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Amrock Ordered to Pay $706 Million in Trade Secrets Case

Amrock Ordered to Pay $706 Million in Trade Secrets Case

(Bloomberg) -- Title Source maliciously used trade secrets of a real estate data-analytics company, a Texas jury found, and has been ordered to pay $706.2 million in actual and punitive damages to HouseCanary Inc.

Texas state-court jurors in San Antonio, where HouseCanary has an office, unanimously found that Title Source, now known as Amrock, failed to comply with a master software license and non-disclosure agreement related to proprietary real estate market analytic tools developed by the San Francisco-based tech firm.

After a six-week trial, the jury awarded $33.8 million in actual damages and $67.6 million in punitive damages for Title Source’s violation of HouseCanary’s master software license and non-disclosure agreement, according to court records.

Jurors also said Title Source should pay HouseCanary $201.6 million for the value of the tech firm’s trade secrets at the time of the misappropriation, along with $403.2 million in exemplary damages for that conduct.

HouseCanary, founded in 2014, sells real estate analytics software that crunches more than 40 years of data into tools to define and forecast real estate values and market influences. The firm counts Alphabet Inc. Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt’s family office, former Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker’s PSP Growth/PSP Capital and Alpha Edison among its investors.

Amrock is a unit of Rock Holdings, which also owns Quicken Loans. Quicken said in a statement Thursday it has no liability in the case.

The case is Title Source Inc. v. HouseCanary Inc., 2016CI06300, 73rd Judicial District Court of Bexar County, Texas (San Antonio).

To contact the reporter on this story: Laurel Brubaker Calkins in Houston at laurel@calkins.us.com.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Elizabeth Wollman at ewollman@bloomberg.net, Joe Schneider

©2018 Bloomberg L.P.