CoStar facing multiple antitrust accusations in lawsuits 

Arlington County-based CoStar Group is facing multiple federal lawsuits accusing the real estate data and analytics company of participating in monopolistic practices. 

Per court records, the company is facing three similar federal lawsuits, filed in U.S. District Court in Virginia, California and Washington, D.C. All three filings seek jury trials and class action status. 

The Virginia case, Shapiro Hospitalities LLC d/b/a Grand & Co. v. CoStar Group, Inc., et al., was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia in April. The 79-page complaint by the plaintiff, Shapiro Hospitalities, claims CoStar violated federal antitrust laws. 

“This is a rare case about a company that has perpetrated an anticompetitive scheme so pernicious that its own customers openly lament how it has destroyed competition, leaving them no choice but to pay its supracompetitive prices,” the complaint alleges. 

The filing specifically alleges CoStar maintains monopoly power as the dominant provider of commercial real estate, or CRE, online listing and information in violation of Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act. 

The complaint claims that CoStar has coerced the three largest CRE brokerages into noncompete agreements, limiting the sharing of information with CoStar competitors and effectively excluding any rival platform from “compet[ing] effectively without access to that information.” 

“By restraining customers’ ability to share their own CRE information with CoStar competitors, CoStar has created and maintained a dangerous probability that its attempt to monopolize will succeed,” the complaint states. 

Greg Asciolla, a partner at DiCello Levitt and counsel for Shapiro Hospitalities, said in a statement on the firm’s site that the case was filed because “commercial real estate brokers and firms are being squeezed by a system that leaves them with no real choice. 

“We believe CoStar used its dominant position to lock up customer data, shut out competition, and raise prices,” Asciolla said.  

Per court records, CoStar has filed a motion to stay the proceedings in the Shapiro case while it seeks to transfer the California case, Malm Inc. v. CoStar Group Inc., to Virginia. 

“While CoStar maintains that this is the proper forum in which to litigate the putative class actions, CoStar asks the Court to temporarily stay proceedings pending the resolution of these transfer motions in order to avoid unnecessary waste of the Court’s and the parties’ resources resulting from unnecessary, duplicative litigation and prejudice to CoStar,” CoStar stated in its May 22 motion. 

Counsel for CoStar could not be immediately reached for comment.