PHOTO: The Agency Group took the company behind The North Agency to court over its branding.
It pointed to The North Agency’s website, Instagram account and profile pages on real estate websites and argued consumers on Sydney’s well-heeled northern beaches might be confused about whether the two businesses were linked.
The court heard The Agency Group made sales in the northern beaches region totalling $239 million between the financial year ending June 30, 2018, and the end of March 2023.
In a judgment delivered on Wednesday, Justice Ian Jackman dismissed The Agency Group’s lawsuit.
The freshly minted North Agency launched its website and hung signs at its Dee Why office in March, while The Agency brand has been in use since 2016 and the group has offices in Manly and Neutral Bay.
Jackman said The Agency Group had promoted its business on its website using registered trademarks featuring the words “The Agency” and the letter A “against a dark background, such as a dark sky at dusk”.
Meanwhile, the company behind The North Agency promoted its business on its own website using its name and an N logo “against a dark background, including a dark sky at dusk”.
But Jackman said it was “fanciful” to suggest The Agency had a distinctive reputation in the appearance of its website, “consisting of the use of a dark background, particularly including a dark sky at dusk” because a dark background was “an obvious and commonplace way of making light coloured lettering stand out”.
Jackman accepted evidence given by the directors of the company behind The North Agency that they did not regard The Agency as a key competitor and “The Agency Group did not cross their minds at all in the process of deciding on the name or the branding for their new agency”.
The ASX-listed Agency Group sold 5709 properties totalling $5.9 billion in the financial year ending June 30, 2022, the court heard, and received $72.7 million in revenue.
The group operates 26 offices in NSW at 21 locations and uses registered business names at various offices, including The Agency North West, The Agency Northern NSW and The Agency Upper North Shore.
The rival North Agency, by contrast, had one office and six employees at the time of the court hearing this month.
Jackman said there were “fundamental difficulties” with the allegation The North Agency used its name and logo in a way which was deceptively similar to The Agency’s trademarks, and he did not regard potential consumer confusion about a link between the businesses as “a real risk”.
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