Miami attorney Avi Kaufman filed the class action lawsuit.

Luxury South Florida real estate brokerage RelatedISG International Realty has been accused of breaking the Telephone Consumer Protection Act by sending unsolicited texts promoting its services and listings.

RelatedISG, based in Miami-Dade County and created from the partnership of developer The Related Group and sales and marketing firm International Sales Group LLC, sells residential and commercial real estate and markets projects, some of them still pre-construction.

RelatedISG allegedly sent the unsolicited text messages using an automatic telephone dialing system to recipients in South Florida in violation of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, the 1991 law adopted to protect from abusive telemarketing. The law was adopted with phone calls and faxes in mind but now it applies to texts, too.

RelatedISG and International Sales Group didn't return a request for comment, and The Related Group declined comment.

The plaintiff is Manuel Gonzalez, although little information is provided on who he is aside that he lives in Miami-Dade. He asserts that RelatedISG sent similar text messages to the messages  he got to thousands of recipients, also without their consent.

Gonzalez received four texts between June 29 and July 4  from a short phone number promoting homes for sale starting in the mid-$300,000s in Southwest Miami-Dade, according to the complaint filed Thursday in federal court for the Southern District of Florida.

“Related Realty's unsolicited texts were a nuisance that aggravated plaintiff, wasted his time, invaded his privacy, diminished the value of the cellular services he paid for, caused him to temporarily lose the use and enjoyment of his cell phone, and caused wear and tear to his phone's data, memory, software, hardware, and battery,” Kaufman attorney Avi Kaufman wrote in the complaint.

He declined to comment further when reached by phone.

The lawsuit seeks an injunction for RelatedISG to stop sending the texts, an award of actual and/or statutory damages, an order certifying this case as a class action and appointing Gonzalez as class representative, and a jury trial.

Erica Rutner, a partner in Lash & Goldberg in Miami who represents defendants in TCPA lawsuits, said she has seen an increase in lawsuits filed under the act in Florida's Southern District, against real estate companies and other businesses.

That's because of a July 10, 2015, ruling by the Federal Communications Commission, which implements and enforces the TCPA, that made it easier to bring lawsuits under the act, Rutner said. The ruling broadened the definition of an automatic telephone dialing system, which must be used for a defendant to be held liable under the act.

“The statutory definition of an ADTS, or an automatic telephone dialing system, is defined as equipment that has the capacity to store or produce telephone numbers to be called using a random or sequential number generator. … It's sort of a convoluted definition. It gave rise to a lot of confusion in the courts as to what type of equipment counts as an ADTS. In 2015, the FCC determined that in their view of the way ADTS is defined, any equipment that's used to make calls or send text messages qualifies as an auto-dialer as long as it has a potential future capability to dial,” Rutner said.

That qualified even smartphones as auto-dialers, she added.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in a March review said the FCC ruling would subject millions of consumers to TCPA liability, not just companies, and told the FCC to re-evaluate its decision, according to Rutner.

“Since we don't have that (ADTS) definition yet, there's still a lot of ambiguity in what direction the law is going to go in,” she said. “That's maybe why we are seeing a lot of these TCPA cases.”