A federal judge in Chicago has granted final approval to $28.5 million in combined settlements between RE/MAX, Keller Williams and a nationwide class of homebuyers, closing out the two brokerages’ portion of the Batton 1 commission-antitrust lawsuit. Under the terms posted on the case’s official settlement site, homebuyerlitigation.com, Keller Williams will pay $20 million and RE/MAX will pay $8.5 million into the settlement fund.
U.S. District Judge LaShonda Hunt, who oversees the case in the Northern District of Illinois, held a fairness hearing on Aug. 4 in Chicago before granting final approval this week. According to the settlement site, no class members objected to or opted out of either agreement. Homebuyers who qualify have until Aug. 25, 2026, to submit claims; the settlement fund will be distributed later under a court-approved plan.
What the case alleged
Batton v. National Association of Realtors, filed in January 2021 and later amended with Batton as lead plaintiff, is a homebuyer-side companion to the commission lawsuits that have reshaped real estate pay structures nationally. Like the seller-side cases, it alleges that NAR’s rules requiring listing brokers to make a blanket commission offer to buyer-brokers — a practice tied to MLS access — artificially inflated the commissions homebuyers indirectly paid through higher home prices. RE/MAX and Keller Williams were named alongside NAR and Anywhere Real Estate; NAR and Anywhere instead resolved their homebuyer-side exposure by opting into a separate settlement negotiated in the related Tuccori lawsuit, which remains up for final approval in November.
Keller Williams first disclosed its $20 million settlement in January 2026, and RE/MAX disclosed its $8.5 million settlement in March 2026. Neither company’s agreement included new business-practice changes, distinguishing these deals from the practice-change commitments Keller Williams and other large brokerages made in the earlier, higher-profile seller-commission settlements. With final approval granted and no objections filed, the court has dismissed the case against both companies.
The settlements are not without controversy elsewhere in the litigation. According to case filings, a group of four retired federal judges has separately challenged the Tuccori opt-in settlements now pending for NAR and Anywhere, arguing that allowing defendants to resolve claims by opting into a different, related case invites “forum shopping” by future class-action defendants. That challenge does not affect the RE/MAX and Keller Williams settlements, which were negotiated and approved directly in the Batton 1 case.
What it means
The final approval closes a specific and relatively contained piece of the years-long legal fight over how real estate agents are paid — RE/MAX’s and Keller Williams’s homebuyer-side liability in this case, as opposed to the larger seller-commission settlements the same companies reached in 2024 and 2025. It does not resolve the broader Batton 1 case, which continues against NAR and other defendants pursuing the Tuccori opt-in route, or address the pending challenge from the retired judges. For homebuyers who bought MLS-listed property going back as far as January 2006 in some states, the practical next step is the Aug. 25 claims deadline.
What to watch: how the Tuccori opt-in settlements for NAR and Anywhere Real Estate fare at their November approval hearing amid the retired judges’ forum-shopping objection, and whether the distribution plan for the $28.5 million fund is finalized once claims close. The settlement follows a pattern of nine-figure commission-related payouts across residential real estate this year, including a separate $359.9 million nationwide settlement in the unrelated RealPage rent-fixing litigation.
