The Kingmaker
How Compass is subtly building a national MLS in their own likeness.
For all the ways real estate gets maligned as one of the slowest industries to adopt change, there sure have been a lot of developments in the past four weeks.
Let’s recap, shall we:
April 24: MRED and Compass announce an alliance.
April 27: REAL Broker (the brokerage I hang my license with) announces plans to acquire RE/MAX.
May 5: Zillow and Realtor.com announce a Preview partnership. Pre-market listings on either platform will appear on both starting this summer.
May 7: eXp acquires NextHome.
May 8: Compass terminates all direct listing feed agreements with Zillow nationwide — across every Compass entity and subsidiary.
May 12: Zillow files a federal antitrust lawsuit against MRED and Compass.
May 17: Google, powered by HouseCanary, re-enters the real estate portal business.
May 18: Redfin launches Early Access, a dedicated search category for pre-market listings — Redfin Coming Soons plus Compass brands’ inventory — with premium placement, a special icon, and (surprise, surprise) no DOM or price-history accrual.
May 18: MRED sets a 5/19 11:59pm deadline for Zillow to relent on its Listing Access Standards or lose access to MRED’s data feed. Zillow files a motion for preliminary injunction.
May 20: MRED suspends Zillow’s and Trulia’s access to its Chicagoland feed. Roughly 43,000 active listings affected. Zillow can no longer publicly display MRED data on its consumer sites.
Honorable mentions: following the pattern of the MRED deal, Compass also struck partnerships with Realtracs in Tennessee, TheMLS/CLAW in California, and Bright MLS in the Mid-Atlantic.
That is a wild month.
Most of the coverage I’ve read has treated these as separate stories. An alliance here, an acquisition there, a lawsuit, a portal experiment, a feed cutoff. But these stories aren’t so disparate as they first appear. There’s a through-line. And once you can see it, you realize that the largest residential brokerage in the country is carefully choosing which MLSs get to be the pillars of what the industry becomes next — and which others get routed around. And the MRED-Zillow cutoff is the move that makes the pattern visible.
That’s where this piece is headed. But first, let me pull back the curtain on why I disappeared for a few weeks.
True story, I’ve written eight drafts over the past four weeks and haven’t posted a single one of them. The breakneck pace of announcements, partnerships, acquisitions, and lawsuits has made writing anything that endures for more than ten minutes virtually impossible. Plus, I’ve had closings to attend (four in four weeks — let’s go!), an anniversary to celebrate (happy fifteen to my lovely wife!), and end-of-season soccer games where I’ve been wildly cheering on my boys. So, literally and metaphorically, I’ve stepped away from the keyboard in exchange for a spot on the sidelines to watch how things play out.
But unlike my kids’ soccer matches, there’s no end in sight for the industry headlines — especially as it relates to the apparent Godzilla vs. Kong battle going down between Compass (plus its partner MLSs) and Zillow.
The biggest and most relevant move, of course, is MRED cutting off Zillow’s feed. Day of, I shared a brief video on LinkedIn with my knee-jerk reflections. Brooklee Han, one of HousingWire’s finest, featured some of those comments in a piece she published on how consumers and agents are impacted by MRED’s decision (you can read that here).
My position then is my position now: if I’m a homeseller in Chicagoland, I am pissed. I’m angry that, because of some corporate fight I had no part in, my home is no longer showing up on the largest real estate website in the country, and that I’m missing out on potential buyers as a result. And if I’m an agent, I’m also upset, because explaining why my clients are getting fewer eyeballs today than they got just a few days ago is not the position I want to be in. After all, saying, “Not to worry, Mr. and Mrs. Seller, your home is still on Redfin and accessible to agents via MRED” offers the client about the same degree of comfort as a marketing agency telling a Realtor, “We’re sorry your site is no longer showing up on Google, Ms. Agent, but the good news is your page is still featured prominently on Bing and your number is in the phone book!”
Such attempts at consoling active home sellers just ain’t going to cut it. And the confusion created for consumers here further erodes their trust in the agents working their asses off to serve their local communities.
So why in the world are we here?
It’s worth being precise about what MRED and Zillow are actually fighting over, because the surface of this dispute looks much smaller than the consequences of it.
The proximate cause of MRED’s decision to cut Zillow’s feed is nine listings.
Not nine-thousand. Not nine-hundred. Nine.
Stranger still, these nine listings in question were all Compass Private Exclusives in California, Florida, and Georgia, which Compass piped into MRED’s system after their April 24 alliance. Zillow declined to display these listings in accordance with its Listing Access Standards. MRED says Zillow’s selective non-display violates its licensing agreement. Zillow says MRED has never before claimed authority over listings outside its traditional service area, and the rule MRED is enforcing was rewritten in April specifically to enable this fight.
The courts will sort out the ‘it’s your fault; no it’s your fault’ finger pointing. The more interesting question is why MRED would torch 43,000 of its own members’ Chicagoland listings — and draw a federal antitrust suit in the process — over nine out-of-state Private Exclusives.
At face value, that math ain’t mathing. Which means the real thing being protected must be something else.
That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out.
A Pattern Emerges
On March 19, 2026, Compass co-signed an open letter with Rocket and Redfin and sent it to MLSs across the country.
The letter named names. Twice.
It praised six MLSs by name for building what it called “seller-choice frameworks” into their rules: MRED, MLSPIN, Bright MLS, Unlock MLS, Realtracs, and Canopy MLS. Compass urged every other MLS to follow their lead.
It also called out seven MLSs by name for “doubling down” on restrictive policies that, in Compass’s framing, harmed sellers: ARMLS, CRMLS, FMLS, Georgia MLS, NWMLS, OneKey MLS, and Stellar MLS. The letter pledged that Compass and Redfin would “defend” agents disciplined by those MLSs for executing Compass’s marketing strategy.
One letter. Two lists. The carrots and the sticks, named publicly, in the same document.
Six weeks later, the Compass and MLS partnerships began rolling out.
MRED on April 24. Realtracs on April 30. TheMLS/CLAW on May 6. Bright MLS on May 13 (surprisingly, the day after Zillow filed its antitrust suit against Compass and MRED alleging exactly this kind of coordination). Four out of the six MLSs Compass had publicly praised in March were under formal partnerships with Compass by mid-May. All four adopted more flexible rules around private listings. All four would benefit financially from Compass subsidizing any Compass International Holdings (CIH) agents who joined these ‘approved’ MLSs.
Meanwhile, on the other list: Compass had already sued NWMLS in April 2025, calling it a monopolist. The case is heading to trial. NWMLS counterclaimed this April with sharper language than usual, calling Compass’s Three-Phased Marketing strategy “Orwellian-named” and grounded in deceptive practices.
Looking at this sequence of events, you must ask, does this look like a series of independent MLS decisions converging on the same answer at the same time? Or does it increasingly resemble a coordinated bloc forming around one of the industry’s most powerful players — a company who publicly named which MLSs were in and which were out just six weeks before the in-MLSs started signing deals while the out-MLSs were getting sued?
Suspicious, right?
What Compass is Actually Doing
I’m going to simply call it as I see it:
Compass is playing kingmaker.
But you do not have to take my word for it. Take Reffkin’s.
On stage at Inman Connect New York on February 3, 2026 — his first public appearance after closing the Anywhere acquisition — Reffkin said: “I believe we shouldn’t have 518 MLSs. I believe the brokerages should come together and create a common MLS that brokerages and agents own, and treats everyone fairly and equally without fines and bans.” He went on to name Brian Donnellan, CEO of Bright MLS, as his preferred CEO of that entity.
Three months later, on Compass’s Q1 2026 earnings call on May 6 — the same day MRED demanded Zillow reinstate Compass’s nine out-of-state listings — Reffkin restated the goal more directly: “We are bringing MRED national, as well as it will be just a select number of MLSs that are pro-seller choice, where we’re going to give them all of our listings, where we’re going to subsidize our agents joining.”
And then the sentence that does the most work: “It’s not that I want to create a national MLS to replace local MLSs. I want to create a national MLS to compete against local MLSs.”
Read that carefully.
I must admit, it’s a brilliantly conceived strategy. Reffkin would presumably just buy the MLSs he wants if he could. But he can’t — the DOJ would likely block it. So he’s building the same thing through partnerships instead. The strategy goes: Pick a select group of pro-Compass MLSs. Fund their national expansion. Give them Compass’s inventory. Subsidize agent migration into them. Voilà!
That is the kingmaker thesis, stated by the kingmaker himself.
Let’s be clear, the bloc-of-regionals approach — MRED in the Midwest, Bright in the Mid-Atlantic, Realtracs in Tennessee, CLAW in Southern California — is not an alternative to the national-MLS goal. It is the vehicle for getting there. Reffkin is not building a national MLS by betting entirely on one entity. He is building a national MLS by selecting and elevating a coordinated bloc of regional MLSs that share his rules, accept his inventory, and absorb his agents, until the holdouts are impotent.
The geographic distribution of the bloc matters for at least three reasons, all of which serve the underlying national-MLS objective.
First, antitrust optics. A single national MLS, especially one championed by the nation’s largest brokerage, would draw immediate DOJ scrutiny. But four or more large regional MLSs, each independently adopting complementary rules, has the plausible cover of organic collaboration — never mind the fact their convergence was preceded by a public letter naming each of them and an earnings call all but announcing the strategy.
Second, distributed enforcement. Zillow losing access to MRED is undeniably a blow. But if Zillow lost access to Realtracs, CLAW, and Bright MLS — that would be potentially catastrophic. And, according to Reffkin’s October 2025 emails to at least eight MLSs, removing Zillow’s access to MLS data feeds is one of Compass’s stated goals. While I have no dog in the fight to protect Zillow’s access to data here, it’s the consolidation of power and control over access to listings that’s most alarming to me. And this access is lost not through a single negotiation but through a coordinated sequence of regional cutoffs. It’s as clever as it is terrifying.
Third, no single point of failure for Compass. If MRED’s board changes hands, or loses its antitrust case, or backs down for any other reason, the bloc survives. Because the bloc is not one MLS. It is a pattern of MLSs. And the goal — one national MLS by strategic aggregation rather than extreme consolidation — survives the loss of any single member.
The pattern is the play. The bloc is the method. The national MLS is the end state. And Compass has said all of this on the record.
Why MRED Said Yes
This is where MRED cutting off 43,000 listings to protect ‘the nine’ stops being incoherent.
Reconsider the April 24 announcement of MRED and Compass’s partnership with the kingmaker frame in mind. MRED opens membership to any licensed agent in the country. Compass commits to feeding its full national inventory in. Compass also agrees to subsidize membership for the first 100,000 of its agents to join as full members.
At the time, MRED had roughly 48,000 subscribers. Compass International Holdings has roughly 340,000 agents. All of them were encouraged to consider joining MRED.
The potential for MRED to double or even triple in size within a matter of a month or two completely redefines their horizons of possibility. With growth like that, MRED stops being merely the MLS for Chicagoland. They can reinvent themselves as a national cooperative platform with a Chicagoland anchor. They collect more dues. Their vendor leverage increases. Their data licensing footprint expands. And their institutional importance to every agent in the country who wants access to Compass’s pre-market inventory becomes a core component of their value proposition.
With the Compass partnership, there’s a different stratosphere of potential for MRED compared to what they possessed at the beginning of the year.
But all that potential is contingent on MRED being able to enforce its rules on behalf of the alliance. If MRED can’t make Zillow display Compass’s nine banned out-of-state listings, then MRED’s value to Compass collapses. Compass doesn’t need an MLS that can host its inventory; it already has its own platform for that. Compass needs an MLS that can use its data leverage to force other people — namely portals — to display that inventory on the terms Compass wants.
MRED is betting they can be the leverage Compass needs. And in exchange, they get up to 100,000 new agent subscribers, fully subsidized by Compass.
This is why the nine banned listings matter so much, even though they shouldn’t.
If MRED blinks, their leverage is gone. If MRED blinks, the product collapses. The enforcement value of the alliance evaporates — and with it, presumably, the strategic case for Compass’s continued investment in MRED specifically. Compass would have other options. Realtracs, Bright MLS, and TheMLS/CLAW are already in the bloc. MRED would be left holding a damaged relationship with Zillow and a partnership that no longer carried the strategic weight it had on April 24.
So MRED has strong structural reasons not to blink. The 43,000 listings, the angry sellers, the federal antitrust suit, the bad press — all of that is the cost of holding the line on the actual asset, which is MRED’s credibility as a national enforcement partner in the bloc Compass is assembling.
To be fair, there’s a less grand-strategic reading available here, and it deserves naming. Perhaps MRED enforced a contractual rule because MLSs reflexively defend their rule-enforcement authority against portals. Perhaps the board simply underestimated the public backlash. Perhaps the entire chain of events looks like coordination from the outside but is actually a series of separate decisions that happen to align. I find the kingmaker reading more compelling because of the timing — the rule MRED is enforcing was rewritten in April, in coordination with the Compass alliance announced the same month — and because Reffkin has stated the bloc-building strategy publicly. But the alternative reading is plausible enough that anyone defending it deserves a hearing.
Even if my kingmaker suspicions are right, I don’t think these moves are intentionally sinister. To me, they read as rational and coherent. From inside the MRED boardroom, this probably looks like a calculated bet on which way the industry fractures, with the clearest path to MRED becoming structurally vital on the side they think is most likely to grow in the future. The alternative — staying a regional MLS while some other large regional takes the deal with Compass instead — they fear is a long, slow fade into irrelevance.
But just because a deal is coherent doesn’t mean it’s good.
The Cost of the Deal
Here is what the kingmaker arrangement requires the MRED board (and every other MLS board considering a similar deal) to accept.
Every Chicagoland seller whose home went invisible on the largest real estate portal in the country this week is collateral in a fight about MRED’s national positioning. Every Chicagoland agent who has to explain to their client why this is happening is collateral. Every buyer who can’t see homes they would have seen a week ago is collateral. None of those people are parties to the MRED/Compass alliance. None of them got a vote on whether MRED should reposition itself as Compass’s regional enforcement arm. They just woke up on May 20 to a worse market than they had on May 19.
MRED is clearly willing to make this sacrifice with the self-assurance that doing so is what’s best for the MLS in the long run. And they may be right. MRED may emerge from this as a national platform with multiple times its current revenue and influence. But, even if so, the people paying the price for the bet today are not the same people who will reap its benefits in the future.
And this is what makes the kingmaker frame harder to defend than the simple ‘seller-choice’ frame Compass has been running publicly. Compass is not just exercising market power — every large brokerage does that. Compass is exercising governance power over a layer of the industry it does not own. Compass is methodically building a coordinated bloc of MLSs that are theoretically ‘cooperative’ and technically governed by their own broker-members, but increasingly aligned around rules that serve the strategic interests of one party. The cooperation is still real. It is just no longer accountable to all of its members equally. Increasingly, it is accountable to one. Hence why 43,000 Chicagoland listings, most of which had no affiliation with CIH, came down over just nine banned Compass listings.
That is the concern Errol Samuelson raised on May 12, the day Zillow filed its lawsuit. Speaking to The Real Deal, Samuelson said MRED had “decided to work with the largest broker in their market, a broker who has seats on their board of managers, and skew the rules... in a way to actually hurt consumers and hurt competition.”
Three of MRED’s fifteen elected board seats are held by Compass-affiliated brokers. That’s the governance backdrop for the rule changes MRED enacted in April, the changes Zillow’s lawsuit alleges were rewritten specifically to enable this fight. Samuelson wasn’t accusing MRED of being captured. He was accusing Compass of remaking MRED — and by extension every other MLS in the bloc — into something other than what an MLS is intended to be.
A kingmaker does not merely capture institutions. A kingmaker repurposes them.
What I’m Watching For
Having been wrong enough times in my life, I try to avoid making heavy-handed predictions. The honest answer to “what happens next” is that nobody knows, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something. But there are four questions I’ll be watching over the next several weeks, because the answers to them will tell us a lot about whether the bloc will hold or break.
How loud do the seller complaints get? Whether the Chicagoland public revolts is the variable nobody can predict, and it’s the one that matters most. The other three answers don’t change much regardless of how this one plays out. If sellers go quiet, the bloc holds. If sellers get loud — and especially if any of that noise reaches the Illinois Attorney General’s office — the bloc weakens.
What happens to Compass’s market share in Chicagoland? Does it grow? Or does it shrink, because angry sellers walk to brokerages that won’t make their listings disappear?
Do the next MLS partnerships accelerate or stall? Realtracs, TheMLS/CLAW, and BrightMLS are already in. Who’s next, and how fast? If a fifth and sixth large regional sign up by mid-summer, the bloc is consolidating faster than the antitrust suit can resolve. If the next deals slow to a crawl, that may indicate that MRED’s gamble is too rich to stomach for the next-in-line boards.
Does any other MLS publicly distance itself from MRED’s move? So far, I haven’t seen any that have. Even MLSs that find MRED’s reasoning thin have an institutional interest in not undermining an MLS’s right to enforce its rules against a portal. That is the principle they’re protecting. The application is, conveniently, somebody else’s problem.
Where That Leaves Us
The story of the past four weeks is not a series of unrelated headlines, and it is not a Godzilla vs. Kong fight between two large companies. It is one company building, through a sequence of regional partnerships, protections for its own pre-market strategy.
It is a coherent strategy. It is being executed skillfully. And it is reshaping a cooperative system into something else — something where one brokerage’s strategy increasingly drives the rules, there’s less accountability to the broker-members it is supposed to serve, and less honesty about whose interests the rules now protect. All the while, most people are still arguing about the surface-level question of whether private listings are good for sellers.
The private-listings question is a feint. The real question is who gets to write the rules of the cooperative, and who do those rules benefit most?
Right now, the answer increasingly appears to be Compass.
Almost as if they planned it.
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Connect with me on socials (I’m most active on LinkedIn) @NickAufenkamp
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