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May 11, 2009 The Honorable Christine A. Varney By email: jeanie.meikle@usdoj.gov Dear Assistant Attorney General Varney: We write to congratulate you on your appointment to the position of Assistant Attorney General of DoJ’s Antitrust Division and your announcement today of plans to restore an aggressive enforcement policy against organizations that use their market dominance to elbow out competitors or to keep them from gaining market share. We also write to make some constructive suggestions on areas where we believe a more aggressive antitrust enforcement policy is particularly warranted. By way of background, we are a national consumer advocacy organization serving individual homeowners. We are concerned with antitrust violations in the real estate services sector. We have worked with DoJ Antitrust Division staff on numerous cases in that area over the past years. The DoJ staff we have worked with are extremely competent and dedicated, and they have done an excellent job of protecting the rights of current and future homeowners, especially given the large number of cases in this area and the limitations in DoJ resources. The same can also be said for their FTC counterparts, who have also taken the lead on a number of cases also involving violations of competition policy in the real estate services sector. The problem has been that organizations in the real estate services sector have been violating our antitrust and competition laws on an ongoing basis, testing the combined resources of the DoJ and the FTC. To date many of the sanctions imposed have not succeeded in discouraging other real estate service organizations from the same or similar violations. Many of the violations relate to the use of the Internet, an area where you have excellent expertise and background (today 90% of home buyers initiate their home searches on the Internet). We urge you to consider ways to increase the number of staff allocated to this effort and to consider strengthened sanctions in the future in order to reduce the incidence of future violations. I have pasted below our September 30, 2004 recommendations to the Antitrust Modernization Commission in support of the Commission’s statutory responsibility: (1) to examine whether the need exists to
modernize the antitrust laws and to identify and study related
issues; Many of our 2004 recommendations are still relevant to today’s marketplace and the Antitrust Division’s mission. We suggest a meeting with you or your staff to discuss areas where antitrust enforcement in the real estate services sector could be strengthened. Please let me know if that would be possible. We are also among the 300 members of the Consumer Federation of America, and I’ve chaired CFA’s Antitrust Subcommittee in recent years. CFA has some excellent background on their website antitrust enforcement as it pertains to many areas, including real estate services. We believe that CFA’s input could be very helpful to the DoJ Antitrust Division as you refine your focus for more aggressive antitrust enforcement. Sincerely,
Bruce Hahn Serving the interests of the nation's 75 million
homeowners and future homeowners since 1984.
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