The Pre-Market Arms Race

Everyone's Building Their Own MLS. We Already Have One.

Lots of big headlines in the real estate industry the past couple weeks.

In case you’ve been living under a rock — or, more positively, live a well-adjusted life and don’t follow every breaking story in organized real estate — here’s a quick rundown of what you missed.

Compass and Rocket/Redfin inked a three-year partnership. Compass Coming Soon listings now appear on Redfin — with Private Exclusives soon to follow — and Rocket Mortgage becomes the preferred lender for Compass and its brands. Quite the about-face from Redfin, who, five minutes ago, was pledging to ban private listings in the interest of a fair, transparent marketplace.

Howard Hanna announced HannaList, an internal listing platform that lets agents market listings within the brokerage before broader MLS distribution. It resembles Compass’s approach but is positioned as MLS-compliant — built in partnership with regional MLSs, not in defiance of them.

Zillow unveiled Zillow Preview, allowing participating brokerages to display pre-market listings on Zillow and Trulia before they go active on the MLS. Launched with Keller Williams, RE/MAX, HomeServices of America, Side, and United Real Estate. Zillow is framing this as the pro-transparency alternative to private networks: still pre-market, but public.

eXp Realty announced a non-exclusive syndication deal to push Coming Soon listings to Realtor.com, Homes.com, and ComeHome.com (to which I said, Come again?). Unlike the other deals, any portal that wants eXp listings can have them on equal terms.

And the kicker: Compass dropped its lawsuit against Zillow — the same lawsuit that named Redfin as a co-conspirator. In a matter of weeks, Compass went from suing Zillow and Redfin to partnering with the latter and publicly thanking the former. Apparently, it’s a very thin line between enemies and friends.

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If you’re an everyday homebuyer or seller — and you’ve somehow made it this far without your eyes glazing over — most of this probably sounds like noise. Why should you care about what Compass or Zillow or eXp are doing behind the curtain?

Even for most agents, these announcements are being made at an altitude so far above the sphere where you actually operate day-to-day that it can all feel like a distraction from getting another home under contract.

But this stuff matters. These aren’t just milquetoast PR campaigns. These are strategic moves by the largest forces within real estate in a massive battle to define the future of the industry.

What's happening right now could reshape how homes are bought and sold for decades. So it’s worth thinking carefully about the trajectory these announcements signal and asking what’s the path we truly want to follow.

There’s no neutral ground anymore. These decisions are being made right now, and if consumers and agents don’t pay attention, the system will be reshaped around them before they ever had a say.

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Why This Is Happening

Before I get into what concerns me about all of this, let me say: I get it. And I’m sympathetic to what these giant companies are doing.

The real estate brokerage business is brutal.

There’s a perception that there’s a ton of money in real estate, but most brokerages — especially the big ones — operate on razor-thin margins. Want proof? Look no further than the enormous debt Compass had to take on to acquire Anywhere and its portfolio of brands. Now, that debt needs to be serviced. Moreover, growth needs to be demonstrated to investors. Which means margin has to come from somewhere. (Or, dare I say . . . Anywhere?!)

It’s also no secret that Zillow’s business model is built on agent referrals. Fewer listings flowing through their platform means fewer opportunities to monetize buyer leads. Every listing that lives exclusively on Redfin or inside a brokerage’s private network is a listing Zillow can’t make money on. Zillow Preview isn’t purely charity. It’s business-preservation.

For Howard Hanna, Keller Williams, eXp, and the rest, pre-market listings serve as both a recruiting tool and a retention play. The pitch writes itself: Come join us, and your sellers get access to our proprietary network. Your buyers get a first look at listings, some of which no one else can see. It’s a competitive advantage for agent attraction, and for the brokerages running private networks, it increases the odds that both sides of the transaction stay in-house — which means the company captures a bigger share of the commission.

These companies need to generate returns. That’s not evil. That’s business.

But understanding why someone makes a decision doesn’t mean the decision is good. Just ask the scientists behind Jurassic Park: resurrecting dinosaurs sounds awesome, until you have a velociraptor screeching in your face.

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The “Seller Choice” Smokescreen

Every single one of these announcements was wrapped in the language of consumer benefit. Compass talks ad nauseam about “seller choice.” Zillow talks about “transparency.” Howard Hanna talks about “flexibility.” eXp talks about “consumer access.”

I’m not saying these companies don’t care about consumers. I believe (some more than others) they do. But 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.

Here’s the tell: every one of these initiatives routes listings through channels the company controls, generating data, leads, or revenue that the company captures. Compass gets premium placement on Redfin with no referral fee while Rocket embeds its mortgage product in the flow. Zillow Preview keeps eyeballs on Zillow and funnels leads through its Preferred Agent network. HannaList keeps listings inside Howard Hanna’s ecosystem before anyone else sees them.

The differences between these approaches are smaller than the press releases suggest. Zillow calls Preview the “pro-transparency” alternative to private networks. But Preview listings are only visible if you’re on Zillow. If you’re not, you don’t see them. That’s the same dynamic as Compass Coming Soons on Redfin: visible on one platform, invisible everywhere else. Zillow’s building the same walled garden as everyone else. They’re just inviting more people to put their plants in it.

The one genuinely different model is eXp’s: non-exclusive, any portal can have the listings on equal terms. Credit where it’s due. But even eXp’s approach is a brokerage-to-portal pipeline that routes around the MLS.

Collectively, all of these moves are pulling inventory out of the one system designed to be the shared spot for brokerage cooperation and transparency. That’s the trend that should concern you whether you’re a buyer, a seller, or an agent.

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We Already Solved This Problem

Here’s the real stone in my shoe: we already have a shared platform where all listings live and everyone has equal access.

It’s called the MLS.

The Multiple Listing Service — for all of its flaws, and there are many — is one of the most remarkable cooperative systems in American commerce.

Competing brokerages agree to pool their listing inventory so that every buyer has access to every home, and every seller gets maximum exposure.

Sure, the governance is clunky. Some of the rules are outdated. The technology can absolutely be maddening. But the core principle — that an open, shared marketplace serves consumers better than a fragmented one — is sound.

Our MLS system is the envy of real estate markets around the world, most of which would kill for something like it.

And we’re here dismantling it. Not all at once. Not with a single explosive implosion. But incrementally. Deal by deal, partnership by partnership, private network by private network, we are building a world where listing data lives in a dozen different silos controlled by a handful of powerful companies, each with its own rules, its own incentives, and its own cut of the transaction.

Now, I’m not arguing the MLS is sacred or that its rules should be immune from scrutiny. The DOJ has raised legitimate questions about whether parts of the MLS structure function as restraints on trade. Some MLS rules absolutely need revision. Clear Cooperation has been enforced unevenly and has real costs for some sellers. These are fair criticisms.

But there’s a Grand Canyon-sized difference between reforming a fully functioning, universally adopted cooperative system and abandoning it for a dozen competing proprietary ones.

Again, look at the trajectory — even of the past few weeks. Every significant move is away from existing MLSes. Is that really the direction we want to keep going?

I don’t. For real.

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.

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“But What About Sellers Who Actually Want Privacy?”

Fair point. Some sellers genuinely benefit from keeping a listing private. Sensitive family situations. Celebrity sellers. Estate sales where the family needs time. I grant that. Not every home needs to hit the MLS on day one.

But here’s what that argument conveniently ignores: privacy has a cost. If you choose to limit who sees your home, you’re choosing a smaller buyer pool. That’s a trade-off, and it’s one a seller should be fully informed about and willing to accept.

What Compass’s three-phase marketing strategy does is try to eliminate that trade-off — keep the listing private to build “exclusivity,” then go public a few weeks later and get the full market anyway. That’s having your cake and eating it too.

You don’t get to claim the benefits of privacy and the benefits of full market exposure as though there’s no tension between those things. There is. And the person who pays the price for that tension is usually the buyer who never got to see the home when it was in the private phase, or the seller who accepted an offer from a smaller pool without knowing what the full market would have brought.

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The AI Objection

I can already hear the rebuttal from the tech-forward crowd: “None of this matters. In a couple years, AI tools will scrape every listing site and aggregate everything for buyers. It won’t matter where inventory lives because the AI will find it all.”

Maybe. Eventually. But private means private. If Compass Private Exclusives aren’t publicly accessible, an AI can’t scrape what it can’t see. And even if an AI tool can technically surface everything, the consumer still has to trust that it found everything. In a world with one shared database, that’s an easy promise to keep. In a fragmented world with inventory scattered across private networks, portal-specific feeds, and brokerage-controlled platforms? Good luck. The MLS’s value was never merely aggregation. It was the guarantee of completeness.

And honestly, the “AI will fix it” argument is the tech industry’s version of “someone else will clean this up.” It’s a rationalization for breaking something now and assuming future tools will paper over the damage. That’s not a strategy. That’s giving a bad system an overly simplistic pass.

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Twenty Years From Now

Here’s what I keep coming back to.

I can see it so clearly: twenty years from now, after a generation of buyers and agents have spent their careers navigating a balkanized mess of competing listing platforms, private networks, and portal-specific inventory, someone is going to stand up at an industry conference and say:

“I have a proposal that will revolutionize the consumer-experience and reduce friction for real estate professionals nationwide! I call it: The Multiple Listing Service. A place where every listing lives, where every buyer and agent has equal access, where brokerages compete on service and expertise instead of who controls the data.”

And the room will erupt in applause, like it’s the most brilliant idea anyone’s ever had.

. . .

Y’all.

We have that. Right now. Today.

Yes, it may need work.

But not a wrecking ball.

Fix the governance. Modernize the technology. Give sellers more flexibility within the system. But don’t let a handful of companies dismantle the one thing in this industry that was actually built for everyone.