Where Real Estate Gets Its Dirt

ListHub 2.0?

The Industry Relations Podcast is now available on your favorite podcast player!

Overview

Rob and Greg break down Open Real Estate (ORE), a new initiative from eXp, Real, RE/MAX, Keller Williams, and Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices to build a broker-run listing cooperative. They debate whether ORE is a national MLS or a syndication platform, whether a Q1 2027 launch is realistic, and what ORE could mean for MLSs, Compass, and government regulation of the industry.

Key Takeaways

  • ORE aims to prevent inventory fragmentation driven by Compass’s private listing strategy.
  • Greg gives ORE a one-out-of-ten chance of success but thinks MLSs and portals should help anyway.
  • Rob says mandatory submission plus cooperation makes ORE a national MLS, whatever it’s called.
  • Greg sees ORE as closer to ListHub 2.0, a data feed that works alongside MLSs.
  • Rob asks why ORE doesn’t just buy ListHub from Realtor.com instead of building from scratch.
  • Neither host believes ORE can launch by Q1 2027 with RFPs only now going out.
  • ORE’s early principles include submission within one business day and public or participant-only listing options.
  • ORE could become the industry’s new rulemaker, giving MLSs cover against Compass.
  • Pricing like a dollar per listing could push smaller MLSs toward consolidation.
  • Greg credits ORE for bringing a solution to the table instead of filing lawsuits.
  • Greg wonders if ORE gives Robert Reffkin a face-saving way out of his fight with MLSs.
  • Rob argues ORE’s real goal is removing inventory as a way for brokerages to compete for agents.
  • Rob warns that ORE’s consumer-protection rhetoric could invite government regulation of the MLS.
  • In 2004 congressional testimony, industry leaders defended the MLS as a private broker-to-broker cooperative.

Links

Vendor Alley: Upstream 2.0? Not Quite. 

Inman: KW, AGNT, HomeServices of America, Real REMAX fight private listing with new collaboration 

BAM (Video) : REAL, eXp, Keller Williams & Berkshire Hathaway Announce Historic Team Up 

Notorious POD (Video): Reaction Video – Open Real Estate

Are you an MLS Exec going to NAR NXT?  Book a meeting with Greg/Giant Steps 

Connect with Rob and Greg

Rob’s Website 

Greg’s Website 

Watch us on YouTube

Our Sponsors:

Cotality 

Notorious VIP

The Giant Steps Job Board 

Production and Editing Services by Sunbound Studios

Upstream 2.0? Not quite.

KW, AGNT, HomeServices of America, Real, and RE/MAX Fight Private Listings With New Collaboration

“This effort is bigger than any one company.”

Keller Williams, AGNT (eXp and NextHome), HomeServices of America, Real, and RE/MAX launched Open Real Estate today, with Brown Harris Stevens, Lamacchia, Samson, and Windermere signed on as participating members.

One thing I love is that they dropped the news right before Compass’ annual retreat. Now Reffkin will be on stage trying to defend his bullshit “Seller’s Choice” narrative against a backdrop of multiple lawsuits, inquiries from local, state, and national politicians, and some of the largest real estate firms in the business advocating for transparency and consumers. And some Compass agents are already losing faith. Who wants all this drama?

Okay, back to the announcement. After reading a bunch and watching this video, here’s what I’ve come up with.

The idea (not the execution) is simple. A broker enters a listing once, using standard fields, and it goes to every member brokerage, the local MLS, portals, appraisers, and data services. The listing has to be in the database within one business day of the listing agreement being signed. The listing broker then picks “Market,” which is public, or “Participant,” which only agents at member brokerages can see and nobody can market publicly.

A submission deadline, and every member sees every listing. That’s a cooperation rule. This time, the brokers wrote it.

Here are some high-level takeaways:

  • Open Real Estate is pushing back against the industry’s move toward inventory fragmentation and worries we’re heading toward a European model.
  • Open Real Estate has lost confidence that the MLS industry is going to solve this problem. This may be due to some MLS organizations bending the knee to Compass or the onslaught of lawsuits. (Sprinkle in some resentment about paying hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements following the NAR litigation.)
  • Open Real Estate is tired of dealing with so many MLS organizations and outdated technology.
  • Open Real Estate believes listing data is worth more than what brokers are currently being compensated for, and it plans to “democratize” the sharing of any revenues generated with Open Real Estate participants.
  • Open Real Estate doesn’t want to be a consumer-facing portal.
  • There’s no cost to sign up.
  • RFPs are out. They want to use “third-party, best-in-class technology.”
  • The plan is to be operational in Q1 2027.
  • Open Real Estate is ready to make “massive investments.”

I can see why they’re doing it. Brokers are running on razor-thin margins and looking for ways to replace lost commission revenue. Several of these firms wrote big checks to settle the commission lawsuits after NAR lost Sitzer-Burnett. And all of them have spent years dealing with hundreds of MLSs, each with its own rules, fields, and fees.

If your listings are your most valuable asset, building your own pipe and getting paid for what flows through it makes business sense. Who could blame them? Although it’s not that easy.

From what I understand, you need a complete dataset for anyone to be truly interested. Not 25%, not 50%, not 75%. And these firms aren’t there.

As I’ve stated, I don’t think these firms were particularly happy with how some MLS organizations bent the knee to Compass. But I do see something that might help many MLSs.

Since the settlement, NAR has been “de-risking,” pushing MLS policy decisions down to local MLSs. That leaves a lot of MLS executives defending rules on their own. A national group of big brokers with its own cooperation standard might be just the ticket for MLSs tired of making up excuses.

I could see Open Real Estate starting to charge MLSs for listing data, and not every MLS will be able to pay. The big ones will. The smaller ones might not, and that could set off another round of consolidation.

But running a broker cooperative is hard. Ask any MLS executive.

Rules need enforcement, enforcement needs staff and governance, and at some point, somebody has to fine a member’s top producer.

Open Real Estate has no leadership, no staff, and no final governance structure yet. It hasn’t picked a technology partner, and the RFP process with “several national technology vendors” wraps up in Q1 2027.

I think declaring they’ll be “operational” by Q1 2027 is a mistake. And I’m not really talking about the tech.

It’s never the tech. It’s the politics.

What about BLX? I thought KW and HomeServices had already announced something tech-wise with Cotality. This all sounds very familiar.

Here’s a quote from Kevin Greene, general manager of Real Estate Solutions at Cotality, in RISMedia on July 10, 2026:

“The MLS remains the essential bedrock of the local real estate marketplace. It is the definitive environment for compilation and broker-to-broker cooperation,” Greene states. “BLX is not a replacement marketplace; it is a broker’s private portfolio management tool. The two systems work in unison. The broker gains deep visibility into their own internal business inventory across their regional or national footprint, while the MLS continues to provide the comprehensive, hyperlocal market intelligence that every agent needs to advise clients and close transactions.”

Will Open Real Estate sync both ways the way BLX does? Leo says yes in the BAM video.

Again, I’m skeptical.

And what about Compass?

Back in February Robert Reffkin floated a national listing platform jointly owned by a coalition of brokerages, with “no disproportionate ownership” by Compass and an independent board.

Today, his biggest competitors launched something that looks a lot like it.

He just isn’t on the cap table.

On paper, Open Real Estate runs straight at his exclusive-listing strategy: Get it in within a day, and every member sees it.

But that strategy has brought Compass plenty of headaches and lawsuits. If Reffkin is looking for a way out, could a broker-run cooperative that isn’t an MLS be it?

Joining means playing by his rivals’ rules. Staying out means fighting them on another front.

Lots for him to think about.

Right now, it’s a letter, a website, and eight logos. It’s an interesting idea with a lot of hard parts left.

By Q1 2027, we’ll know whether it’s a platform or a press release.

Stop Losing Agents Unexpectedly: How to Build a Proactive Retention System [Sponsor]

30% of brokers lost an agent unexpectedly last year. The brokers who didn’t? They have systems in place. Here’s how to get there, in 15 minutes.

The problem, quickly

If you’ve been following this series, you already know the shape of it. Brokers say retention matters more than recruiting (74%), but almost none of them treat it as a top growth priority (2%). The blind spot behind that gap is informal monitoring: gut instinct, check-ins, and production trends, with almost no structured data behind any of it.

The cost of that blind spot is real. $18,036 and 200 days for every agent lost unexpectedly. And the warning window is often too narrow to use: 26% of brokers get little to no notice at all before an agent walks, and among those who do notice something, a third only get one to three months to act.

The system approach

Closing this gap isn’t about working harder at the same informal methods. It’s about moving from gut instinct to data-driven signals:

  • Real-time production monitoring that pulls from data your brokerage already has, no new manual tracking required.
  • Behavioral pattern detection that flags the early, quiet shifts, engagement pulling back, activity changing, before an agent decides to walk.
  • Automated alerts to your leadership team, so the signal doesn’t depend on one person’s bandwidth catching it in a busy week.

How it changes your outcome

  • Instead of 30% surprise departures, brokers running a system report far fewer.
  • Instead of landing at “somewhat confident,” brokers report genuine confidence they’d catch a flight risk in time.
  • Instead of scrambling to chase a replacement, brokers get ahead of it with a proactive retention conversation.
  • Instead of absorbing a 200-day ramp-up hit, brokers protect the pipeline before it’s ever at risk.

What the data backs up

The report’s own finding makes the case simply: brokers who move even one step past pure gut instinct, a regular check-in cadence, a simple tracking list, report meaningfully higher confidence than those relying on observation alone. You don’t need a perfect system to see the benefit. You need a system that’s more than a feeling.

See it in 15 minutes

This isn’t a band-aid on informal monitoring. It’s the system that replaces it.

Schedule a 15-Min Demo

Many thanks to Lone Wolf for sponsoring Vendor Alley this month.

Exhibit B

In Its Own Words: What Compass’s Lawsuit Reveals About Itself

CRMLS’s Art Carter and Ed Zorn sat down with Compass’s antitrust complaint against them and read it slowly. They stopped at paragraph 3:

“One reason homeowners like having this choice is that they can use pre-MLS public marketing to test the price of a home with real-world feedback from agents and their clients, which helps ensure the home is not overpriced when it lists in the MLS…”

Compass says about 48% of its sellers used this “phased marketing” where their MLS allowed it.

Last week I wrote about paragraph 76 of the six-MLS complaint, which says Compass agents build their CMAs on everybody else’s comps. Turns out that’s only half of it. According to Compass’s own complaint, about half its sellers also need everybody else’s agents to tell them what the house is worth. The comps aren’t enough. They want live feedback from the competition too, before the listing goes anywhere those competitors’ buyers can see it. Carter and Zorn ask it more politely:

“Why would a competent agent representing a seller need input and feedback from competing agents just to determine what the list price of a property should be?”

Price is the number one objection sellers raise. Compass’s answer is to let the other brokers argue it for them. Strange thing for a technology company to tell a federal judge about half its listings.

It gets worse. Same paragraph, Compass says the strategy avoids listings getting “permanently soiled by price cuts and extended ‘days on market’ that hurt the perceived value of the homes.” Zorn has been working this angle since THRIVE in September. California’s agency disclosure form (Civil Code 2079.16) says the listing agent owes the buyer a duty to disclose facts that materially affect value. If DOM and price cuts permanently soil value, they’re material. Compass just said so in a federal filing. Then it threw in the 4.6% premium its phased-marketing homes supposedly sell for, which reads an awful lot like a damages number. Hagens Berman already noticed that one in Chicago.

The fact-check section is fun too. Compass says CRMLS licenses data to portals while “paying Compass nothing.” CRMLS says it emailed Compass brokers five times this spring with instructions to collect $24,443.78 in revenue share. Compass says sellers of other goods don’t have to show price history. CRMLS posted screenshots from Edmunds (Porsche Macans natch!) and Amazon. Compass says consumers can’t get into the CRMLS database. CRMLS counts more than 12.5 million consumer logins to its client portals last year.

Yikes!

This is one side of a lawsuit arguing its case in public, and Compass’s lawyers will have answers (I’m assuming). But “test the price” isn’t a lawyer’s flourish. It’s the listing presentation.

The CMA is the price test. If you need your competitors to tell you what the house is worth, the least you can do is let their buyers see it. Last week the CMA was Exhibit A. This week Compass filed Exhibit B itself.

(Same disclosure as last week: I consult with Lone Wolf on Cloud CMA. The dog is still a very good boy.)

The CMA is now Exhibit A

Six MLSs Sue Compass, Seeking to Block Lawsuits and Affirm Rules

So, I helped break this news yesterday that ARMLS, BridgeMLS, Canopy, REcolorado, Hive and Doorify filed in the Southern District of New York on Tuesday, same court as CRMLS, same ask: declare the cooperation rules legal and tell Compass to stop threatening to sue us. Rob already did the legal read, and even he admits it’s a well-drafted complaint.

But there’s one paragraph nobody has written about. Paragraph 76:

“Brokers use records of past sales and current listings in the MLS, including detailed sales information (such as closing price, marketing time, and concessions), to prepare comparative market analyses (“CMAs”) for potential sellers. Brokers then use these CMAs to persuade a seller to hire them, to recommend listing prices, and to advise on timing and other aspects of the sale. The Cooperation Rules thus prevent non-cooperating brokers from profiting from the cooperative’s shared information while withholding their own publicly marketed listings, which other brokers cannot then use in preparing their CMAs.”

For a year and a half this fight has been framed around the buyer. Can my buyer see your listing? Six MLSs just moved it to the listing appointment, and I’m here for it.

Every CMA ever made is built on somebody else’s closed sales. The comps are your competitor’s listings, your competitor’s price reductions, your competitor’s days on market, your competitor’s concessions. You never contributed a single one of them. The cooperative did. That’s the deal. You put yours in, you get everyone’s out, and the agent at the one-person shop walks into the listing presentation with the same data as the agent from the biggest brokerage in America.

Now look at Compass’s three-phase strategy. Private Exclusive, then Coming Soon on Compass.com, then (maybe) the MLS. Reffkin’s own line is that Compass should be known for having “more inventory than any other website or brokerage.” Fine. But the complaint’s point is that a listing which arrives in the MLS after it’s sold, or arrives without the price history and the DOM, isn’t a comp. It’s a receipt. Every Compass agent still gets to build CMAs on everybody else’s data. Everybody else gets to build CMAs on whatever Compass decided to share, whenever Compass decided to share it.

Now as many of you know, I’ve spent a long time on CMAs (I even wrote a book about them, so grain of salt). In our 2026 survey with Lone Wolf, a third of agents said they’d lost a listing over price, and price was the number one objection sellers raised. The CMA is how you win that argument. It’s the one document in the business where the data is the pitch. Degrade the data and you degrade every agent’s ability to tell a seller the truth about what their house is worth. Except, of course, the agents at the brokerage holding the inventory.

That’s the free ride. Not the buyer search. The listing presentation.

Rob’s answer (beyond blowing everything up) to all of this is to make Limited Exposure the only status and let brokers market however they want, as long as everything goes in the MLS. Notice that his fix and the MLSs’ complaint agree on the one thing that matters for the CMA: the listing has to be in the database, on time, with its history. Everything else is a fight about billboards.

Reffkin wants it known that Compass has more inventory than anyone. Paragraph 76 is six MLSs pointing out that his agents’ listing presentations are built on everyone else’s.

(Disclosure: I’m currently consulting with Lone Wolf on Cloud CMA, the product I co-founded. I have a dog in this fight and he’s a very good boy.)

Lone Wolf’s Talent Puts BrokerMetrics’ Data to Work on the Roster You Already Have [Sponsor]

If you’ve run a brokerage in the last twenty years, you’ve used BrokerMetrics or sat across from someone who did. The Terradatum product became shorthand for “what’s our market share” in broker-owner circles, which is about as high a compliment as software gets in this industry. The knock was never the data. It was that the thing lived on one machine in the office, and whoever had that laptop had the numbers. Lone Wolf has since moved the whole product to the web inside Foundation, and last week they showed me a new module called Talent that changes what BrokerMetrics is for. Just a quick aside, man Lone Wolf has done a great job with the new UI in their products. How do I know? Well, they pretty much followed Cloud CMA style guide, so ‘natch.   

Anyway, back to BrokerMetrics Talent. First, the part that hasn’t changed. Market Share and Market Dynamics are still the heart of the product: where a broker actually wins, sliced by office, property type, or price band, and whether it’s a buyer’s or seller’s market with the inventory and pricing data to prove it. Yosef Tajzoy, a former broker now on Lone Wolf’s sales engineering team, made the point that stuck with me. When he ran an office, finding time to put real market data in front of his agents was the hardest part of the job. Brokers who do it have agents who walk into listing appointments with numbers instead of a hunch, and those agents tend to stay. Market analytics is a retention argument before it is anything else. 

Which brings us to BrokerMetrics Talent. Everything it surfaces was already in BrokerMetrics. You could always run the search and find which of your own people were drifting. Almost nobody did, because it took a broker sitting down and doing the work. Talent reads the MLS production data daily, runs it through Lone Wolf’s Aspen AI, and hands the broker a short list of who to talk to and why. It then drafts the email, the text, and the call script. 

The piece I’d lead with is the Roster view. Your own agents get sorted into Needs Attention, Worth Recognizing, and Top Producers, each with a likelihood-of-movement gauge Lone Wolf says is built on roughly fifty variables. A top producer whose volume is up 168% gets a card that says, in plain language, to celebrate the trend before a competitor notices, along with a dollar figure on the profit you’d lose if they walk. Lone Wolf’s number is that losing one productive agent costs about $18,000, before you count replacing them or the fact that agents leave in packs. Yikes! 

The feature I haven’t seen elsewhere is the Profitability Estimate. Enter your actual comp plans, a straight 70/30 or a graduated tier, and Talent projects what an agent nets the brokerage under each one from their real MLS production, and what the agent would earn. One caveat: it doesn’t pull from Lone Wolf Back Office, so the expense side is a market average you adjust by hand. That’s the integration I’d expect brokers to ask for first. 

Yes, BrokerMetrics Talent recruits too. You can ask Aspen AI in plain English for agents who did three to fifteen deals in a county or in a shape you draw on the map, and move prospects through a pipeline to whichever manager owns recruiting. It’s well done. But the retention side is where I think the money is, and the market analytics that made BrokerMetrics a trusted name are still underneath all of it. There’s no separate Talent SKU; BrokerMetrics now brings Market Share, Market Dynamics, and Talent together. If you’re already a customer, upgrading gives you access to all three. 

Congrats to the Lone Wolf team on this new release. 

Disclosure: Giant Steps, my consulting firm, works with Lone Wolf Technologies on Cloud CMA, which I sold to Lone Wolf as part of W+R Studios. 

IT’S WAR! 6 MLS orgs file suit against Compass

Case 1:26-cv-09253 Complaint for declaratory and injunctive relief.

“This lawsuit arises from a campaign by Compass- the largest real estate brokerage in the United States to pressure multiple listing services (“MISs”) into changing cooperation rules in a way that would favor Compass but would make the market for residential real estate less transparent and less competitive, ultimately hurting”

Holy Shit, its on.

Thumbs Up

NYU

Jenn and I went to the movies and saw “You Can See Everything“. I wanted to know what a senior film student at NYU thought about the documentary. So I FaceTimed my son Cole last night. He loved it. Me too, you should go see it.

Hard to believe that he will graduate in just a few months. Time flies.

Can a father be more proud?

Spinning Compass

The Industry Relations Podcast is now available on your favorite podcast player!

Overview

Rob and Greg break down Compass’s newly filed lawsuit against CRMLS in the Central District of California. They cover the eyebrow-raising $175 million figure tied to commission settlement costs and why Rob thinks Compass has a strong case that’s badly packaged. They also debate MLS “transparency” claims and OneHome, revisit precedent from Cantor v. Multiple Listing Service of Dutchess County and RealComp, and look at what MLSs facing Compass threats, like Unlock MLS and OneKey MLS, should do next.

Key Takeaways

  • Compass’s suit against CRMLS shifts the main legal action to California.
  • Compass appears to seek recovery of commission settlement costs (Sitzer/Burnett, Gibson) from MLSs.
  • Rob sees strong arguments in the complaint but a weak, overly combative narrative.
  • The complaint doesn’t explain why CRMLS’s board would adopt rules that bind its own members.
  • Rob argues MLS transparency claims fail because consumers can’t join MLSs directly.
  • Greg counters that OneHome gave roughly 12 million consumers CRMLS data access in a year.
  • Rob says an MLS’s customer is the agent who pays, not buyers or sellers.
  • Cantor v. MLS of Dutchess County struck down a rule that had little to do with the cooperative: mandatory MLS yard signs.
  • The core question is whether MLSs should regulate how properties are marketed.
  • NAR’s 2004 change, dropping the advertising restriction from the 14 points, was followed by DOJ action.
  • Greg questions whether MLSs can negotiate in good faith with Compass, given its shifting demands.
  • Rob urges MLSs to try to avoid costly litigation before going to “war.”
  • Greg notes MLSs feel squeezed between Compass suits and potential seller lawsuits.
  • The 1983 FTC Butters Report shows the MLS is anti-competitive by design but delivers major consumer benefits.
  • Rob predicts private and office-exclusive listings will grow, driven by buyer demand in a K-shaped economy.

Connect with Rob and Greg

Rob’s Website 

Greg’s Website 

Watch us on YouTube

Our Sponsors:

Cotality 

Notorious VIP

The Giant Steps Job Board 

Production and Editing Services by Sunbound Studios

Wait, Compass wants the MLS to pay for past commissions settlements?

From HousingWire:

Compass takes CRMLS fight to court and promises to cover agent fines

I’ve been delaying writing about this, too much reading. As you know, two weeks ago CRMLS beat Compass to the courthouse and filed in Manhattan. I told any MLS holding one of Compass’s demand letters to wait and see what that judge had to say before signing anything. On Friday Compass went and found a second judge. It filed its own antitrust suit in Riverside. Same fight, two federal courts, and both sides went shopping in the other guy’s hometown. CRMLS sued in Compass’s. Compass walked past its own federal courthouse in Manhattan and flew 2,500 miles to sue in the division CRMLS sits in, which tells you how badly it wants out of the district that told it no on Zillow in February.

From the complaint:

“Only the law and the homeowner should tell agents how to market a home, and CRMLS is neither the law nor the homeowner.”

Good line. Then read the rest of Friday’s announcement, where Compass adds itself to that list.

Compass will cover the fine for any agent at Compass, Coldwell Banker Realty or Sotheby’s International Realty, as long as the client asked for the public marketing in writing. Two conditions. Send the fine notice to a Compass email address, and assign Compass your right to sue CRMLS over it. Compass then folds your claim into its own case.


Call that what it is. Compass is buying plaintiffs, one fine notice at a time.

Remember the arithmetic. CRMLS says it issued 89 Rule 7.9 fines in 2025, eight of them to a Compass agent, and the fine tops out at $2,500. Call it twenty grand. Now, I’m even less of an attorney than Mrs. Zachria but as I read the complaint is asks for those back as restitution, buried in the prayer for relief. Paragraph 8 is where the real number lives, and the theory is this (and it’s a doozie). Compass couldn’t market a home publicly without putting it in the MLS, so it had no choice but to follow MLS policy, and MLS policy is what got brokerages sued over commissions.

Compass paid over $175 million to defend and settle lawsuits resulting from MLS policies it could not avoid… Although the settlements were the result of MLS rules, CRMLS paid nothing.

Compass wants an MLS to pay for the commission settlements. And in the complaint’s own words, the harms “must be paid back in triplicate.”

My head hurts.

It’s worth checking the word paid. Compass settled Gibson for $57.5 million. Getting anywhere near $175 million takes Anywhere’s $83.5 million settlement, and in Compass’s most recent quarterly filing, $54 million of that was still unpaid. Another $30 million of it was paid by Anywhere back in 2024, before Compass owned the company.

Nicole Aguilar at CRMLS sent over Art Carter’s full statement. Here’s the part that didn’t make the coverage:

“…no brokerage gains an unfair advantage by benefiting from the cooperative while withholding its own publicly marketed listings.”

The word for that is freeriding, and Art didn’t pick it at random. It’s the word the Manhattan judge used in February when he denied Compass’s injunction against Zillow, and CRMLS quotes that ruling three times in its own complaint.

Ten Compass enforcement cases were still open at CRMLS when it filed, eight of them on appeal. Those eight are the ballgame now, because an agent appealing a $2,500 fine wants it to go away. Compass’s lawyers want a transcript.

Compass also promised, on the record, to sue Unlock MLS. Twelve days ago. Maybe CRMLS is the test case and the rest of you are the docket.

So if you got one of those letters, here’s your homework this week. Find out what your enforcement process is worth once the defendant pre-pays the fine and owns the appeal. And I’d still wait before signing anything. Just know that waiting now means two judges instead of one, and every citation you write in the meantime is evidence somebody can buy.

Sponsored By Lone Wolf Technologies