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Four months after seven Realtors filed a class-action lawsuit against Realtor.com parent company Move for the alleged sale of unvetted and fraudulent leads, the defendants have moved the suit to the federal courts.
In an eight-page Notice of Removal filed on Tuesday, Move’s counsel said they’ve moved the lawsuit from the Los Angeles County Superior Court to the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, due to the 2005 Class Action Fairness Act (CAFA). CAFA states that federal courts have original jurisdiction over a class action lawsuit when three benchmarks are met: the plaintiffs are citizens of a different state than the defendant, there are at least 100 members in the punitive class, and there’s an amount-in-controversy exceeding $5 million.
“Six of the seven Plaintiffs reside outside of California and Delaware and are not citizens of California or Delaware. Only one Plaintiff is a resident of California and Plaintiffs’ purported class consists of real estate agents across the United States,” the filing said of the first standard for minimal diversity.
“As Plaintiffs allege, Move, Inc., and Move Sales, Inc., are each citizens of both Delaware and California … providing that a corporation is a ‘citizen of any State by which it has been incorporated and of the State where it has its principal place of business.’”
As for the punitive class and alleged damages benchmarks, Move’s counsel said the lawsuit meets both as it covers any real estate agent that’s used Move’s lead generation services within the past four years. Due to the large punitive class,…