Photographer Sues Realtor.com Parent Over Unauthorized Photos of NFL Star's House

A Kansas City photographer has filed a lawsuit against Realtor.com’s parent company, Move, Inc., and the National Association of Realtors (NAR), alleging copyright infringement after the portal published images of NFL star Travis Kelce’s estate on its  without permission.

The photos, taken by Brynn Burns, show the Kansas City property where the Kelce proposed to Taylor Swift in August. In her complaint, filed on Monday in a local court, Burns claims Realtor.com used her copyrighted photographs without permission "to drive millions of people to Defendants’ profitable website.”

“Defendants knew these photographs belonged to Plaintiff,” the lawsuit states. “Defendants used and published these photographs without Plaintiff’s permission, thinking it would be better (and cheaper) to ‘beg forgiveness’ rather than to have sought Plaintiff’s permission.”

Realtor.com had previously paid to license the photographs, but the complaint claims that the license had expired by the time they appeared on the portal's News & Insights section in a post entitled 'Inside Travis Kelce’s Luxe $6 Million Kansas City Mansion Where He Proposed to Taylor Swift ‘2 Weeks Ago’. Burns argues that the unauthorised publication rendered her images commercially worthless.

The lawsuit names both Move, Inc., owned by News Corp, and NAR, which licenses its Realtor brand and domain to Move. Burns’ attorney told Inman that the case includes NAR because “it appears that the two defendants jointly operate and control Realtor.com and the corresponding Instagram page.”

Neither Realtor.com nor NAR has yet commented on the filing. According to public records, Burns took the photographs in 2023 and registered them with the U.S. Copyright Office in early 2024.