Where Real Estate Gets Its Dirt

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 

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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.

RIP Mark Allen

Kathleen Lappe on LinkedIn

“Hi Friends,
With a heavy heart, I share the passing of Mark Allen, someone deeply loved by me and by the real estate industry.

For nearly four decades, Mark shaped how our industry works, shares information, embraces technology, and connects people.

He spent 16 years as CEO of the Minneapolis Area Association of REALTORS®, establishing programs that became models nationwide. He founded 10K Research Marketing, pioneering market analytics for brokers, associations, and MLSs before its acquisition by ShowingTime.

As Vice President of Industry Relations at Realtor.com, he built relationships with REALTOR® associations and MLS leaders and helped oversee data relationships with more than 500 MLSs.”

I had no idea he was sick. Mark was a great guy, very kind and always great to share stories with. I met him first at the Minneapolis Area Association.

Why always the good ones?

#FUCKCANCER

You’re not on the list…

From the Wall Street Journal:

Katherine Clarke for the Wall Street Journal (pay wall)

The Fierce Battle to Control How Americans Buy and Sell Their Homes

Velvet ropes around a house? What a travesty. This is exactly what Brian Boero warned us about at the CMLS Conference in Seattle. The article is not a good look for Compass, but even a worse look for the industry. Just check out the comments, and I thought this quote was emblematic of Compass double talk…

“Compass’s spokesperson said those figures are incorrect, but said the company doesn’t keep track of the numbers itself.”

How long will the industry tolerate one person, one company gatekeeping the American Dream?

AI, real estate and finding a home

Andy Woolley for Homes.com

Beyond the Risks: What Thoughtfully Designed AI Can Bring Real Estate

“The industry’s inventory of homes for sale does not simply appear in a database. It is created, curated, and continuously maintained through the work of real estate professionals, and well-designed AI helps consumers and professionals put that work to better use.

MLSs support this cooperative marketplace by helping participating brokers share listing information broadly and consistently. Their standards, rules, and distribution systems make it easier for professionals and consumers to find and compare listings across brokerage boundaries. AI only increases the importance of accurate, comprehensive, and timely listing information and the systems that make it broadly available”

100%

There are a few initiatives out there regarding AI and real estate. I think we need to listen to all voices and let the best ideas win.

Blame the Dentists

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

Overview

Rob and Greg look at the latest NAR existing home sales report. Sales rose 1.5% to a 3.99 million SAAR, inventory stands at 4.8 months, and the median price is $417,500. Investor purchases jumped from 15% to 20% month over month. Rob argues that housing affordability is becoming a political flashpoint ahead of the midterms. He warns that candidates may find it easy to blame real estate investors, and the realtors who work with them, for the housing crisis. Greg pushes back on how much political power anyone could gain by taking on NAR, the country’s second-largest lobby. The two then debate whether the industry has any real message for young, working-class Americans who believe they’ll never own a home.

Key Takeaways

  • Existing home sales hit 3.99M SAAR in September, the fourth straight year near 4 million.
  • Investor share of purchases rose from 15% to 20% in one month; first-time buyers edged up to 31%.
  • Mortgage rates are set by the bond market, not the Fed, and 10-year yields are near 5.3%.
  • Rising bond market concerns are pushing wealthier individuals toward real assets like housing.
  • Most real estate investors are individuals, such as dentists and retirees, not institutions like BlackRock.
  • Investors and first-time buyers often compete for the same starter homes.
  • Rob sees housing as an open lane for a “housing candidate” willing to blame investors and realtors.
  • NAR ranks second in national lobbying, behind only the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and ahead of pharma.
  • Policy ideas discussed include limiting Fannie and Freddie financing for investment properties and restricting the mortgage interest deduction to owner-occupied homes.
  • Down payment assistance risks raising prices by the same amount.
  • Greg is optimistic that the AI infrastructure build-out will drive long-term prosperity.
  • Rob argues Gen Z has lost the reasonable expectation that hard work leads to homeownership.
  • Open question to listeners: what message should the industry have for the younger generation?

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

Sponsored By Lone Wolf Technologies