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Crye-Leike Inc. is revising the figures it provided for a notable industry ranking and claiming coverage under the National Association of Realtors nationwide antitrust settlement as a result.
A legal filing on Feb. 5 in a federal court in Missouri requests to stay a case against Crye-Leike known as Gibson until all appeals of the NAR deal have been resolved. The Gibson suit was the first antitrust commission lawsuit filed post a jury verdict in the Sitzer | Burnett case in October 2023, where a class of homeseller plaintiffs in Missouri received billions.
NAR settled Sitzer | Burnett, Gibson, and other similar suits last year, covering member brokerages with total residential home sales volume not exceeding $2 billion in 2022.
In its 2022 Annual Report, Crye-Leike celebrated the company’s $8.5 billion in sales volume.
Now, Crye-Leike is challenging the metric utilized in the settlement for determining coverage: the T360 Real Estate Almanac. The settlement terms explicitly state that the Almanac’s “Sales Volume” serves as an indisputable presumption of a Person’s “Total Transaction Volume.”
Harold Crye
According to Crye-Leike’s filing, the Almanac’s sales volume for “Crye-Leike Realtors” includes the total sales volume for six brokerages fully owned by Harold Crye but operating as independent corporations.
Since the Gibson suit named Crye-Leike Inc. as a defendant and Crye-Leike Inc. itself closed only $1.75 billion in residential sales in 2022, the firm argues it is covered under the NAR settlement.
The filing states, “Crye-Leike is only defending this lawsuit because the T3 Sixty Report Form requested information for two types of brokerages.”
Those companies are Crye-Leike, Inc., Crye-Leike of Arkansas, Inc., Crye-Leike of Mississippi, Inc., Crye-Leike of Nashville, Inc., Crye-Leike South, Inc., and Adaro Realty.
According to the filing, these companies operate independently with their own management teams and maintain separate accounting records.
“CryeLeike, Inc. provides accounting support, human resources, information technology, in-house legal, and group procurement services for the others,” and they pay fees to Crye-Leike Inc. for those support services, the filing said.
The filing argues that plaintiffs cannot prove Crye-Leike Inc. had “total control” over the six firms to treat them collectively as one entity with over $2 billion in total transaction volume.
Steve A. Brown
In a statement, lead counsel for the Gibson plaintiffs, Michael Ketchmark of Ketchmark & McCreight, told Inman, “The terms of the settlement agreement make it clear that Crye-Leike is not covered.”
The plaintiffs have 10 days after Crye-Leike’s filing to respond. “We are in the process of responding in court,” Ketchmark said.
Crye-Leike’s filing asserts that Crye-Leike Inc. provided real estate consulting firm T3 Sixty with transaction volume data for each Crye-Leike Entity, but T3 Sixty grouped all the companies’ transactions together in 2023.
However, a declaration by Steve A. Brown, president of residential sales for all six Crye-Leike entities, and exhibits included with the motion to stay seem to show that Crye-Leike did not provide individual transaction data for each entity to T3 Sixty.
Inman has reached out to Crye-Leike for comment and will update this story as necessary.
Read Crye-Leike’s filing (re-load page if document is not visible):
Email Andrea V. Brambila.
