MLS Maximus
Maximal public duty, not maximal institutional power. A proposal for the MLS to finally choose the role it already plays
Several of life’s greatest gifts begin implicitly.
We know this from society’s most beloved books and films. The most satisfying stories have extreme ups and downs — characters experiencing the myriad of reasons why their relationship should never work — only to find in the end that “the heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.”
I watched Parent Trap with my kids the other night and was reminded of this afresh. From first introductions, we all know Nick & Elizabeth belong together. Everything about them is evidence they are implicitly ‘meant to be.’ But the real power comes from the closing scene, when Nick follows Elizabeth back to London and makes his intentions to be with her explicit. [It’s worth a quick watch — if not to prove my point, at least for the nostalgia.]
But, imagine watching the movie again except, this time, it ends before Nick ever makes the London trip to reconcile with Elizabeth. Instead, they part ways and the credits roll. Or worse, Liz leaves and Nick decides to go back to Meredith Blake (whose name remains a byword in our home) because it makes more sense to be with her, practically speaking. London, after all, is a long ways from Napa Valley.
It kind of ruins it, no? So much so, I’d say an unresolved and non-intuitive ending is worse than a tragedy.
Now, what hath love, human nature, and 11-year-old Lindsay Lohan to do with MLSs?
Everything.
Okay. Not quite everything.
But, while it might not be a love story, like it or not, the MLS has been in a relationship with the American public since May 2000, when NAR approved the first IDX policy, giving birth to public MLS data feeds on broker websites.
In the 26 years since, the relationship between MLSs and the public has been implicit, yet powerful, as it has fundamentally changed how the public orients to the US housing market. Pre-2000, access to listing inventory, property data, and market insights were gated and confidential, accessible only by working with a licensed agent. Back then, in a very real sense, the vast majority of consumers were dependent upon hiring an agent if they wanted to buy a house. The idea of finding a house on your own and navigating most of the home buying journey independently was genuinely laughable.
Look at the headlines today and it’s remarkable how much the tables have turned. Now, with the public having nearly unlimited access to listings, property specifics, and market insights, there have never been more questions about the value of hiring an agent. Add to that tools like Claude and ChatGPT, a growing number of early adopters are feeling emboldened to navigate the buying and/or selling process with just the help of an AI assistant.
How did the public get so informed and educated?
In large part, thanks to the MLSs. Not only have they maintained the purest set of housing data in the entire world, but they have made it as transparent and accessible as possibly imaginable over the past two decades. With a gift as valuable as this, I would expect to see more people wearing “I <3 My MLS” paraphernalia in my favorite downtown coffee shops. Alas, I’ve yet to see that trend catch on. I suspect some of this is owed to the fact that many MLSs are a bit uncomfortable with their implicit relationship to the public.
Why might that be, you ask?
Because the MLS never purposefully chose this relationship. It sort of just happened.
I don’t mean that to be trite, either. I actually believe that’s the most honest definition of how we got where we are today.
Go back to May 2000 and you won’t find any press releases about MLSs adopting IDX as some great act of consumer conviction. It was largely the path of least resistance. The internet had arrived, consumers were flocking to it, and cutting-edge brokers wanted ways to meet consumers on the new digital frontier. Syndicating listing data to broker websites was simply the easy thing to do. But nobody ever stood up and declared, “The MLS now exists to serve the public.” The public just started showing up, and — at least until recently — no one ever asked them to leave.
And why would they? Ask any honest agent and they’ll tell you syndicating listings on the internet was great for business. Advertising became much more efficient, demand increased, homes sold faster, and for the first time agents and brokerages were able to start collecting better analytics and insights on listing performance that could serve both their clients and their businesses.
Even so, after 26 years of the American public having near complete access to MLS data, the relationship between MLSs and the public has never been made explicit. Go read the mission statements and governing documents of the MLSs in this fight — I have — and you’ll find cooperation, standards enforcement, database management, professional development, licensing and use policies, and privacy rules. All worthy commitments to the members. But what I have not found in any of them is the public named as someone the institution exists to serve — a sentence like we exist to make the market publicly visible. Let me know if I missed one and I’ll gladly post a correction. But the fact I couldn’t easily find an example is remarkable.
Remarkable in the sense that for over two decades the public transparency and accessibility of MLS data has rewired how our entire country imagines buying and selling homes. And it’s done so without ever being written down.
This past year, the MLS’s relationship to the public has finally come under the scrutiny of the professionals who support the MLS financially and supply it with its precious data. The call for the MLS to return to its B2B roots is simultaneously a challenge to break off its current relationship to the public. And while such a move intuitively feels wrong to many MLSs, they have no written promises or obligations to the public that they can point to or reach for. Therein lies the trouble with implicit relationships. They work beautifully right up until they’re tested. And they are absolutely being tested: in federal courtrooms, on Capitol Hill, and in MLS rulebooks being revised and rewritten as we speak.
The Question Being Forced
After months in this debate, I’m both surprised and pleased to find that nobody in these battles is opposed to the MLS. In fact, everybody wants the MLS to not just survive, but to thrive as the complete, current, and trustworthy source of truth for our industry.
Zillow wants it because its entire business is built on displaying MLS feeds. That’s, at least in large part, why it’s suing MRED to keep their feeds alive. The Consumer Federation of America wants the MLS protected, which is what their July 1 letter to the DOJ and FTC is about. As of late July, even Congress is taking a closer look at what’s happening within the MLS world — a House Judiciary subcommittee summoned the CEOs of Compass and MRED to Washington, with an August 5 deadline to schedule briefings.
That said, you may be surprised that Compass — who so often gets maligned as the enemy of the MLS — wants the MLSs’ record fully stocked. Robert Reffkin has said repeatedly that he supports mandatory submission so the MLS can remain the source of truth for comps. The largest brokerage in the country is not trying to deprive MLSs of listings. Case in point: under its MRED partnership, Compass contributes its Private Exclusives into the MLS. All to say, merely keeping listings out of the MLS is not their primary intent.
So if everybody wants the MLS to be the single source of truth, what is this fight really about?
It’s about the audience, and who gets access to the complete data the MLS houses. The dividing question is this: should the complete data the MLS houses be accessible exclusively to the paying professionals inside its walls, or available to everyone the market touches?
We must admit, those, like Reffkin, who believe the MLS should return to its B2B cooperative beginnings have history on their side. For 50 years, the MLS’s client was the agent — the confidential book, the members-only data, the fines for sharing it with outsiders. By going back to those origins, the MLS would cease to have any relationship to the public via the display or marketing of listings, which is really what Reffkin and those in his camp want. As I understand it, what Reffkin rejects is the MLS’s public layer as an obligation upon brokers and their agents. He argues the MLS has crossed the line by conflating cooperatively sharing listings between brokers and publicly marketing those same listings on the MLS’s terms to the entire internet. He says he’d support mandatory submission and gladly open Compass’s private inventory to all agents across all brokerages — in exchange for assurance that the MLSs won’t mandate public syndication of that data. Let the MLS be complete and unfettered for professionals and their clients, but leave it exclusively up to sellers and their agents to determine what the public sees.
Changing my tune a bit from a couple months back: on this point, I do believe him. More than that, I think it’s a serious position (and not just because it’s also the position that Rob Hahn argues for honorably). It’s historically grounded, rational, and coherent. It’s not cheating or sabotage, especially by a strict reading of the existing rules. And it’s a genuine theory of who the MLS is for: its duty runs to its members, and the public gets whatever the members individually choose to show — nothing more.
Practically speaking, it may even be the relationship that makes sense.
Two Bets
Since MRED cut Zillow’s feed in May, our industry is well beyond theorizing about these issues. We’re in full-on experimentation mode.
The Member-Only Bet
In April, MRED opened its membership — and with it, its decade-old Private Listing Network — to any licensed agent in the country willing to join. Though the partnership nearly lives in infamy today, it was at this point Compass announced it would contribute its national inventory and subsidizing the cost of membership for their first 100,000 agents who signed up to help MRED go national. Importantly, under MRED’s published mechanics, a listing can sit in the PLN indefinitely, be marketed privately, take unlimited price cuts, and then debut publicly as a fresh listing when the seller decides to go ‘active.’ Days on market never accrue during the private phase. Private-phase price changes also never enter the history. Perhaps that sounds great to the individual seller and agent. But what about for the agent running a CMA for their client or the appraiser pulling comps for a lender? Those members (and the clients they serve) are no longer getting a complete picture. Sure, the record keeps the final outcome, but it loses the story. And a record that loses its story doesn’t lie, per se — it goes mute, which is actually worse, because the silence reads as normal. Nobody interrogates a comp that looks normal.
Building on MRED, in July, Bright MLS — one of the nation’s largest MLSs — took things further. Under their updated rules, sellers can suppress price, address, photos, days on market, and price history from consumer-facing sites on fully syndicated listings. But pay attention to the design underneath: Bright simultaneously reaffirmed mandatory submission — every listing must be entered into the MLS within two days, with a new “Registered” status that satisfies the requirement without triggering any public exposure at all. Contribution to their MLS is more compulsory than ever. But exposure to the public? It’s à la carte, field by field. Admittedly, these tools don’t damage the completeness of the dataset — at least not like MRED’s PLN that doesn’t track DOM and price history. At least with Bright’s requirements, everything stays intact and visible inside the MLS. But the data is walled, creating a two-tier market for the facts: professionals get the whole record, consumers read a curated one, and a buyer’s only path back to the missing facts runs through contacting/hiring a professional.
Again, none of this is corruption. No rules are being violated, everything is disclosed, and I’m sure these MLS execs would tell you, credibly, that they’re offering sellers options while still protecting data integrity where it counts. But it’s a bet, placed openly: the cooperative pull back data transparency that’s been foundational in its relationship to the public while still keeping everything that makes the cooperative matter to its professional members.
The Public Embracing Bet
A different set of MLSs has looked at the same pressure to pull back from their relationship to the public and refused.
Northwest MLS has, if anything, doubled down on its duties to the public. They’ve insisted listings marketed anywhere must be available through the MLS — a line they’ve held even through nine months of negotiation with Compass. Even when Compass sued them, the NWMLS counterclaimed that Compass’s 3PM strategy creates “a two-tiered system that limits access.”
CRMLS, another of the nation’s largest MLSs, declined the NAR’s ‘delayed-marketing’ category outright, stating CRMLS “opposes private listings and information silos, which harm marketplace transparency.” Likewise, NorthstarMLS refused the delay marketing guidance, stating it “conflicts with our mission to provide accurate, reliable data to all participants.”
Two things of note about this diverging path between MLSs.
First, there is no safe harbor in either bet. MRED partnered with Compass and got sued by Zillow, then summoned by Congress. NWMLS refused to accommodate private listings and got sued by Compass. Both roads lead to federal court — the only real choice an MLS has is what it’s defending when the lawsuit arrives.
Second, the public embracing position has no name. It’s being defended lawsuit by lawsuit, policy memo by policy memo, and as a series of stubborn local decisions — which makes each defense look like obstinacy instead of principle. By way of example: NWMLS, which is suing and countersuing right now to defend the public’s access to all available listings, has a mission statement that mentions no one but its members.
I’d like to change that, and propose that these brave MLSs are paving the way for MLS Maximus. They are defending — and even advancing — maximal transparency, market usefulness, and data integrity.
With that, I do not believe MLS Maximus is my invention. It’s a name for the bet a significant number within the industry has already placed on the importance of the MLS embracing its role in the public sphere. MLS Maximus unites and aids in deliberate moves in this direction.
The Hurdles
Like any bet, MLS Maximus has its own objections it must survive.
One of the most common that I hear is that data points like days on market aren’t even facts about the property. Bedrooms and lot lines are property facts, but DOM is a fact about how long someone has tried to sell. Investment bankers never disclose how long a company’s been shopped. So why does a buyer have any right to a seller’s marketing history?
I grant that DOM and square footage are fundamentally different. But that’s not really the point. The MLS was never merely a registry of houses — it’s a registry of market events. An appraisal doesn’t price a house in the abstract. It prices this house, transacted in this market, at this time, and the clock and the price trail are facts about that event. Accurate property valuation depends on these data points.
Just as importantly, buying a home isn’t M&A between sophisticated parties with diligence teams backed with elite education and degrees. Residential real estate is a consumer market where an ordinary family’s largest transaction is financed by a federally backed mortgage and priced through an appraisal system that requires the record to be whole. Sure, today nearly half of listings take a price cut, and sellers often experience the public trail as a scarlet letter. But that stat cuts the other way, too: if 45% of listings reduce price, a reduction is normal, and suppressing the signal market-wide doesn’t remove the market softness — it just removes everyone’s ability to discern what normal is.
As for the seller who genuinely just wants to test the waters without the clock, an honest licensee already has an answer, and it’s one this industry hates to say out loud: that’s what FSBO is for. Test it yourself, outside of the bounds maintained by professionals, with no record and no obligations. But when you’re ready to actually market, hire the pros and accept the trade-offs that comes with it.
In this regard, sellers have always had choice. But, if we care about the integrity of fiduciary responsibility and serving the public’s interest, what can’t exist is a licensed professional apparatus with an amateur’s obligations. Any given member of the public may be able to wire their own house. But they cannot hire a licensed electrician who blatantly disregards building code.
The one carve-out for private listings that survives is for genuine privacy and safety situations, where limited exposure exists for the person’s exceptional situation. But exceptions are different from building MLS tolerances that enable and even encourage licensed professionals to implement marketing strategies that undermine data transparency and accessibility.
What MLS Maximus Is
So here is MLS Maximus, in three commitments.
First, an access commitment, written into governance rather than left to inertia: every listing is broadly available to every buyer — represented or not. This written commitment matters greatly because the distance between “we happen to syndicate” and “we exist to make the market visible publicly” is the distance between a function that can be quietly unwound, field by field, and one that has to be openly repealed.
Second, a display data threshold: a minimum public record that includes the listing’s existence and address, its current price, its price history, its status, and its days on market. At minimum, these five data points will follow a listing wherever it’s marketed. The photos, the marketing copy, and the staging narrative can all be discretionary. But the clock follows the marketing. The moment a listing is being marketed anywhere, its market time starts and its price history records — and both travel with it into the public record. That’s precisely the rule the current implementations invert.
Third, an identity commitment that names the public facing good MLSs serve. Northstar has already demonstrated this, at least in part. When it refused delayed marketing, its reason wasn’t a policy preference, it was that the option conflicted with its mission. That’s a declared identity and purpose that brought needed clarity to Northstar’s position in a rules fight. What remains unwritten is the public version of that sentence. Twenty-six years of implied relationship, and in every MLS mission statement I can find, the public is still waiting to be named.
Why these commitments and not the other versions of “MLS, do more”? Mostly, because the alternatives all break the machine.
Bruce Ailion made the elegant case in my comments for pricing the access — portals paying to ride the pipe, on the Georgia gas model — and my problem with it comes from history Bruce himself recounts: the portals did pay feed fees once, and the toll booth dissolved when they registered as brokerages and became entitled to IDX at member rates. As I see it, we can’t rebuild the existing system without charging some participants more than others for the same access, which is exactly the discrimination the post-DOJ/NAR settlement rules prohibit.
Others say just mandate the record and give total freedom to the marketing — but a reporting mandate divorced from marketing function is enforced by exactly one tool: fines. And fines make the cooperative its members’ adversaries.
Bright’s rulebook offers the newest position: enable every option, police nothing on how sellers and their agents choose to display data, since it’s not the MLS’s role to say. A commenter on my last piece, Kurtis Cicalo, named the MLS’s true role better than I had: the steward of real estate data integrity. And that’s my problem here — a steward that declares neutrality about the MLS’s public transparency has resigned the stewardship.
Which leaves duty — and my argument for this is fundamentally pragmatic, not pious. Keep the MLS in the public marketing business, deliberately, and every price drop and status change keeps flowing into the shared record as a byproduct of self-interest — the way it has since IDX shipped. Data accuracy follows marketing necessity. No fines as the driving compliance engine. No needing to police all the time. The public duty and the data integrity incentives point the same direction, and that alignment is the entire design.
The Stakes
The MLS as a cooperative’s legal and moral credibility rests on one story: its member-owned rails exist so the market works for everyone in it. That’s what MLS lawyers argue in courtrooms — a database jointly run by competitors survives antitrust scrutiny because the cooperation produces public benefits nobody could produce alone. It’s a true story, when the institution behaves like it’s true. The first bet keeps the cooperative’s form and trades away the story’s foundation: the MLS looks like a tool to serve the entire market, but actually it acts just like any other gated platform.
And gatekeeping — hiding inventory, making it harder for consumers to access market data they’ve enjoyed for decades without the necessity of hiring an agent — is the very thing that invites both journalistic and legal scrutiny. The headlines about greedy brokers and MLSs hiding listings are coming. The CFA’s July 1 letter already dropped. The congressional briefings, examining whether private listing structures insulate companies from competition “at the expense of consumers,” must be scheduled by August 5.
Point is, when an institution’s conduct and its publicly accepted classification drift apart, the state eventually re-derives the classification from the conduct. Nobody is absorbing more of that blowback than Rebecca Jensen — sued by Zillow, always under watch by the DOJ, and now summoned by a House subcommittee. Three fronts, one operator. That is what it looks like when an institution’s public function gets determined from outside instead of chosen from inside.
One more concession, before someone raises it: isn’t Compass International Holdings too big for any MLS to reasonably stand up to? On that, NWMLS would like to have a word. But, seriously, I know there’s concern about MLSs offending if not losing one of their most valuable customers: CIH. Even so, abandoning the public to accommodate their strategy is a worse alternative. MLS, Do Less hands the giant everything on day one. What an MLS Maximus approach — backed by a declared, codified duty — actually does against an actor that size is decide which side of the antitrust caption the cooperative is standing on when the state arrives — essential infrastructure, or co-defendant — and whether the rest of the membership still believe the cooperative is theirs. A written mission might not be enough to stop a giant. But it makes accommodation visible and costly instead of quiet and cumulative. Sometimes that’s all a smaller institution can do. It is not nothing.
Make the Trip
Finally, ask agents what actually enrages them about the current arrangement, and it isn’t the MLS or MLS rules about public marketing. It’s fifteen years of watching their listings generate demand that gets sold back to them.
I hear that grievance, and agree there’s some legitimacy there — even if I do believe it gets overblown (but I digress). But the only entity that has ever held collective leverage against the portal economy is the MLS, licensing access on behalf of every broker at once. The restructuring many agents are cheering for dismantles that leverage and hands the renegotiation to whoever is big enough to matter alone. An MLS that owns its public function is infrastructure no portal can route around and no member can be picked off from one at a time. In the AI era, when every model and AI assistant becomes a consumer of ground truth, the source that is the verified record grows more valuable, not less. With that in mind, the public duty is the moat. Zillow can copy the MLS’s technology. A well-funded rival brokerage can replicate its plumbing and poach its members. But what no portal and no brokerage can ever be is the neutral, guaranteed-complete record of the market. Zillow answers to shareholders, and Compass is one publicly-traded competitor among the many other competitors the MLS contains. Only a cooperative that belongs to everyone and profits from no one’s advantage can credibly hold such a commitment to being the reliable, single-source-of-truth for the marketplace. Which means the public duty everyone treats as the MLS’s burden is, in fact, its only uncopyable asset. That’s the trade on the table: accept the obligation, keep the thing that makes you most irreplaceable.
That’s MLS Maximus.
I’m so much deeper in this conversation than I ever expected because of Rob, so in closing, let’s address a couple things in the context of my back and forth with him. Rob wants a surviving cooperative. So do I. His road gets there by shedding the public function; mine says the public function is the institution now — shed it, and the members hollow out what’s left while the portals (or someone worse) inherit the public facing void left behind.
In a strange way, “MLS, Do Less” is the conservative position wearing radical clothes: dramatic means, deployed in defense of the MLS’s oldest self-image — the private club, the confidential book, the world before the relationship began.
Which brings us back to Napa Valley.
The MLS has been in this relationship with the American public for 26 years. It rewired how a whole country finds home. And it has survived this long on accident, inertia, and the fact that nobody forced the question. Well — the question is being forced. The suits are filed, the letters are dated, and the rulebooks are being rewritten in both directions while the institution that started it all still hasn’t said the words out loud.
Every expansion of the MLS’s public role in its history has been an accident, a concession, or a settlement term. Not one was a choice. Maximus is simply the proposal that the MLS make the choice — once, deliberately, on the record — while choosing is still available.
The relationship already exists. All that’s left is boarding the proverbial plane to London.
Go say it out loud.
Wanna connect further?
Connect with me on socials (I’m most active on LinkedIn) @NickAufenkamp
Tiered & Flat Fee Real Estate Services in SW Washington: The Tartan Team
DIY Homebuyer Resources & Advocacy: DIY Homebuyer Academy
Advisory & Consulting
I advise a select number of proptech founders, MLS leaders, and real estate organizations navigating industry change. My work focuses on stress-testing assumptions, identifying second-order effects, and helping teams think more clearly about strategy, policy, and implementation. Start the conversation by sending me an email.
Support the Writing
To maximize the distribution of my ideas, I want to keep this publication free. But, if you’re a regular reader and value my voice, please become a paid subscriber. I spend at least 8-10 hours on every post — usually writing in the middle of the night. And my wife says the coffee bill is getting out of hand.