President Joe Biden is mere days away from leaving office, but his administration is taking one more shot at the real estate industry.The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced Thursday that it’s suing multifamily property manager Greystar for allegedly deceiving renters by adding mandatory fees that raised prices above the advertised amount.The complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado, and the State of Colorado is also a plaintiff in the case. According to the FTC, this alleged practice violates the Federal Trade Commission Act, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and the Colorado Consumer Protection Act.“Because of Greystar’s deceptive advertising and hidden fees, tenants are on the hook in their lease for hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars more than they anticipated that their apartment would cost,” Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser said in a statement. “Through their actions, Greystar is thwarting apartment hunters from comparison shopping and choosing a home that fits within their budget.”The complaint lists a number of fees Greystar levies that it refers to as “hidden,” and the FTC claims that Greystar doesn’t include information about these fees to apartment hunters. These include fees related to utilities and for the use of renters insurance not provided by Greystar. Consumers are allegedly not given the option to opt out of these fees.In a statement, Greystar decried the FTC’s approach of producing “headline-grabbing” litigation rather than working with the company to “help drive meaningful improvements for consumers in the rental housing industry.”“The FTC’s complaint targets a longstanding industrywide practice of advertising base rent to potential residents,” the statement reads. “The idea that this is done with the goal of hiding fees from consumers is patently false. No resident at a Greystar-managed community pays a fee they have not seen and agreed to in their lease.”The Biden administration has been aggressive in addressing what it sees as violations of antitrust and consumer protection, and the real estate industry has been in the crosshairs multiple times. While it didn’t play a direct role in the National Association of Realtors‘ (NAR) $418 million settlement of class-action antitrust lawsuits, it hovered around the related cases and signaled it would intervene if deemed necessary.Plaintiffs in the related cases accused NAR-affiliated multiple listing services of colluding to artificially inflate agent commission fees through private information sharing.In August, the Department of Justice (DOJ) hit RealPage with an antitrust lawsuit, claiming that the company’s YieldStar and AI revenue management (AIRM) software helped multifamily landlords to artificially inflate rents through private information sharing, claims that echo those in the NAR cases.President-elect Donald Trump hasn’t made any comments related to this effort, so it’s an open question as to whether his administration will continue to pursue these cases or, more broadly, the issues of antitrust and consumer protection.

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Attom‘s year-end 2024 foreclosure report revealed that 322,103 properties in the U.S. had some type of foreclosure filing — default notices, scheduled auctions or bank repossessions — last year. The data solutions company also reported that in fourth-quarter 2024, one in every 1,671 properties had a foreclosure filing.Attom also noted that foreclosure filings were down 10% from 2023, down 1% from 2022 and down 35% from pre-pandemic levels in 2019. Last year’s filings were also down 89% from a peak of nearly 2.9 million in 2010, when the housing market was recovering from the Great Recession.The 322,000 units flagged in 2024 represented 0.23% of all U.S. housing units, which is down slightly from 0.25% in 2023.“The continued decline in foreclosure activity throughout 2024 suggests a housing market that may be stabilizing, even as economic uncertainties persist,” Attom CEO Rob Barber said in a statement. “This year’s data points to foreclosure trends potentially returning to more predictable levels, offering some clarity for industry professionals, investors, and homeowners. “While foreclosure filings remain a critical metric for understanding market health, current trends may point to a more balanced landscape, potentially shaped by careful lending practices and ongoing homeowner resilience.”Lenders started the foreclosure process on 253,306 properties in 2024, 6% less than in 2023. But the figure for 2024 was up 74% from 2021.California saw the greatest number of foreclosure starts among all states at 29,529. It was followed by Florida (29,239) and Texas (28,946).But Florida was the state with the highest foreclosure rate in 2024 as one in every 267 housing units had a filing. It was followed closely by New Jersey, Nevada, Illinois and South Carolina.Lenders repossessed 36,505 properties through foreclosures (REOs) in 2024, down 13% from 2023. Last year’s REO measurement was down 97% from a peak of more than 1 million in 2010 following the Great Recession.The average time to foreclose decreased between the third and fourth quarters but increased on an annual basis in 2024. U.S. properties foreclosed upon in Q4 2024 had been in the process for an average of 762 days, a 6% decrease from the previous quarter but a 6% increase from a year ago.

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Longbridge Financial, one of the largest reverse mortgage lenders in the country, is currently embroiled in a lawsuit against competitor and Home Equity Conversion Mortgage (HECM) endorsement leader Mutual of Omaha Mortgage. Now Longbridge has filed a motion in court seeking to take down material it contends is deceptive and misleading from websites that it claims unfairly steer reverse mortgage business toward Mutual.This is according to court filings reviewed by HousingWire’s Reverse Mortgage Daily (RMD). The robust filing clocks in at nearly 270 pages, and includes statements from an expert commissioned by Longbridge alongside a large number of visual exhibits.The filing seeks an order to “remove advertisement and related content” from the website of Review Counsel, LLC, and to “refrain from publishing any further false, misleading, and deceptive advertisements, comparisons, reviews, and other content relating to reverse mortgage products on the Review Counsel website while this action remains pending,” the Longbridge filing said.It highlights several web addresses at the Review Counsel website including a landing page that “spotlights” Mutual of Omaha, and multiple pages offering grades for several reverse mortgage companies. It is also seeking removal of pages from another website at issue from the original complaint, Advisory Institute, LLC, with similar demands.In its own response to the initial complaint filed in court earlier this week, Mutual of Omaha has denied the allegations that it misled potential customers, and filed a counterclaim demanding a jury trial and for litigation to determine monetary losses inflicted upon it by Longbridge’s alleged advertising activities.In its filing, Longbridge says that the websites at issue “falsely hold themselves out to the public as ‘independent’ third-party review platforms that offer ‘objective’ ratings and rankings of reverse mortgage providers, and aggressively advertise to ensure that they receive top placement within Google’s search results to lure senior citizens onto the fake review websites,” the company said in the filing.Longbridge contends that instead, both sites exist “solely to promote Mutual” by giving it “artificially inflated scores” in comparison to other reverse mortgage companies. Longbridge claims that Mutual has “conceded these websites are fatally deceptive,” saying a series of changes to both websites at issue have been made since initially filing its complaint this past September.“In the context of Mutual’s overall deceptive scheme, these changes are equivalent to rearranging chairs on the deck of the Titanic,” the filing said. “None of them will be permanent unless this court rules that Mutual cannot revert back to any of the admittedly false content it removed from Review Counsel and Advisory Institute, and none of them come close to addressing all of the false and misleading content that remains.”Longbridge also contends that Mutual and the websites “aggressively drive consumer traffic to their deceptive websites through elevating their content on Google,” including screenshots in an effort to prove its claims. It also claims in the filing that the content on the sites has changed multiple times in January.Longbridge added that it believes it is likely to prevail in court based on its claims, which it says warrant the requested injunction. The final determination, however, will be up to the presiding judge.The company enlisted expert testimony from Utpal Dholakia, the George R. Brown Chair of Marketing at Rice University, to further reinforce its claims. Dholakia said he was being compensated for his time in providing his opinion.Dholakia said that in his opinion, the websites at issue “are highly misleading to consumers,” adding the opinion that the ratings on the sites use “arbitrary and statistically unsound criteria.”In its response filing, Mutual of Omaha stated that Review Counsel “rates financial services companies offering a broad spectrum of products based on objective criteria that Review Counsel has developed and periodically verifies,’” adding that “any compensation received by Review Counsel or Advisory Institute does not affect the ratings or scores of the companies listed on those websites.”RMD reached out to legal representatives for both Longbridge Financial and Mutual of Omaha Mortgage, but did not receive an immediate response. The Longbridge filing said it will request the injunction formally in court on March 14.A previous court filing indicated that both companies may be attempting to reach a settlement.

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