Gomez v. Corro

Background

Andres Gomez sued real estate agents Paulo Corro and Arturo Ramirez, doing business as Corro Ramiriz. Gomez alleged that their website was inaccessible to people with visual disabilities, preventing him from navigating the site to obtain information about houses for sale in Northern California. He asserted claims under Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and California’s Unruh Civil Rights Act.

The defendants moved to dismiss, arguing in part that they did not own or operate a physical location and pointing to Gomez’s testimony in another case that he had been unemployed for a decade and could not qualify for a loan to purchase real estate. The court denied that motion on January 10, 2022, because it raised factual questions beyond the allegations in the complaint.

The court later ordered Gomez to explain why the ADA claim should not be dismissed for lack of jurisdiction and to provide the factual basis for the claim. In his response, Gomez stated that “window shopping and dreaming about real estate” was a hobby and that he valued reading the information in the website’s real estate listings. He also stated that he did not intend to visit the defendants’ physical office. The court understood his response to confirm that the only Corro Ramiriz service he sought to access was the listing information on the website.

Court’s analysis

The court relied on Ninth Circuit authority stating that the ADA covers actual, physical places where goods or services are open to the public, and that there must be some connection between the challenged website feature and a physical place. The court discussed the Ninth Circuit’s decision in Robles v. Domino’s Pizza, where an inaccessible website and application interfered with ordering food from physical Domino’s restaurants. The website and application therefore facilitated access to services provided at physical locations.

The court found Gomez’s allegations different. Gomez treated the real estate listing information itself as the service, rather than claiming that the website interfered with access to services offered at a physical Corro Ramiriz location. He had disclaimed any intention to visit the physical office and did not seek to use the website to obtain a separate good or service beyond the website’s information. The court stated that Gomez had not identified Ninth Circuit authority allowing a Title III ADA claim based solely on inaccessible website information when the inaccessibility did not separately block access to goods or services at a public accommodation.

Ruling

The court concluded that Gomez had not stated an ADA claim and dismissed that claim without leave to amend. The court declined supplemental jurisdiction—the federal court’s authority to hear a related state-law claim—over the Unruh Act claim under 28 U.S.C. § 1367. The Unruh Act claim was dismissed without prejudice.