CoreLogic has been busy on the legal scene the last couple years, and Redfin is the latest recipient of a patent lawsuit.
CoreLogic filed a patent-infringement lawsuit against Redfin late last week, alleging that a new home price tool the online brokerage released in March violates an existing patent.
A home price estimator, Redfin’s Home Price Tool was designed to give prospective buyers a better understanding of the pricing process before entering discussions with an agent. Unlike other home pricing tools, Redfin’s was designed with a more user-driven model in mind, but it still inspired legal action from the Santa Ana-based research firm. Here are the five most important details of the lawsuit:
- CoreLogic is alleging that Redfin violated U.S. Patent No. 5,361,201, which is titled “Real Estate Appraisal Using Predictive Modeling” and was originally issued on November 1, 1994, by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
- As Agent Genius points out, patents filed before 1995 expire in 20 years, so CoreLogic has just a couple years left on its patent.
- According to Matt Wakefield, Redfin’s PR specialist, the brokerage just received the documents regarding the lawsuit on Friday, and are beginning to look them over and formulate a response.
- Redfin is not the first company to receive a lawsuit from CoreLogic; Zillow, LPS, RealData, RealEC Technologies, Fiserv, IntelliReal, Interthinx, American Flood Research, Precision Appraisal, Electronic Appraiser and Espiel have all received patent-infringing lawsuits, with IntelliReal settling and Precision Appraisal being dismissed from the lawsuit.
- East Texas, where CoreLogic filed its lawsuit, has become a bedrock in recent years for patent lawsuits; the trend was exhaustively covered in a recent “This American Life” program.