The National Association of Realtors won a second court victory in less than two years against Homie Technology after the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed dismissal of the discount brokerage’s antitrust lawsuit on Aug. 11, ruling that Homie’s claims were both untimely and legally insufficient.
The appeals court upheld a lower court’s August 2024 dismissal, finding that Homie failed to plausibly allege the antitrust injury needed to support its case and that its claims fell outside the four-year statute of limitations for federal antitrust suits, according to NAR’s own account of the ruling. “We are pleased that the Court has affirmed the dismissal of the case, bringing this matter to a close,” NAR said in a statement.
Homie Technology, a Utah-based discount brokerage, sued NAR, the Wasatch Front Regional MLS and several major national brokerages operating in Utah β including Anywhere Real Estate, RE/MAX, Keller Williams and HomeServices of America β in August 2024, alleging the defendants conspired to steer clients and listings away from Homie because of its lower buyer-broker commissions. The district court dismissed the case within roughly a year, finding Homie had not alleged specific facts showing the defendants participated in any organized boycott; Homie appealed within a month of that dismissal. The 10th Circuit’s ruling this month closes that appeal.
The court’s timeliness finding centered on NAR’s Clear Cooperation Policy, adopted in 2019, which the district court and appeals panel both found was outside the four-year window for Homie’s 2024 complaint even under the most favorable reading of when the clock started running.
The ruling adds to a string of recent legal outcomes touching real estate commission practices, though it cuts in NAR’s favor rather than extending the wave of commission-related settlements that reshaped the industry after 2024. RE/MAX and Keller Williams recently won final court approval of their own $28.5 million settlements in the separate Batton commission litigation, part of the broader legal reckoning over how buyer-broker commissions are set and disclosed that has worked through the courts since the landmark Sitzer/Burnett verdict.
What it means: The Homie case was narrower and more localized than the sprawling nationwide commission-structure litigation that produced NAR’s 2024 settlement and the Batton cases, turning on whether a single Utah brokerage could show a specific, timely conspiracy to exclude it from a regional MLS β a different and, on this record, harder legal bar than the broader claims that succeeded elsewhere. For NAR, the win removes one more piece of litigation risk following its earlier nationwide settlement, but it does not address the structural commission-disclosure questions that continue to work through separate cases nationally.
