NASHVILLE—Mortgage software provider Optimal Blue and nearly 30 major lenders—including Rocket Mortgage, CrossCountry Mortgage, and United Wholesale Mortgage—are facing a federal lawsuit accusing them of conspiring to inflate mortgage fees for millions of U.S. homebuyers, Reuters reported.
Filed this week in Nashville, the proposed class action alleges that homeowners in Tennessee, Minnesota, Delaware, and Rhode Island were harmed by a price-fixing scheme in which lenders used Optimal Blue’s software to share nonpublic data on interest rates and fees, enabling them to coordinate pricing in violation of federal antitrust laws.
The lawsuit claims the data-sharing scheme drove up mortgage costs nationwide and "transformed the American dream of homeownership into a financial nightmare," Reuters said.
Attorney Robin van der Meulen, representing the homeowner plaintiffs, in a statement said they looked forward to "holding accountable unfair competitors and unfair competition, no matter the mechanism," Reuters said.
The lawsuit describes Plano, Texas-based Optimal Blue as "the dominant market intelligence and pricing software provider in the U.S. mortgage industry."
Lenders pay for subscriptions to access its business analytics tools, which allegedly have allowed them to monitor competitors’ pricing and adjust their own rates, Reuters said.
According to the lawsuit, Optimal Blue’s software provides “daily, nonpublic, real-time, loan-level data analyzed at the local level” and is used to set prices for more than one-third of all U.S. mortgages.
The proposed class covers borrowers nationwide who obtained residential loans priced through Optimal Blue’s tools between October 2021 and the present. The plaintiffs are seeking unspecified monetary damages and a court order to halt the alleged price-fixing scheme involving Optimal Blue and the participating lenders, Reuters said.