Dive Brief:
- CBRE, JLL, Cushman & Wakefield, Colliers, Newmark and CoStar are being sued by a commercial tenant that alleges CoStar acted as a central hub of a price-fixing scheme, Bisnow first reported on Tuesday.
- In a June 12 suit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, the plaintiff, FitFactariDC, alleges that the companies operated a hub-and-spoke conspiracy to exchange “current, nonpublic, deal-specific lease information” through CoStar, resulting in rent prices above what they would be in a competitive market. CoStar has denied the allegations.
- The plaintiff is seeking to have the suit classified as a class action for industrial, office and retail leaseholders in 49 U.S. metropolitan area markets from June 2022 to now that worked with landlords or brokers that used CoStar.
Dive Insight:
Plaintiff FitFactariDC is a Florida company that leased commercial real estate in Denver via one or more of the defendants, which are all reportedly clients of CoStar. The other defendants all act on behalf of landlords in negotiating lease terms with tenants, according to the filing. The suit alleges that the rent FitFactariDC paid was “artificially inflated by Defendants’ coordinated conduct” in the greater Denver market.
CoStar offers subscription-based information services that include property-level and transaction-level leasing data, market analytics and related tools that brokers, landlords and other CRE professionals use throughout the U.S., the complaint says.
CoStar’s lease comparables database gives subscribers access to detailed transaction records tied to specific properties, tenants and units, including terms that are not otherwise publicly available, the lawsuit states.
“CoStar, which controls an overwhelming share of the market for commercial real estate information services, acted as the hub of the conspiracy,” FitFactariDC states in its filing, alleging that the commercial real estate information provider holds from 58% to 97% of the market share for commercial real estate information in the metropolitan areas it names in the suit, based on prior litigation allegations.
“It collected and redistributed nonpublic lease transaction data; designed its products to permit property- and unit-level inference; and promoted its services as enabling landlords and brokers to ‘optimize [their] pricing.’ The value of CoStar’s platform increased as more competitors participated, reinforcing the coordinated conduct,” it states.
CoStar Group General Counsel Gene Boxer called the lawsuit frivolous and its claims "contrary to common sense" and "lacking in any facts."
"Our CoStar product reduces information asymmetries by providing accurate, and comprehensive property and market information, allowing brokerages, landlords, tenants, property owners, and investors, among others, to make intelligent real estate decisions," Boxer told Facilities Dive in an emailed statement. "We look forward to a swift and complete victory in court.”
The complaint alleges the broker defendants “entered into vertical agreements with CoStar and a horizontal agreement with one another, as inferred from their conduct and shared understanding, to exchange and use current, disaggregated lease pricing information.”
“Through mutual monitoring enabled by CoStar, the Broker Defendants detected deviations from prevailing market rents, replacing independent pricing decisions with coordinated conduct,” FitFactariDC alleges.
“Economic analysis confirms that the hub-and-spoke conspiracy reduced pricing uncertainty, weakened competition, and kept rents artificially high. For example, from 2015 to 2025, every 1-point increase in CoStar’s market share corresponded to a 0.3% to 0.8% increase in rent per square foot across industrial, office, and retail leases,” the complaint states.
JLL, Cushman & Wakefield, Colliers and Newmark did not immediately respond to a request for comment. CBRE declined to comment.
The initial status hearing for the lawsuit is scheduled for Aug. 19, according to documents filed.
The lawsuit bears some similarities to a lawsuit the U.S. Justice Department filed in 2024 against RealPage over its software, which the DOJ called an “unlawful scheme to decrease competition among landlords in apartment pricing and to monopolize the market for commercial revenue management software.”
That case hinged on RealPage using contracts with competing landlords who had agreed to share nonpublic, competitively sensitive information about their apartment rental rates and other lease terms to train and run RealPage’s algorithmic pricing software.
The software would then generate recommendations on apartment rental pricing and other terms for participating landlords. “In a free market, these landlords would otherwise be competing independently to attract renters based on pricing, discounts, concessions, lease terms, and other dimensions of apartment leasing,” the DOJ said in a statement in 2024.
In November 2025, the DOJ and RealPage reached an agreement that requires the firm, among other conditions, to stop using competing rental management companies’ nonpublic and sensitive information to determine rental prices; stop using active lease data to train the models; remove or redesign features that limit price decreases or aligned pricing between competing users; and refrain from conducting market surveys to collect sensitive information or discussing market analyses or trends based on nonpublic data.
The DOJ settlement included no financial penalties, damages or finding or admissions of wrongdoing for RealPage. Other businesses that were subject to related suits paid millions of dollars in settlements to the District of Columbia to resolve allegations that they used the software to conspire with other landlords to inflate rents.
