C.D. Cal. Court Holds Overnight Delivery Companies Covered By RESPA

Class Action RESPA

On March 21, in a suit brought by borrowers who had paid overnight delivery fees at closing, the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California held that the overnight delivery services provided by certain delivery companies to a parent company of various escrow companies were “settlement services” under RESPA and concluded that borrowers had pleaded facts sufficient to establish that defendant parent company may have violated RESPA by accepting marketing fees from certain delivery companies in exchange for “referring”—via its escrow subsidiaries—overnight delivery business to those delivery companies. Henson v. Fidelity Nat’l Fin. Inc., No. 14-cv-01240, slip op. (C.D. Cal. Mar. 21, 2014). In this case, the defendant parent company’s allegedly required its escrow subsidiaries to use certain delivery companies in connection with loan closings. Defendant parent company, in turn, allegedly received a marketing fee from those delivery companies based on the volume of business it sent to the delivery companies through its escrow subsidiaries. On the parent company’s motion to dismiss, the court held that the overnight delivery service was a “settlement service” under RESPA given that Regulation X specifically lists a “delivery” as a settlement service if provided in connection with a real estate settlement. The court further held that a “referral” under RESPA need not be linked to particular transactions and thus that a RESPA violation could occur where a master agreement required subsidiaries to use certain delivery service providers in exchange for a marketing fee received by a parent company. However, the court agreed with the defendant that the borrowers failed to adequately plead either a split of an unearned fee or that defendant did not perform any service in exchange for the marketing fee it received. Thus the court denied, in part, and granted, in part, the defendant’s motion to dismiss.