2025, will now be delayed until 2026 due to the contract breach.
“Both CRMLS and REcore are deeply disappointed by the reversal in position from Homes.com and CoStar,” REcore stated in a release. “Despite CoStar spending millions on parties at REALTOR® events and over a billion dollars on the marketing of their services, they have refused to honor their financial commitment to REcore in which funds were intended to be shared with the listing brokers who contribute the very data powering Homes.com.”
