Maribel De Dios v. International Realty & Investm, No. 08-56288 (9th Cir. 2011)
Annotate this CasePlaintiffs, various tenants of Norton Community Apartments, L.P. ("Norton"), sued Norton over rent disputes and other claims. At issue was whether International Realty & Investments, Inc. ("International Realty"), the agent appointed by a receiver to manage and collect rents on the Norton property, was a debt collector under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act ("Act"). Also at issue was whether the district court's sanctions against plaintiffs' counsel for filing multiple identical actions and the district court's award of attorneys' fees to defendant for opposing plaintiffs' disqualification motions was an abuse of discretion. The court held that International Realty, as the residential property manager in this case, was not a debt collector because it acquired the debt before default and thus exempted it, as the manager, from the Act. The court also held that the district court did not abuse its discretion in sanctioning plaintiffs' counsel where plaintiffs' counsel filed nine separate but identical actions for alleged violations of the Act and the district court did not abuse its discretion in awarding sanctions where there was no legal basis for the motion to disqualify defense counsel.
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