CoStar Taking Homesnap Founder Guy Wolcott to Court Over Alleged Trade Secrets Theft

The U.S. commercial and residential real estate portal operator CoStar is suing the founder of a company it acquired in 2020.

CoStar alleges that Homesnap founder Guy Wolcott, who left the company in April, along with former Homesnap employees John Mazur, Thomas Goff, and Jeffrey Repanich gained knowledge of CoStar's inner workings to set up a similar platform named Happening Technology.

According to a document filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, CoStar accuses Wolcott of poaching its employees and leveraging knowledge that they gained after the Homesnap takeover, specifically around the CoStar Sync data-transfer system.

"At the time of their departures from CoStar, none of the Former Employees informed CoStar management of their future plans or where they would be working next, even when asked. As CoStar has recently discovered, however, all of the Former Employees eventually formed or joined Happening Technology, a new company that was incorporated in January 2023 with Wolcott as CEO, and did so with the apparent intention of repurposing the proprietary and confidential information they had access to and worked with at CoStar so that Happening Technology could offer competitive technology and services to CoStar’s competitors."

Wolcott denied the allegations in comments made to U.S. agent-facing publication Inman.com saying that he was confident that it would become clear that there was no misappropriation or copying.

Until it was sunsetted by CoStar earlier this year in favour of the Homes.com brand, Homesnap built software tools for agents and had a portal website. CoStar bought Homesnap for $250 million in 2020 and then went on to detach the platform from the Broker Public Portal program in 2022.