Canada’s largest real estate board sues listings website Mongohouse for $2.1M
TORONTO — The Toronto Real Estate Board is suing property listings website Mongohouse for $2 million, alleging that the anonymously-run page is illegally accessing, copying and distributing proprietary data.
The board, which is the largest in Canada and represents more than 50,000 realtors across the Greater Toronto Area, filed the lawsuit last month in Federal Court asking for an immediate and permanent injunction for the popular website to be taken down.
In the statement of claim, TREB alleges that Mongohouse participates in an “orchestrated strategy to avoid and elude” the board’s multiple attempts over the past two years to shut it down.
It claims the website is infringing on the board’s copyrights by “employing various techniques to illegally data scrape” information that it provides to its fee-paying members through its internal multiple-listings service (MLS). This includes data such as new property listings, descriptions, sold prices and photography.