
The country’s third largest builder wants to know how much it stands to gain in the National Association of Realtors’ (NAR’s) settlement but says it's impossible to know because proper procedures haven't been filed.
“Pulte has not seen any information about class size, expected claim rate, or the claim administrator’s evaluations in dividing up settlement funds,” PulteGroup wrote in a new filing to the court. “Most of this information typically would be provided in a plan of allocation, a document routinely provided before the opt-out date.”
The class-action lawsuit was filed in Missouri by a group of home sellers who sold properties between April 29, 2015, and June 30, 2022, against NAR, Anywhere, Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices, Keller Williams, and RE/MAX. The plaintiffs claimed real estate commission rates were too high and NAR’s cooperative compensation rule caused the sellers to pay too much in real estate commissions.
As part of the settlement, Anywhere and RE/MAX agreed to pay $138.5 million collectively, and Keller Williams agreed to pay $70 million into settlement funds to be distributed to qualifying settlement class members “who submit an approved claim form.”
PulteGroup said this requirement doesn’t make sense for a large claimant who sold thousands of homes on multiple listings services and paid commissions to buyer agents.
As a large-scale builder, PulteGroup would need to submit thousands of claims and manually enter addresses of home sales, dates, listing brokerages, total commissions paid, and commissions paid to buyers’ brokers.
“This is a needless complication for the many home sellers that hold this information in electronic databases,” PulteGroup wrote in its filing.
Copying the information from its digital database creates “unnecessary hurdles,” according to the builder.
“Requiring a manual claims submission process for all sellers, regardless of how that information is normally kept, will create an additional burden on the claims administrator to review thousands of claim forms instead of a single filing by a single claimant,” PulteGroup wrote in the filing. “This will inevitably increase administrative costs, which will lessen the recovery of the class members under the settlement agreements.”
PulteGroup’s final objection in its filing is that the company never received notice of the settlements through “any approved mechanisms.” The home builder’s representatives independently learned of the settlement “well after the fact” from a review of legal news.
“If Pulte, with thousands of claims, did not receive direct notice of settlement, individual home sellers with many fewer sales likely did not receive notice either,” PulteGroup wrote. “Those individual home sellers may also lack legal counsel and would be less likely to learn about their class membership through the news.”