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CoStar Group has long controlled much of the commercial real estate listing market. A new class action filed in April 2026 alleges that dominance was built and maintained through anticompetitive means. The complaint, brought by a Brooklyn brokerage on behalf of all similarly situated CoStar customers, alleges two principal mechanisms: long-term non-compete agreements with CBRE, JLL, and Cushman and Wakefield that prevented those firms from launching competing data services, and contractual terms that effectively transfer ownership of customer-submitted photographs and listing data to CoStar the moment they are uploaded.

The case has significant legal momentum behind it. Nearly identical antitrust claims brought by Crexi survived two rounds at the Ninth Circuit and are heading toward trial after the Supreme Court declined to intervene in March 2026. The complaint also notes that CoStar quietly added a class action waiver to its customer terms in February 2025, shortly after the Ninth Circuit signaled it would allow the Crexi claims to proceed.

The comparison to the RealPage litigation, which cost landlords nearly $360 million in settlements, is hard to avoid. Both cases center on a platform that aggregated industry data in ways alleged to suppress competition, and both carry implications well beyond the named parties. CoStar’s business model is focused on gathering and protecting proprietary data, if they are no longer allowed to do that due to a court order, it could change their entire business model and alter how the industry gets its information.

Let’s go!

🧱 Framework for framing
MIT researchers have developed a new computational framework that makes topology optimization, a technique capable of reducing material use in structures by up to 90%, practical enough for real-world construction of buildings and bridges. The approach allows engineers to apply constraints to algorithmically generated designs, limiting complexity by controlling factors like the number of connections at each joint, minimum part sizes, and material selection, so that the resulting structures are actually buildable on time and budget rather than theoretically optimal but impossibly intricate. The researchers demonstrated the framework by generating timber, steel, and hybrid truss designs for a bridge near Buffalo, New York, showing that different material combinations offer meaningful tradeoffs between carbon emissions and structural performance that engineers can now optimize for simultaneously.

🦿 Non-human help
Flagstar Bank, the $87 billion-asset lender that absorbed New York Community Bank's infrastructure, has completed a major technology overhaul, consolidating the two banks' legacy systems into a single proprietary platform called S2, and filed a provisional patent for a generative AI system built specifically for regulated financial services environments. The complexity of integrating NYCB's sprawling portfolio alongside heightened regulatory scrutiny the company to build rather than buy, an unusual approach for a regional bank of Flagstar's size. Analysts have suggested the platform could become a revenue stream if licensed to smaller institutions that lack the resources to build comparable infrastructure themselves

🛢️ Data and oil
As data center backlash spreads across the country, the California Resources Corporation is betting that siting a 600,000-square-foot data center campus inside its Elk Hills oil field will sidestep community opposition by keeping it more than a mile from the nearest homes on land already zoned for heavy industry. The project is part of a growing trend of locating data centers near oil and gas fields, which offer underutilized power infrastructure. For CRC, which has been diversifying into carbon capture as California phases out fossil fuels, the data center represents a way to generate revenue from a declining asset while creating jobs and tax revenue in a county where oil employment has fallen by half since 2015.

Propmodo Technology is edited by Franco Faraudo with contributions from readers like you and the Propmodo team.

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