Compass Demands MLSs Stop “Weaponizing” Its Data For Agent Recruiting

“The MLS exists to facilitate real estate transactions — not to weaponize our operational data against us for competitor poaching.”

Last week Victor Lund sent an email to MLSs on behalf of Compass asking them to stop feeding Compass agent data to recruiting vendors. Courted, BrokerMetrics and Brokerkit got named. There’s a 30-day deadline, plus a line about “damage claims to the MLS” that Compass will generously release if the MLS plays along. 

(Disclosure: BrokerMetrics is owned by Lone Wolf, the company Dan and I sold W+R Studios to, and Giant Steps does some work for Lone Wolf. CMAs come up below. Read accordingly.)

Everybody is going to write the recruiting story. The story I care about is demand number three. Per HousingWire, Compass also wants MLSs “to clarify Compass’s right as a participant broker to opt out of non-IDX/VOW vendor data distribution.

“Read that again. That’s an off switch. Recruiting software is just the safest place to test it, because nobody is going to march on the state capitol to save Courted. But the logic has no brakes. If a listing broker can pull its data out of a competitor’s recruiting tool, why not the competitor’s CRM? Its market reports? Its CMAs? First they came for the recruiting software…

We’ve had this fight before, and the brokers who wanted to use the data won. In 2014 The Realty Alliance pushed NAR to require MLSs to provide data feeds for broker AVMs. Rebecca Jensen, then running UtahRealEstate.com, said more than 85 percent of her brokers were against it. The NAR board passed it anyway, after a motion to send it back to committee narrowly failed. Since then, MLS content available to participants for brokerage purposes has had to be available for valuation too, and the listing broker doesn’t get a veto. Craig Cheatham said it best at the time: “Valuation is a core right and benefit, and opt out has no place in this area.”

Twelve years later, Compass wants the opt-out.

It’s also a little rich. In 2018 Inman reported that Benoit Mizner Simon, a Boston-area brokerage, spent nearly a year in acquisition talks with Compass and handed over “performance metrics of its top agents.” Talks ended in February. Within weeks, Compass hired eight of its top agents with $100,000 signing bonuses. Compass’s position back then was that all agents “have the right to choose the firm that is best for them.” In 2021 Compass sued REBNY, claiming the legacy firms were using industry rules to “thwart competitors,” including rules that kept agents from bringing clients with them when they switched firms.  That’s just the tip of the iceberg, go Google, “Compass agent recruiting lawsuits” and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

Agent mobility was sacred when Compass was the one doing the recruiting.

So why push this now? Here’s my guess, and it is a guess. Compass is rolling its platform out across @properties, Corcoran and the rest of the Anywhere brands, calling it “the largest technology deployment in residential real estate history.” Every seat that platform fills is a seat some vendor used to sell. A broker-level off switch for vendor data, held by the company that now owns Coldwell Banker, Century 21 and Sotheby’s, makes everybody else’s software a little harder to plug in. I can’t prove that’s the plan. But if I sold software into Anywhere franchise offices, I’d be reading this letter very slowly.

Here’s what I’d tell MLSs. Don’t answer this alone, and don’t answer it in 30 days. Send it to counsel, send it to CMLS, and pull out the 2014 policy. If licensing agent-level production data to recruiters is a problem (and reasonable people think it might be), fix it with a rule that applies to every participant the same way. Just stop short of a side deal with the biggest one.Because the first MLS that grants Compass an off switch will get the same letter from every broker with a lawyer.