Two Tribeca Renters Sue Compass, Claiming Its Zillow Delisting Strategy Inflated Manhattan Rents

Two Manhattan renters filed a federal class-action lawsuit against Compass on August 19, claiming the country's largest residential brokerage manipulated the city's rental market so badly it drove up their own rent.

Plaintiffs Peter Castaneda and Haley Gelfand say they each signed one-bedroom leases this month for $5,270 a month, well above July's median asking price of $4,390, according to the filing reported by RISMedia and realestatenews.com. The suit, filed in the Southern District of New York, invokes the Sherman Antitrust Act and New York's Donnelly Act.

The core allegation: Compass controls roughly 80% of Manhattan's rental listings, a figure the plaintiffs pulled from a December 2025 analysis by The Capitol Forum based on RealTrends transaction data. Combined with its acquisition of Anywhere and brands like Corcoran, Sotheby's International Realty and Coldwell Banker, which closed in January, the complaint says Compass now controls roughly $39 billion in gross NYC sales, according to realestatenews.com, citing Crain's New York Business rankings. That's more than double its nearest competitor, Douglas Elliman, and more than all other top-20 brokerages combined.

The lawsuit's second claim is more specific: Compass allegedly told its agents to pull listings off Zillow's StreetEasy platform starting in August and reroute them through REBNY's Residential Listing Service instead, according to the filing cited by RISMedia. StreetEasy lets renters search without a broker; REBNY's system generally requires one. The plaintiffs say this "Fall Marketing Playbook," first reported by The Real Deal, was designed to force renters back into broker relationships and drive up broker fees, which are often tied to rent amounts.

The numbers behind the claim are stark. Citywide rental inventory dropped 40% year-over-year as of August 13, 2026, according to the filing citing Business Insider reporting. June 2026 rents rose 3% year-over-year; July rents rose 6%, double the prior month's pace, the complaint states.

Compass has not responded publicly to the lawsuit. Castaneda declined to comment; Gelfand did not respond to a request for comment, according to Gothamist.

Compass says the fight started with Zillow, not the other way around

Compass and Zillow have already clashed over this issue. Compass sued Zillow earlier this year alleging Zillow was the one trying to monopolize listings by refusing to display homes marketed under Compass's "coming soon" private-exclusive model. A judge ruled Compass was unlikely to succeed on the merits, finding that Zillow can't hold a monopoly if buyers already research listings across multiple platforms, according to Ars Technica. Compass voluntarily dropped that suit in March.

Zillow has since tightened its own rules, excluding delisted or "hidden" properties from ever appearing on its platforms, a policy meant to discourage brokers from pulling listings strategically.

Zillow isn't a neutral party here either. CoStar Group, which owns competitor Homes.com, filed an amicus brief in a separate case, Zillow Group v. Midwest Real Estate Data, accusing Zillow of the same behavior it condemns in Compass. According to Breitbart's reporting on the CoStar brief, Zillow launched its own pre-market product, Zillow Preview, built on exclusive agreements with roughly 60 major brokerages, then paired it with an exclusive deal with Realtor.com that locks competitors like Homes.com out of that same inventory. CoStar argues Zillow's "free flow of information" argument against Compass and MRED is hard to square with Zillow keeping its own pre-market listings walled off, sometimes indefinitely, from every platform except its own.

Federal and state regulators are already circling. Senator Elizabeth Warren has opened an inquiry into whether Compass is creating what she's called a "two-tiered housing market" where insiders get exclusive access to listings and data while everyone else is shut out, according to Ars Technica.

Rent laws are also getting blamed for the same spike

Compass isn't the only thing New Yorkers are pointing fingers at. Manhattan's average rent hit $6,655 in July, up roughly 10% year-over-year, according to a market report cited by the Daily Wire. Gary Malin, chief operating officer of the Corcoran Group (now itself a Compass-owned brand), blamed the state's "good cause" eviction law, the FARE Act, and 2019 rent regulations for constricting supply well before the current lawsuit's allegations even begin.

The FARE Act, which took effect in 2025, bars landlords from passing broker fees onto tenants who didn't hire the broker. StreetEasy senior economist Kenny Lee told the Daily Wire that landlords are simply rolling those costs into base rent instead. Separately, New York's Rent Guidelines Board voted 7-1 to freeze rents on roughly one million rent-stabilized units starting with leases beginning October 1, a policy championed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani. NYU Stern's Arpit Gupta, the board's lone dissenting vote, called freezing rents while landlord expenses keep rising "troubling."

None of that appears in the Compass complaint, and the lawsuit doesn't attempt to disentangle how much of the July rent spike, if any, is attributable to Compass's listing strategy versus these preexisting state and city policies. That's the open question a federal judge will eventually have to sort through: whether a company with an 80% market share manipulating where listings appear is illegal monopoly conduct, or whether it's one contributing factor in a housing market that was already strained by a 1.4% vacancy rate, according to the city's most recent housing survey cited by Gothamist. New York's own housing agency unveiled a plan the same week to build 700,000 new units, an acknowledgment that undersupply, not any single company, is the underlying problem the lawsuit is fighting over.