A brand new lawsuit is taking concern with Compass’ market share in Manhattan, claiming the residential big is making an unfair dent within the rental market.
Two New York Metropolis renters filed a criticism this week within the U.S. District Court docket for the Southern District of New York, who declare that Compass’ marketing strategy, which includes withholding properties from showing on public-facing websites like Zillow and its native subsidiary, StreetEasy, has led to sky-high rents within the metropolis.
The swimsuit, which seeks class-action certification, alleges that Compass’ conduct, coupled with its market share, violates antitrust legal guidelines.
The criticism, filed by Peter Castaneda and Haley Gelfand, who hire a $5,000-a-month one-bedroom unit, focuses on Compass’ outsize market share, citing an evaluation from a regulatory publication Capital Discussion board, that estimated Compass’ managed 80 % of the Manhattan market based mostly on 2025 transaction information from RealTrends.
That determine, which sparked headlines earlier this year in the wake of Compass’ $1.6 billion deal to accumulate Wherever Actual Property and its manufacturers like Corcoran, Sotheby’s Worldwide Realty and Coldwell Banker, is an estimate based mostly on Compass’ for-sale market share.
The criticism conflates the for-sale market and the rental market, claiming that “controls over 80 % of the rental unit listings obtainable for renters in Manhattan based mostly on 2025 information.”
However there was no evaluation of Compass’ rental market share, which is in all probability a lot decrease than 80 %, because the rental market is much extra fragmented and huge numbers of listings are managed by landlords’ leasing workplaces.
Equally, the criticism claims that Compass’ technique of withholding listings from publication on websites like StreetEasy and Zillow has artificially diminished provide and led to larger rental costs.
The one downside is that Compass has by no means mentioned withholding rental listings. In its “Fall Advertising and marketing Playbook” presented to New York City agents and beforehand reported by The Actual Deal, the brokerage targeted particularly on how brokers ought to deal with for-sale listings.
Compass declined to touch upon the submitting.
Whereas the criticism might battle to maneuver ahead in its present type, it might encourage extra lawmakers, regulators and different potential plaintiffs to take a better take a look at how Compass’ post-merger dimension is affecting native markets.
Compass is already going through one other antitrust lawsuit from Zillow in Chicago, the place it partnered with the native itemizing service to withhold listings from showing on Zillow. That case, wherein Zillow claims Compass and MRED colluded to stifle competitors, is at the moment ready for a decide’s choice on Zillow’s request for a preliminary injunction on Midwest Actual Property Knowledge and Compass slicing its information feed.
The newest lawsuit nonetheless hits on core considerations raised by critics of Compass that fear about how its dimension and personal itemizing technique might distort the housing market by making it troublesome for different brokerages to compete and pushing consumers into Compass’ ecosystem in the event that they really feel they’ll’t see all of the properties obtainable in the marketplace.
The brokerage can be below appreciable antitrust scrutiny, with lawmakers elevating considerations that its use of personal listings might violate truthful housing legal guidelines and deform a housing market that’s on the entire nonetheless quick on provide.
In a letter to Compass CEO Robert Reffkin and MRED CEO Rebecca Jensen requesting clarification on their entities’ partnership, Sen. Elizabeth Warren wrote that she was “notably involved that the private, unique nature of personal listings might perpetuate housing discrimination by residential steering.”
The New York Lawyer Common’s Workplace antitrust division can be wanting into the residential giant’s footprint in New York Metropolis.
Learn extra
“People will search where the inventory is”: Robert Reffkin lays out Compass’ portal ambitions
MLS en garde: Regional listing services eyeing congressional inquiry into Compass and MRED
StreetEasy to boot agents from specialty tools over private listings
