To all the agents in the house,
REX, the Austin, Texas-based brokerage that has received more attention for its legal actions than its brokerage operations, appears to be going out in a blaze of litigation glory.
According to internal documents REX agents have sent HousingWire, the company's offices in Austin and Woodland Hills, California have been shuttered and REX executives Thursday implored agents to transfer their license to another brokerage by "day's end" Friday.
REX is a private company with a few hundred agents who worked there at its peak and the company was intriguing for a number of reasons. Its co-founder and CEO Jack Ryan achieved some past notoriety as a Goldman Sachs banker and, briefly, the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate in Illinois, running against Barack Obama in 2004. REX paid agents salaries, something only a couple of other brokerages nationally do, and, unlike Redfin, it seemed the salary was the majority of the agent's income. And those agents, in turn, were supposed to give consumers rebates for their normal commissions.
The first sentence in REX's obituary, though, will focus on Ryan and the company's wars against the National Association of Realtors - the trade group that represents almost all agents and brokerages in the country, and owns the majority of multiple listings services.
REX brought information to the U.S. Justice Department in 2020, which may have eventually led to a consent decree with NAR, and then a withdrawn consent decree, beginning a DOJ investigation. The company also filed antitrust lawsuits of its own. Some have quietly gone away.
But one looks like it's here to stay, big time. On Tuesday, REX filed papers in federal court stating David Boies would represent the company in a sprawling antitrust case against Zillow and NAR. The case centers on the way Zillow aggregates listings from multiple listings services and places them on the company's website.
Boies' long long list of famous clientele includes none other than the DOJ. The Bill Clinton administration brought him on in the 1990s to wage antitrust warfare against Microsoft. It bears watching if Boies uses his full legal firepower against NAR and Zillow – and also if a dead company can wound these real estate titans.
Agents, I'm not totally sure what's going on here. But please! Send me your thoughts anonymously. I'm at mblake@hwmedia.com.
Sincerely,
Matthew Blake
Senior Real Estate Reporter
-2.jpg?width=1116&upscale=true&name=970x250%20(4)-2.jpg)
EmoticonEmoticon