What Kind of Housing Marketplace Does the Public Deserve?

The MLS debate has been about what the industry needs. What about the consumer?

Over the past couple weeks, Rob Hahn has made a masterful case for the MLS doing less. I don’t say that with the slightest hint of sarcasm, nor with my tongue anywhere near my cheek. I mean it wholeheartedly.

I’m also grateful that our good-natured back and forth has served to push the conversation within the industry forward. The question that Rob’s latest centers on is who has the responsibility and authority to market a property?

You should read his whole argument here, but here’s how I’d summarize it:

Rob concludes the authority and responsibility for marketing a property should fall wholly to the listing broker. That’s who the client hired to sell the house. So, implicitly, they are the one entrusted to determine the best marketing strategy. By contrast, the client did not hire the MLS to sell the property. Since the client hired the agent and not the MLS, why should the MLS have any control over the marketing strategies? The MLS would be best leaving those decisions to the professional ultimately entrusted with the task of selling the house.

It’s a good take. And, considering the historical context of the MLS’s origins as a B2B platform, Rob makes a solid case for why the MLS should get out of marketing and lead generation entirely. Instead, he proposes the MLS go back to being a cooperative database where brokers share listing data exclusively in the service of active clients. If they stop allowing listings to be syndicated for marketing and lead generation, and — for the love of all that’s holy — stop setting rules and limitations on how an agent may market a client’s property, this whole issue will be put to bed.

Also, to his credit, Rob was dead-on in his sense about what Robert Reffkin would have to say about all this. This week, Reffkin and Caitlin McCrory co-authored a piece in Inman titled, Restore the MLS: A return to cooperation, not control, in which they essentially summarize Rob’s whole argument (eerily closely, like using the same Geoff Lewis quote, without ever once citing Rob, which irked me).

Simply put, Compass is very much in support of Rob’s proposal.

In their words, “On behalf of the broader brokerage community, we are advocating for the multiple listing service (MLS) to return to what it was built to be: a B2B engine for professional cooperation.” “We want to share listings. But the MLS should be in the cooperation business, not the marketing business.” And, “What Compass International Holdings is advocating for is not disruption, but restoration: a return to what the MLS was built to be and what it should be again — a platform for cooperation that helps real estate professionals serve their clients.” [Emphasis mine.]

I’ve sincerely tried to be satisfied with Rob’s proposal.

After all, in my last post, I made it clear what I want and need the MLS to be: a shared cooperative system that provides a complete, reliable, and fair picture of the housing market.

Rob (and now Compass) is saying I can have all of that, so long as the MLS gives up marketing and lead generation.

Such a proposal makes all the sense in the world, right? I mean, I’m a competent agent. I know how to build compelling marketing strategies and position properties. Surely I don’t need the MLS for marketing and syndication. If push comes to shove and I want to get maximum exposure for my client, I’ll figure out how to get their property on Zillow, Realtor.com, Redfin, Homes.com, and wherever else they need to be. Shoot, I might even pay for a premium placement!

In fact, to Rob’s point, his proposal inherently increases my value as an agent. Not only do I get to set myself apart from all the mid-tier agents who simply throw a home on the MLS and call it “marketing,” I would also have detailed information about every other brokers’ listings that consumers could not access without me. With an MLS that is stripped of marketing and syndication, leading to a public marketplace that’s potentially incomplete and largely devoid of datapoints like days on market and price history, clients must call me if they want the inside scoop on what’s available in the market or the leverage points for particular properties. Also, since I’ve never paid for a lead in my life, I don’t depend on portals to generate leads for me. Why should my listings be used to generate leads for someone else?

All this just makes too much sense. All of it increases my value as an agent. Naturally then, you’d think I’d be championing Rob’s proposal everywhere.

So, what’s the problem then? Why am I still not satisfied?

Before answering this question, a brief but important acknowledgement: what comes next easily starts to teeter on the edge of moralizing the issues. As I’ve oft heard Rob say, I consider myself to be one who has “strong convictions, weakly held.” And, to help de-escalate any potential “Othering,” I’d like to go on the record:

1. My already great appreciation and respect for Rob has only grown throughout these interactions.

2. I have become friends with several agents at Compass, even in recent months, and I believe they are fine people who do good work.

Now, to why I’m not satisfied with Rob’s proposal.

That Pesky Old ‘Consumer’

Upstream from the questions about the MLS, specific brokerages, agents, and clients, there’s another question: What kind of housing marketplace best serves consumers today? Or, perhaps a sharper way of putting it: what kind of housing marketplace does the public deserve?

I’m choosing my words carefully.

Who are “consumers”? They are the public. Specifically, the public who are interested in buying a home but have not yet engaged the services of a real estate broker.

So, when Rob is talking about the MLS getting out of public marketing, he is saying the MLS should not be available to consumers. When Compass is saying they don’t want potentially damaging data like DOM publicly available, they are saying consumer access to property information should be intentionally limited.

So far as I understand their argument, engaged clients of a licensed real estate professional are encouraged to drink to the dregs all the listing data their agent can provide them via the MLS. But, if a consumer is not a client . . . too bad, so sad. Go hire an agent.

That’s a reasonable position. Truly. Particularly from a real estate professional’s perspective.

But if you’re a consumer — not a client — this proposal sucks. With a capital “S.” Especially since, right or wrong, like-it-or-not, consumers have functionally had access to the lion’s share of MLS listing data for decades thanks to syndication to Zillow, Redfin, Realtor.com, and all the rest.

At this point, I don’t think it’s a viable option for the industry to say, “Whoops. Sorry. We gave you consumers wayyy too much, and now we need to take some data back. Access to all available properties and data like DOM and price history is now reserved for clients only.”

While such a move might be better for brokerages, MLSs, and even me personally as an agent, it feels . . . wrong.

I’m not saying it objectively is wrong. There’s certainly no obvious legal objection to this position. But, when I lay down at night and consider the kind of agent I want to be and the sort of industry I want to be part of building, one that restricts access to meaningful market data and artificially creates greater consumer dependency upon me as a professional . . . well, that ain’t it.

Seriously, no thanks.

I do believe that information wants to be free and that real professional services are built not by arbitrarily withholding data but by having the expertise and judgment to interpret and leverage information to their client’s benefit.

This personal philosophy has been developed over the past couple decades of witnessing big companies and industries that have attempted to compete by withholding information, data, and access from the public. History has not been kind to such institutions. And, based upon the 235 million unique users who hop on Zillow every single month, we don’t have to do much guessing as to what the public wants and expects from our industry moving forward.

So I ask: What will be the consequences of taking that access away? Do we really have the luxury of saying “we don’t care” or letting it become someone else’s problem? If it’s not our problem (thinking of licensed professionals specifically here), whose problem is it? And is that answer better, or worse?

First Principles

That’s quite a few questions to rattle off, so let’s wrestle with this a bit further.

Forget the MLS for a moment. Forget IDX, syndication, Clear Cooperation, and all the rest. If we were designing a housing marketplace from scratch — one that served the public, not just the professionals who work in it — what would it need to provide?

For most Americans, housing isn’t a luxury good. It’s essential. It’s shelter. And it’s the largest financial decision most families will ever make. For a marketplace this consequential to function fairly, the public needs broad, timely, reliable access to the core facts driving the market. What’s for sale. How long it’s been available. What the pricing history looks like. What comparable homes have sold for.

These aren’t professional secrets. They’re the basic information any participant in any market needs to make informed decisions.

And we already accept this principle in practice. Most states require sale prices to be recorded in public records. Lenders have to publicly report mortgage data. Fair housing law ensures access can’t be restricted based on protected characteristics. Property tax assessments, permit histories, zoning, deed transfers — generally speaking, all these facts are public.

The entire infrastructure of housing already operates on the assumption that the public has a legitimate interest in market information. The piece we’re debating here is whether active listing data — what’s for sale right now and on what terms — belongs in that same category.

I think it does, because a fair housing marketplace requires it. I also grant that the MLS was not originally designed to be this universal marketplace, but functionally, that is what it has become.

What’s Actually Being Built

Now let’s look at what’s emerging in the real world, because the abstract debate matters a lot less than the concrete reality taking shape.

Let’s take Rob and Compass at their word. In a cooperation-only MLS stripped of marketing and syndication, all listings enter the system. All agents see everything. Compass cooperates with every broker. The professional layer works beautifully.

But here’s the divide that opens up underneath it.

The buyer with an agent — any agent, at any brokerage — sees everything. Full listing data. DOM. Price history. Comps. The MLS does exactly what it was designed to do: serve professionals and their clients.

The buyer without an agent sees whatever individual brokerages choose to make public on their own. Some brokerages will publish generously. Others won’t. There’s no single place to see everything. No guarantee of completeness. No standardized data. The detailed information that matters most — days on market, price reductions — lives behind the wall of a professional relationship.

In other words, the MLS becomes a professionals-only database. And the door to that database has a sign on it: representation required.

That might sound like a minor distinction. Most buyers hire agents anyway. But “most” isn’t “all.” And the people who don’t — the unrepresented buyer navigating on their own, the first-time buyer who hasn’t committed to an agency relationship yet, the family trying to figure out if they can even afford to enter the market — all lose access to the very information they need to make informed decisions.

Rob argues this increases agent value. He’s right. It does. But it increases agent value by making the agent the gatekeeper to information the public currently has for free. That’s not the same as increasing agent value through expertise, judgment, or service. It’s increasing it through scarcity. Through access control.

And I keep coming back to this question: to what degree is gated access to market information a critical part of the value proposition I want to offer?

For me, the answer isn’t just theoretical. I built a business, DIY Homebuyer Academy, on the opposite premise: that consumers deserve access to information, even if they never hire me.

Why am I confident to give so much information away for free? Because I find, time and time again, when most people see the data they aren’t confident in knowing what to do with it. They realize they want professional help, and that’s when they call. This fuels my core belief that the professionals who are genuinely worth hiring are the ones who thrive when a market is maximally transparent. Lesser professionals are those who justify their business by trying to control the keys.

The Accidental Gift

At the risk of repeating myself, Rob is right that the MLS was never designed to serve consumers. It was built as a B2B cooperation tool. When IDX came along in the early 2000s, it was a response to the internet, not a philosophical commitment to public access. Consumer access to listing data was, in a real sense, an accident.

But not all accidents are bad. Think about the creation of penicillin.

Over the past 25 years, this “accident” has given American consumers something almost no other country has: the ability to see virtually every home for sale in their market, in real time, from their phone. Try doing that in France. Or Japan. Or the UK. You can’t. The American homebuyer has more access to active listing data than buyers in almost any country on earth.

That transparency wasn’t planned. But it’s real. Millions of people depend on it.

Now Rob and Compass are proposing we pull that back. Not out of malice. Out of a genuine belief that the MLS overstepped and needs to return to its roots.

I understand the argument. I respect it.

But you can’t take back something that millions of people now depend on and call it restoration. At this point, it’s amputation.

The Legislatures Are Already Answering

I confess, it’s a whole lot easier to be the guy asking the questions than the one writing the proposals.

But these aren’t irrelevant, pie-in-the-sky questions. My home state, Washington, just passed Senate Bill 6091 that prohibits real estate brokers from marketing properties to an exclusive group of brokers or prospective buyers, unless the property is concurrently marketed to the general public and all other brokers. The bill passed the Senate 49-0 and the House 92-1. Near-unanimous, bipartisan.

Wisconsin passed similar legislation in December last year. And late last week, a proposal surfaced in New York that may effectively ban private listings.

The legislators looked at the private listings debate and came to a simple conclusion: if a home is being marketed to anyone, it must be marketed to everyone. That’s not an MLS rule. It’s state law, backed by licensing enforcement, and the threat of fines and revocation.

The industry can debate MLS architecture until the end of time. But state legislatures are answering the question of what the public is owed. And their answer is: access.

The Definitional Problem

And yet, even with legislation on the books, there’s a gap that troubles me.

None of these laws require listings to enter the MLS. They require “public marketing.” But what does public actually mean?

If Compass lists a home on Compass.com and Redfin, is that public? If Howard Hanna puts a listing in HannaList and calls it visible to all brokers, is that public? If a Coming Soon appears on one portal but not another, with no standardized DOM, no price history, and no centralized data — is that a public marketplace?

Surely I’m not the only one going mad over calling something a “Private Exclusive” that in a matter of months may be publicly visible to anyone with the Redfin app on their phone. The words ‘public’ and ‘private’ have lost their meaning. And when the words lose their meaning, any rules built on them lose their teeth.

In order for this conversation to remain productive, we need some consensus at the first principles level. We need a shared vision for what the housing marketplace ought to look like for consumers. Not clients. The full public. What rights, if any, are owed to them. What and how much data should be transparent. Even simply but objectively defining our terms about what it means to be ‘on the market.’

While I’m happy to participate in this conversation, I’m not the one in the position to make the decisions that need to be made. That’s not a bad thing. It’s just reality. Thinking back to my original post two weeks ago, I never imagined it’d go this far or that I’d end up going this deep on MLS issues. I’ve learned a ton, changed my mind on a few things, and had my thinking sharpened by people who know this terrain far better than I do.

Now, I hope those who do have the power to influence the future of the American housing marketplace will courageously step up and lead.

Housing is how most Americans build wealth. It’s where families live, where kids go to school, where communities form. It is, for most people, the single most important financial decision they’ll ever make.

Should the core facts of that market — what’s for sale, for how much, for how long — be controlled by the companies that profit from controlling access to them?

Or does the public deserve a marketplace where that information is broadly visible, consistently defined, and difficult for any one company or professional class to selectively withhold?

If the industry wants trust, it should stop fighting over who controls access to the market and start fighting for a marketplace worth trusting.

In the end, managing such a marketplace may be too much to ask of the MLS, but at least I think it’s the right question to be asking.

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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.