Follow-up To Post about Cold Caslling Ruling By Dennis
This matters because folksย reallyย like to cold call property owners in an effort to buy their properties. But folks alsoย reallyย like to cold call FSPOs and expired listings in an effort to list their propertiesโ which is very different. Well inย Cofey v. Fast Easy Offer,ย 2025 WL 1591302 (D. Az. June 5, 2025) the Court held calls asking โHave you given up on selling yourโฆproperty?โ were not telephone solicitations because they did not offer to sell or rent anything to the call recipient. The court thoroughly analyzed the facts and law and determined the calls only related to futureย sellingย activity by the Plaintiff, not futureย buyingย activity. The fact that the caller would profit from a sale of the Plaintiffโs property was of no moment. The caller wanted to buy the propertyโ not sell something to the Plaintiff. As the Court summed up its analysis: The Court is sympathetic to Plaintiffโs skepticism regarding this buying/selling distinction, especially where the end result is the same: Defendants make money off Plaintiff. It is true that, construing Plaintiffโs factual allegations in the most favorable light, were Plaintiff to agree to use FEOโs services to sell her house, Defendants would ultimately benefit from an โeffective feeโ deducted from the offer price. In that sense, the calls and texts might constitute โsolicitationsโ in the colloquial sense of the word. But even if, in that hypothetical scenario, Plaintiff did not make as much money as she might have made selling her home without FEOโs services, she would still be making money and not spending a cent on purchasing any goods or services from Defendants. The calls and texts therefore cannot constitute โsolicitationsโ within the plain statutory meaning of the term, and it is this statutory meaning that must carry the day. Ultimately, Plaintiffโs โquarrel is with Congress, which did not defineโ solicitation โas malleably as [she] would have liked.โ Cf. Facebook, 592 U.S. at 409. This Court cannot rewrite what Congress wrote simply to make the outcome fairer to Plaintiff.