The Faustian Bargain

On Rob Hahn's proposal, Compass's commitments, and what we risk trading away.

I’m becoming a broken record, but I want to begin this post with my gratitude to Rob Hahn. Not only has he deeply and earnestly engaged with what I’ve written, he has also been charitable, eschewed making things needlessly personal, and has even platformed and endorsed my writing — putting my thoughts before several of the most influential leaders within the real estate industry.

It’s hard to fully appreciate the new connections and potential opportunities Rob has enabled for me.

So, Rob, thank you. If we ever find ourselves in the same town — and I hope we do soon — let me buy you a drink.

I must also confess: Rob’s response (First Principles of a Marketplace) to my piece (What Kind of Housing Marketplace Does the Public Deserve?) sent me into a bit of an existential crisis. Here I am, the self-titled Realtor Gone Rogue, and in his conclusion, Rob positioned me as the defender of the status quo.

Now, I’ve been accused of many things in my lifetime, but defending the status quo has never been one of them.

Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t take the portrayal personally. But it also didn’t feel like it fit quite right. Which led to questioning, “What am I really defending here?”

I think that’s the right question. Not just for me, but for everyone engaged in this debate.

Starting Where This Started

In my first piece, The Pre-Market Arms Race, I shared the discomfort I now feel as a practicing agent:

“I’m working with a buyer client right now, and there’s a low-grade anxiety I didn’t used to have: Am I actually showing him everything? I used to be able to say yes with confidence. The MLS was the MLS. If it was for sale, it was there.

Now I find myself wondering whether a Coming Soon hit Redfin tonight and I have no idea it exists. And if my client finds something I missed, not because I wasn’t diligent, but because the system is now designed to keep certain listings out of my view? That doesn’t just undermine my credibility. It undermines the entire premise of buyer representation: that your agent is your eyes on the whole market.”

In reading Rob and talking with others, I think this anxiety is the visceral core of the issue that has resonated with many agents, brokers, and MLS execs.

Rob’s reply, as I understand it, is that this is a legitimate concern, and that the best way to solve it is for the MLS to go back to its B2B roots as a cooperative tool exclusively for agents serving active clients. If the MLS were to kill IDX, stop syndicating listings, and stop regulating how properties are marketed, every brokerage would gladly submit its listings. Marketing would be left in each agent’s domain. We could all even get cool t-shirts that say, “Let the Free Market Market Freely!” as it were.

Under this arrangement, I can imagine Rob asking, “Nick, what’s the problem? Any property your client finds online is already in the MLS. All the data you need to serve your client is there. What more do you want?”

That’s precisely the question I wrestled with in my last piece, trying to define the kind of housing marketplace the American public deserves. I won’t rehash the whole argument here, but in short, I argued it should be fair and maximally transparent, where, with very few exceptions, every home for sale is marketed publicly to every potential buyer.

I confess, Rob caught me. He heard my undertones suggesting the MLS might-could evolve into a public utility. And he was right. I did gesture at that possibility, but I intentionally sidestepped making the argument outright — because, as Greg Robertson has said, I don’t believe there’s any problem the government can’t make worse.

That’s not to say there aren’t merits to the public utility argument. There are, and much smarter people than I have advocated for them for decades . . . unsuccessfully. The principles of the MLS as a public utility may be sound, but the real-world execution is where it keeps getting stuck. Who manages it? How is it funded? How does data get standardized? What about non-professional access for FSBOs? What does enforcement look like? And on and on.

As Rob suggests, it’s likely a conversation worth having. And on paper, it may be the most logical answer to my question about the kind of marketplace the public deserves.

But we don’t live on paper. And we all know the real world is anything but logical.

What I’m Actually Defending

So let me try to answer my original question. What am I defending?

Some of you may be disappointed to hear this: my main goal here is not to defend the MLS. I’m not married to IDX. I’m not even opposed to the MLS doing less, or to a public utility eventually replacing its consumer-facing role.

What I am defending is a principle: in a market as consequential as housing, consumers deserve broad, timely, reliable access to the core facts driving that market: What’s for sale. How long it’s been available. What the pricing history looks like. What comparable homes have sold for.

The MLS happens to deliver that access to the public today. It wasn’t designed to, but through IDX and syndication, it does. That’s the outcome I care about. But for me, the institution that produces the outcome is negotiable.

Which means Rob’s status-quo framing misses the nuance of what I’m actually arguing. I’d gladly trade the current MLS for something better. What I won’t do is trade it for something worse and call the trade ‘restoration.’

And that’s where my skepticism about Rob’s proposal begins.

You Sure About That?

Let’s grant, for a moment, Rob’s ideal world. The MLS goes pure B2B cooperative. IDX disappears. Syndication ends. Marketing becomes each broker’s domain. Every brokerage — Compass included — submits every listing to the MLS on day one, because the thing they objected to (public-facing syndication on terms they couldn’t control) is no longer part of the deal.

Rob and Compass have both publicly endorsed a version of this future. Compass’s Reffkin and McCrory wrote in Inman that they want the MLS to return to being “a B2B engine for professional cooperation.” They say they want to share listings. They say the MLS should be in the cooperation business, not the marketing business.

I’d like to believe them. I really would.

But I don’t. I suspect a lot of people don’t.

And I think it’s worth delving into why.

Compass’s entire 3-Phase Marketing Strategy — Private Exclusives in Phase 1, Compass Coming Soon in Phase 2, public listing in Phase 3 — is built on the premise that listings stay out of the MLS during the early marketing window. The value proposition to sellers, explicitly spelled out in Compass’s marketing materials, is protection from “negative insights” like days on market and price history. That protection is only possible if the listing isn’t in the MLS, because the MLS captures those metrics by design, starting on day one.

So if Compass follows through on its stated commitment and enters every listing in the MLS on day one, one of two things happens. Either 3PM fundamentally changes — and Compass tells sellers that DOM and price history will accumulate from the moment the listing is actively for sale anywhere — or their commitment to the MLS means something entirely different than it sounds.

You can’t enter a listing in the MLS as Active and prevent it from accruing the data the MLS captures for active listings. And if the MLS is genuinely functioning as the source of truth for what’s for sale, there’s no coherent version where a listing is being actively marketed but isn’t Active in the MLS.

Imagine the scenario under Rob’s proposal. My client sees a Compass Private Exclusive on Redfin and sends it to me. Compass has committed to putting every listing in the MLS on day one. So I pull it up. And one of the first things I do is look at days on market and price history. Because that’s what a buyer’s broker does. For better or worse, that data is potential leverage my client may use when we write an offer.

And that’s the exact data Compass wants to hide. Not from Zillow voyeurs. But from the people across the negotiating table. Only then do metrics like days on market and price history become potentially ‘harmful.’

According to Rob and the Inman article, the thing Compass objects to is public display of MLS data on portals like Zillow. But to Rob’s own point, why would they be concerned about what an unserious looky-loo on Zillow thinks of the DOM? I don’t think they care about that at all.

What’s really at stake is whether a buyer’s agent can walk into a negotiation armed with the full data the MLS captures. And under Rob’s proposal, with every listing entered on day one, that agent absolutely can — and will. That’s what cooperation means. That’s what buyer representation requires.

Which means Compass’s stated commitment creates a problem they haven’t resolved. If the MLS actually moves toward what Rob is proposing — pure B2B cooperation, no syndication, marketing rules gone — and Compass follows through on entering every listing on day one, their 3PM strategy stops working as currently designed. The ‘negative insights’ they promise sellers they’ll protect them from start accumulating the moment the listing is active. Any buyer’s agent can see them. And Compass would need to revise their 3PM marketing copy to reflect this reality.

Would Compass actually do that?

Maybe. Maybe they’d embrace it as a victory and rebrand the product around something else — the marketing expertise of their agents, their network, exclusive portal partnerships, whatever.

But you can color me skeptical. They lean so heavily on hiding ‘negative insights’ as the key advantage for sellers in the Private Exclusive Phase, it’s hard to imagine them updating their site to say, “your DOM and price history will be visible to every buyer’s agent and their clients from day one.”

Now, lest anyone allege I’ve insufficiently beaten a dead horse, let’s press a little deeper into these ‘negative insights.’

The Seller Is Also the Buyer

One of Rob’s correctives in his response was that I over-indexed on the buyer as the only consumer in the transaction. His point: Sellers are consumers, too! And a marketplace that privileges buyers’ informational interests too heavily over sellers will eventually lose the sellers altogether. In general, I think that’s a fair point.

But here’s what the framing misses: in American residential real estate, the seller and the buyer are usually the same person. It’s a weird quirk of the marketplace.

According to the 2025 NAR Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, 79% of buyers are repeat buyers — meaning the vast majority of home purchases are made by people who already own a home they’ll eventually sell. People who sell the home they’ve lived in are typically moving into another one. These aren’t cleanly two separate groups of consumers. In the supermajority of sales, they’re essentially the same group, transacting on both sides within weeks or months of each other.

Which makes the Seller’s Choice argument sound like it’s coming out of both sides of the mouth. The same person who, as a seller, wants their DOM hidden and their price history suppressed is the person who, as a buyer, wants and expects to know exactly how long the house they’re eyeing has been sitting and how many price drops it’s had. You can’t coherently build a marketplace framework that treats these as opposing consumer interests when they’re held by the same consumer.

Rob didn’t address this in his reply, but I think it’s an important facet within the dialogue. Nobody likes the “rules for thee but not for me” hypocrite. And, candidly, I think that most consumers—homebuyers and sellers alike—intuit this. So I don’t believe for a minute it’s sellers who are initiating these conversations about how to avoid negative insights and list their home off the MLS, while simultaneously expecting to see all listings and relevant market data for the next home they purchase. Which is why I said in my original post, The Pre-Market Arms Race,

“…let’s not play coy about what’s driving these decisions. Buyers and sellers didn’t march on Washington demanding pre-market listing platforms. This is not a groundswell, grassroots effort. This is corporate strategy shrouded in consumer-centric language.”

What This Fight Is Actually About

So what is underneath all of this?

The push to strip IDX and syndication from the MLS was not demanded by consumers. This fight was started by one brokerage. Compass. And the reason isn’t protecting sellers. Not primarily, anyway. The main reason is leads.

“Your Listing, Your Lead” is the real battle cry underneath the polished, consumer-centric language. Compass, and the brokerages now lining up behind them, don’t want their listings used to generate leads for competing agents. That’s a legitimate business concern. And from a pure profitability standpoint, I get it. As a listing agent, I can calculate the potential financial benefits if I were to capture every buyer lead who saves my listing on one of the portals.

But think about what capturing these leads actually means in practice. If I capture a lead who’s interested in my seller’s home, I’m now in an immediate conflict of interest. Personally, I don’t practice dual agency. I don’t think any agent should. So what do I do? Refer the lead out? To someone in my brokerage or an agent outside my brokerage? How much of a referral fee do I charge? What if that lead ends up not wanting my seller’s home — do I then stipulate I get to work with them, and if so, am I now incentivized to steer them away from my seller’s home so I can earn a separate commission?

“Your Listing, Your Lead” may roll off the tongue, but it’s fraught in ways that rarely get discussed.

And it gets at something I think is wrong with the industry at a deeper level: listings and clients do not exist primarily to generate leads for future business. They exist because someone needs to sell a house or buy one, and they’ve hired me to help. I exist to serve my clients and sell their homes.

Nowhere in the listing agreement is there a stipulation about clients agreeing to be a marketing tool for me to generate new leads.

Yet, all too often, we get this order confused.

Rob’s proposal, as sincere as I believe he is in making it, is downstream of a business-model fight that was never really about consumers in the first place.

The “MLS, do less” framing makes the most sense if you assume everyone is arguing in good faith about what’s best for the marketplace. I believe that Rob is coming at this from a sincere place. I believe he, like me, wants the MLS to survive and thrive.

What I’m less sure about is whether that good faith extends across the whole coalition now endorsing his position. When Compass argues for the same restructuring that happens to remove the constraint on their 3PM strategy — that’s not the same kind of argument Rob is making. That’s a business interest dressed up as a principled one. And the industry should be able to name that difference without pretending it doesn’t exist.

The Faustian Bargain

So where do we go from here?

Rob’s proposal — strip IDX, kill syndication, remove marketing regulation, trust the B2B cooperative to do the rest — sounds plausible on paper. It might even work if we were designing this system from scratch, without 25 years of history and infrastructure behind us.

But we’re not. And the proposal is being offered in a real-world context where the company with the most to gain from its success has a documented history of finding loopholes in MLS rules and an entire product architecture premised on keeping listings out of the MLS.

Still, let’s say we run the experiment. IDX goes away. The MLS becomes pure B2B. And Compass — because of incentive, or inertia, or because their existing contracts make it impossible to pivot — continues pre-marketing listings outside the MLS anyway. The Private Listing Network is alive and well. Properties get showings. Offers get made. And I, as an everyday non-Compass broker, look like an idiot in front of several of my clients because I was unaware of and have no info on certain homes they saw with a Compass sign in the yard.

What then? Do we just go back to how it was before?

I don’t think it’s that easy. Portals will have filled the gap with their own ways of syndicating listings directly from brokerages and agents. The distribution infrastructure will have atrophied. The political will to rebuild what we just dismantled won’t be waiting for us. If Compass becomes more profitable by increasing their pre/off-MLS sales, other big brokerages are sure to follow. The MLS no longer contains a complete data set and thereby loses all authority as the single source of truth for the housing market. It’s crippled to the point that subscribers question the entire value proposition of the MLS in the first place.

That’s not a trade. That’s a Faustian bargain.

Again, I’m not opposed to a better system. I’m not even opposed to the MLS doing less, if a public utility or something like it takes over the consumer-facing work it currently does.

What I am opposed to is dismantling the one mechanism that currently guarantees data completeness and consumer access before we have anything to replace it with. Especially not on the assurances of the company that started this whole fight, promising they’ll play nice once the mechanism is gone.

If that makes me a defender of the status-quo, so be it. For now, I’d rather live with the devil I know than the devil I don’t.

---

Wanna connect further?

Tiered & Flat Fee Real Estate Services in SW Washington: The Tartan Team
DIY Homebuyer Resources & Advocacy: DIY Homebuyer Academy
Connect with me on socials (I’m most active on LinkedIn) @NickAufenkamp