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An employee who led a content team at Realtor.com before moving to rival CoStar Group transferred access to as many as 40 documents to his personal email and continued accessing them dozens of times after exiting the Move, Inc.-owned portal, according to a forensic analysis in new legal filings Tuesday.
Realtor.com parent Move, Inc. asked the court to issue an order that would block former Realtor.com content editor James Kaminsky and current employer, CoStar Group, from further access to documents at the center of a lawsuit filed in July. Trade secrets within the documents include details on the company’s online traffic, advertising and lead generation tactics, Move attorneys claim.
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“Anyone with access to these documents knows what will be published on Realtor.com, and when,” Move, Inc. Vice President of Editorial and Content Amy Maas said in a sworn statement included in the new filing. “How Realtor.com’s stories are performing, and why, who Move’s Communications team is in contact with and what information media outlets are requesting from Move.”
Originally filed in July in U.S. District Court in California, the lawsuit has put a spotlight on the intense race between the country’s largest real estate portals to gain more web traffic and convert that into profit. It also highlights the ongoing fallout between Realtor.com and CoStar, which was reportedly on the cusp of purchasing Move, Inc. in early 2023 before negotiations ended.
In the latest filing, Realtor.com lawyers shared insights from forensics experts who analyzed Kaminsky’s work computer and other Realtor.com documents to determine how and when he allegedly viewed them.
Howard Pence, vice president of global cyber defense for News Corp., which owns Move, said in a sworn statement that digital logs of Realtor.com’s documents showed that Kaminsky transferred access to 40 documents on Jan. 11 and Jan. 12, Kaminsky’s final two days working for Move.
“I am not aware of any legitimate business purpose for a former employee such as Mr. Kaminsky to access Move’s electronic files on the Google Docs account after his employment ended,” Pence said. “Mr. Kaminsky was not authorized to access the Google Docs account after his employment ended.”
CoStar dismissed the latest filing, saying in a statement that it was a distraction from a separate lawsuit filed against Move, Inc. last week.
In that case, a group of eight Realtors accused Move, Inc. of selling unvetted and fraudulent leads through Move Network sights, including Realtor.com, ListHub and UpNest. CoStar is not involved in the suit.
“We have stated from the beginning that Move’s case against CoStar was a PR stunt, and this is just more proof,” CoStar General Counsel Gene Boxer told Inman. “Move’s continued bullying of a long-serving employee in the process is even worse. We will fight and win this dispute. In the meantime, Move should focus on the lawsuit against Realtor.com for allegedly selling unvetted and fraudulent buyer and seller leads.”
The lawsuit and declarations don’t accuse Kaminsky of sharing the documents with anyone at CoStar.
The new filing in Realtor.com’s lawsuit included sworn declarations from Kaminsky’s former employees and superiors at Realtor.com, as well as the forensics experts working for Move who analyzed the documents.
Kaminsky ran a division known as the News & Insights Team at Realtor.com, which Move employees said had successfully driven traffic to the website.
Kaminsky was terminated from Move on Jan. 10. Jan. 12 was his final working day, according to the court documents. He began working at CoStar in March.
According to his LinkedIn profile, which was removed shortly after Move filed its lawsuit on July 2, Kaminsky started working as an editor at Homes.com in March. Kaminsky wrote that he was a content lead responsible for overseeing a team of 10 full-time writers.
Realtor.com’s communications director said that the documents at the heart of the lawsuit “contain a great deal of confidential and proprietary information that could be used to construct and operate a competing News & Insights-type platform.”
One of the four key documents at the heart of the lawsuit is considered “a detailed business plan” for the teams that drive traffic to Realtor.com, according to the filing.
Maas said that a member of her team was viewing the document on June 3, 2024, when they saw a user access the document with the email address jim.kaminsky@gmail.com.
“I was stunned to learn that a former Move employee was accessing a highly confidential electronic document of Move (and effectively spying on updates to that confidential document in real time), especially with respect to this document because it contains so much valuable, non-public information about our business,” Maas said in her sworn declaration.
Read the latest filing here (refresh page if document doesn’t appear).
