From T3 Sixty:
Strategic Paths for MLS Leadership: Consolidation, Cooperation or Sale
“When MLS leadership decides to make a move, there are three primary paths to consider: full consolidation, cooperation or an outright sale. Preparing for each requires addressing distinct operational, financial and governance hurdles.”
Eben Moran lays out the three doors pretty cleanly. Merge into one organization. Share a data feed with your neighbor while keeping your own brand, rules and local fields. Or sell to a private equity group, a tech vendor or a broker coalition.
My favorite detail is the timelines. Consolidation and cooperation each run 12 to 24 months. A sale? Three to six months from valuation to closing. Turns out the fastest way to change your MLS is to stop owning it. (Whether that’s a feature or a bug depends on who you ask at the lobby bar.)
These conversations are only going to increase. Subscriber counts are flat, budgets are tight, and the “go it alone” math gets harder every year.
Disclosure (shameless plug?): T3 Sixty has brought my company, Giant Steps, into a few of these discussions, mostly on the valuation side. That’s usually where things get real. Everyone loves the idea of exploring a merger right up until someone has to put a number on what each MLS is actually worth, and what that number buys at the board table. Eben makes the same point: agreeing to explore is the easy part.
If you want to go deeper on the numbers, Ohan Antebian on our team wrote a white paper on exactly this: Valuation, Ownership and Growth Models for MLS Organizations.
My advice: get the valuation done before you need it. Even if you never merge, cooperate or sell, knowing what your MLS is worth changes how your board weighs every other decision. You can’t negotiate from a number you don’t have.
We still have a few slots open at NAR NXT if you are interested:
Click Here => Meet with Giant Steps Advisors in New Orleans
“Ah, Door #3: Cashing out in 90 days. What an absolute stroke of civic genius.
Why bother doing the messy, unglamorous work of running a member-funded cooperative for your local brokers when you can just sell the entire family silver to private equity before the quarterly cocktail hour ends?
It’s almost poetic:
Generations of working agents pay mandatory dues, drive the comps, take the photos, and enter every byte of property data out of their own pockets.
The board gets nervous about declining dues and lawyer fees.
Giant Steps and T3 Sixty swoop in with an EBITDA slide deck to help the association ‘unburden’ itself.
An eight-figure buyout wires into association reserves, and by next quarter, those very same agents get to rent their own data back from a private equity tollbooth at a premium SaaS rate.
Forget ‘strategic paths’, just call it what it is: the cleanest, fastest asset heist in American real estate history, complete with consulting fees and a private suite at NAR NXT.
I’m sure the local membership will be thrilled to learn their life’s work was appraised, packaged, and sold off in three to six months flat, all to save the board the headache of a 12-month committee meeting. Brilliant work, boys. Don’t spend the advisory cuts all in one place.”
Mr. Alkema, are you well? If you have some constructive comments I’m happy to engage, but I seriously don’t understand where these crazy rants are coming from. I’ve never met you, have never spoken to you, and you seem to have so much hate. Your comments read like a very unhappy person. Please seek help.
Well written