Another day, another lawsuit. Or as a reader who sent me news about this quipped, “Hagens Berman knows copy-paste.”
It appears that Hagens Berman, the powerhouse law firm behind Sitzer, Moehrl, and of course, Taylor v. Zillow, has filed another class action lawsuit. This time, the target is a mortgage bank named Veterans United.
Veterans United Home Loans is not a tech portal. It’s the nation’s largest VA lender, having financed over $19 billion in VA loan volume in 2024 alone. It was founded by two brothers, Brant and Brock Bukowsky, and is run by CEO Nathan Long. None of them are veterans. The company has no affiliation with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs whatsoever, despite a name, a logo, and a website that the plaintiffs allege are designed to make you think otherwise.
The media coverage can be found here (among other place):
A federal class action filed on February 18, 2026, in the Western District of Missouri takes aim at Veterans United Home Loans, its parent company Mortgage Research Center, LLC, and Realty Search Solutions, LLC, which operates as Veterans United Realty. The case, brought by three military veterans on behalf of a proposed nationwide class, lays out what it describes as a self-reinforcing scheme designed to trap borrowers in a closed loop of referrals and overpriced lending.
At the center of the allegations is a referral network of more than 5,000 real estate agents across the country. According to the lawsuit, Veterans United feeds these agents pre-qualified buyer leads. When a deal closes, the agents pay roughly 35 percent of their commission back to Veterans United. In exchange for the steady flow of leads, the agents are expected to steer clients exclusively to Veterans United for their mortgage — no shopping around, no competitive bids. Agents who break ranks, the filing claims, get cut off.
The three plaintiffs — Christian Peyton of Tennessee, Salem Zahn of Texas, and Ernest Easter of Pennsylvania — say they were never told about these arrangements. None were informed that their agent was required to push them toward Veterans United’s lending products or that a significant slice of the agent’s commission was going back to the company. Each plaintiff alleges they ended up overpaying for their loan as a result.
Now… there’s a whole “you lied to us about your brand” angle that is uninteresting to us, so I’m going to skip it. And since this lawsuit really isn’t about the industry itself yet, I won’t do my typical analysis. I will of course, give you the complaint if you have a strange need to read legal filings.
The reason for us to pay attention to this lawsuit is the playbook and the legal argument made here. It substantially repeats the playbook from Taylor v. Zillow. Hence the “copy-paste” quip.
There always was a danger to real estate brokers and agents for using these types of lead-generation services. Now, that danger seems more real every day.
What I thought I might do as a service to my readers, many of whom are brokers and agents, is to point out some issues and maybe make suggestions (Free consulting! Worth what you paid!) for how to deal with them.
I can’t avoid saying things here that sound like legal advice. They are not legal advice; they are opinions of a blogger. Please consult your attorney for actual legal advice.
Let’s do this like Buddhists—calmly and with no violence.
