Move To Dismiss Lawsuit Against CoStar

After months of battle, Move Inc. and CoStar Group are lowering their weapons — at least in the courtroom.

Move filed to drop a lawsuit against CoStar, the parent company of Homes.com, that claimed it stole trade secrets from Move’s subsidiary, Realtor.com, according to a dismissal motion submitted to a Los Angeles federal court on Monday.

Move sued CoStar and Realtor.com’s former employee, James Kaminsky, last year, alleging Kaminsky accessed confidential documents after he was laid off and shared them with his new employer, Homes.com.

A spokesperson for Realtor.com said the firm agreed to settle with Kaminsky, who is no longer an employee of CoStar.

“After catching our ex-employee brazenly accessing our strategy documents while employed at CoStar, we acted decisively,” the spokesperson wrote in a statement. “We have chosen to dismiss our trade secrets lawsuit against CoStar because the risk of additional misuse has been mitigated.”

The legal battle may be over, but the public spat between the two companies continues apace.

CoStar billed the pending dismissal as a win for the company, according to a press release issued Monday.

“This lawsuit was a PR stunt from the start – ridiculous, and totally devoid of merit,” CoStar CEO Andy Florance said in a statement. “We did not settle. We didn’t pay a dime. Move simply capitulated.”

This comes after Judge George Wu dismissed two of Move’s claims against CoStar in October, including its allegations that CoStar violated two computer fraud statutes. Move filed an amended complaint the following month.

If approved by Wu, the dismissal would put an end to a months-long legal saga. Part of the legal fight also took aim at Homes.com’s claim as the No. 2 spot among residential listing platforms with the most traffic.

Realtor.com has repeatedly pushed back against CoStar’s reliance on Google Analytics to measure its traffic, claiming those numbers aren’t reliable. The company maintains that other third-party sources such as Comscore and SimilarWeb list Realtor.com as the second most visited site and that Homes.com is fourth behind its competitors.

In addition to the lawsuit, Move brought its fight with CoStar to the national advertising division of the watchdog group Better Business Bureau. The firm reported Homes.com for two claims mentioned on its website, with Move CEO Damian Eales calling the ads “deceptive and misleading.”

Weeks after the lawsuit was filed, BBB issued a recommendation that Homes.com remove references to having 156 million monthly unique visitors and “DOUBLE Realtor.com’s traffic.”

A spokesperson for CoStar previously called the newly dropped lawsuit a “sham.”

“Homes.com has far surpassed Realtor.com, which is now sliding into obscurity,” the spokesperson wrote in a statement. “Realtor.com is losing the portal wars, and losing big.”

CoStar has been waging war against Realtor.com — last year, it pledged to spend $1 billion in advertising. The firm continued its media blitz into the first quarter of 2025, including another round of Super Bowl spots.