“When homes move into closed or semi-closed channels, that basic fairness can break down. Buyers who are not connected with the “right” agent, broker, or social network may never have the chance to find their dream home. Sellers may lose out on a better deal because fewer buyers know their home is available. Smaller brokerages and agents lose access to critical information that is no longer shared equally.
That should concern anyone who cares about fair housing.”
Robert Reffkin and Rebecca Jensen you got mail! The House Judiciary’s antitrust subcommittee sent both CEOs letters asking for briefings on the Compass/MRED partnership, “as soon as possible” and no later than August 5. The concern, straight from the letters, is that the deal:
“could limit competition by fragmenting inventory, weakening price competition, and creating “velvet ropes” around certain properties that limit access to a select group of potential buyers, potentially limiting consumer choice”
“Velvet ropes.” On congressional letterhead. That phrasing sounds familar, and apparently Washington has been taking notes.
Now walk with me…. The Consumer Federation of America asks the DOJ and FTC to review Compass’sMLS agreements. Senators Warren and Wyden want scrutiny of the Anywhere deal. The New York AG opens an antitrust inquiry. Zillow drags everybody into federal court in Chicago. And now a House Judiciary subcommittee wants both CEOs in the room within two weeks. Here’s the part that should get Compass’s attention: this subcommittee is chaired by Scott Fitzgerald, a Republican from Wisconsin. Warren and Wyden are one thing. When the letters start coming from both sides of the aisle, “this is just politics” stops working as a talking point.
MRED’s response: “Whether it’s our customers or this committee, we’re always happy to help.” Never change, Rebecca. Compass? Nothing yet. The guy who personally emails MLS CEOs across the country didn’t have a comment ready.
Nobody got subpoenaed. A briefing is the meeting you take so you don’t get the hearing or the subpoena.
Compass’ FAFO moment might be about to happen and something tells me saying “seller’s choice” a hundred times isn’t going to work.
“When sellers choose to publicly market their homes and make them available to the broadest possible audience, Zillow is keeping those listings from buyers because they were not initially prioritized on Zillow,” the spokesperson said over email. “In some cases, Zillow is displaying active, publicly available listings as not for sale.”
“Zillow’s partnership with Opendoor was also brought up on multiple occasions. MRED and Compass sought to undermine Zillow’s claims of fighting for transparency and market visibility on the basis of their support of Opendoor buying off-market properties. In another apparent hypocrisy, Zillow supported sellers who chose to sell their home off-market to Opendoor. The attorneys argued that if Zillow cares so much about sellers getting maximum market exposure and buyers having the opportunity to see every available home, how can they simultaneously endorse a platform in which sellers obtain less than market value and no other buyer has any opportunity to see the home before Opendoor closes on it?”
I hadn’t thought of this angle. Not a strong argument for Compass, but interesting.
A joint Compass-MRED press release from April, announcing MRED’s purported national expansion, promised that Compass would provide all of its nationwide listings to MRED and subsidize memberships for up to 100,000 agents. Neither commitment has come close to being fulfilled. Internal Compass emails show executives scrambling over subsidy logistics four days after the press release, with one noting that even a $10-per-agent subsidy “would cost us $1 million.” Broude forwarded that email to a colleague with three facepalm emojis. The colleague replied: “What. A. Mess.”
So even Compass‘ own executives thought subsidizing MLS memberships was a bad idea? “Mess” is the wrong word.
As I write this, Compass CEO, Robert Reffkin. is sitting in a federal courtroom in Chicago. Zillow’s preliminary injunction hearing against MRED and Compass opened this week, and the CEO of the largest brokerage in America is on the witness list. Post-hearing briefs are due July 9th. However Judge Tarp rules, one thing is already clear: this is not where a winning strategy ends up.
So let’s play a game. What would I do if I were Robert Reffkin?
First, some history.
Compass came out of the gate as a technology company that happened to do brokerage. That was the whole pitch. Their former CTO Joseph Sirosh (a Microsoft AI guy, no less) described Compass as a marketplace platform, like Amazon. They IPO’d in April 2021 at $18 a share.
Strategy Number One : We are a tech company
Wall Street looked under the hood and saw a real estate brokerage with a big engineering budget. The stock sank as low as $1.96. It sits around $12 today. Over $900 million went into that platform, and in August 2022 Sirosh was let go as part of a cost reduction program. Strategy number one, dead. And too be fair many brokerages tried the “we are technology company” angle. Remember Gary Keller of Keller Williams on stage? Good times.
Strategy Number Two: Inventory differentiation
If you can’t differentiate on tech, differentiate on inventory. In late 2024 Compass rolled out its 3-Phase Marketing Strategy. Start every listing as a Private Exclusive, stair-step to Coming Soon, then (maybe) the MLS. The vision, as I understand it, is billboards that say “Compass has listings Zillow doesn’t.” Make the buyers come to you.
The problem is that the entire plumbing of American real estate is built to work the other way. So Compass went to war with it. The Clear Cooperation fight. Reffkin personally emailed MLS executives asking them to cut Zillow’s feeds. The NWMLS litigation in Washington, where the MLS is now counterclaiming that the 3-Phase program is consumer deception, with a state law on its side. The MRED partnership I covered in “Dracarys,” with Compass possibly subsidizing 100,000 agent memberships. MRED cut Zillow’s feed over nine listings, the TRO 48 hours later, and now this week’s hearing. I wrote about all of it. It’s a lot. And I hear MRED membership count hasn’t moved a bit. Rob, get ready to buy me that steak dinner.
And while Compass was fighting that war, the biggest distribution player on earth quietly picked a side. I wrote last week about Google building its national home search on MLS data. Every private network, every coming-soon feed, every velvet rope in the business was available to them, and the company that knows more about how people search than anyone alive bet on the open MLS. So here’s the question that should haunt the whole strategy: what is a Private Exclusive worth when Google can’t see it? Strategy number two, dead.
Strategy Number Three: Scale.
If you control more listings than anyone, maybe the industry has to come to the table. So Compass bought Anywhere. Announced September 2025, closed January 9th, $1.6 billion in stock, and suddenly Reffkin runs Coldwell Banker, Century 21, Sotheby’s, Corcoran, and ERA…awesome…wow. Per the 2026 RealTrends data, Compass did $262 billion in volume and Anywhere did $193 billion. Combined, that’s 47% of everything the top ten brokerages in America sold. The deal sailed through the federal HSR waiting period, but Letitia James’s office opened an antitrust inquiry in June, and there’s now a class action in Florida over Compass’s $475 transaction fee. Hard to argue “consumer choice” in one courtroom while consumers are suing you in another. Scale bought him more courtrooms. Strategy number three, is on life support.
And here’s the part that should keep him up at night. While Compass was fighting the listing wars, AI ate the moat. Everything changed after Claude Code, and then OpenClaw in January. Any software built before AI isn’t an asset anymore. It’s an anchor. That $900 million platform Wall Street wouldn’t pay a multiple for? An agent with a laptop can now spin up most of it in a weekend. The “we’re a tech company” argument didn’t just fail to convince Wall Street. It expired. Time to pull the plug Robert.
Which brings us to the fever dream. Wall Street has always had one about real estate: why are we paying agents so much? It reminds me of Travis Kalanick saying the quiet part out loud, that Uber would be a better business without drivers. Now with AI, the fever dream has a new pitch deck. Fewer humans for everything, including real estate.
But there’s a graveyard full of proptech companies that bet against the agent. And they all died for the same reason. A home is the biggest purchase most people ever make. It’s emotional. It’s infrequent, so nobody gets good at it. You live there. You raise your kids there. People want a trusted human for that, and I don’t think AI changes it. I think AI makes it more true, because when a machine can do everything else, the trusted human is the scarce thing.
So here’s what I’d do if I were Robert Reffkin. Stop differentiatingthe listings. Differentiate the agents.
And I mean with teeth, because “we have the best agents” is what every brokerage has claimed since the dawn of the yard sign. Here’s the version with teeth: radical transparency. Publish every Compass agent’s track record. Actual days on market. Sale-to-list ratio. How often they double-end. Nick Aufenkamp’s whole critique of the private listings movement is that it hides the negative insights buyers need. Imagine Compass answering that critique with more information instead of less. “We hide nothing, including exactly how good our agents are” is a strategy. It also happens to be the perfect reversal for a company currently in federal court defending its right to hide days on market.
And if you want proof that nobody else in this industry will follow him there, NAR just provided it.
Two weeks ago at NAR’s midyear meetings, the board killed a proposal requiring REALTORS® to disclose to clients when they lack knowledge about a property type or geographic area. The Professional Standards Committee spent two years crafting it. The commitee chair called it something “we all should be doing anyway.” The board debated it for an hour and sent it back to committee to die. Here’s the line from a Florida director that tells you everything:
“We do not need to create ‘ahas’ or ‘gotchas’ in the Code of Ethics. The moment that we disclose [that lack of knowledge] you’ve lost that trust with the consumer for the rest of your relationship with them.”
Read that again. The National Association of REALTORS® believes that if its members are honest with consumers, consumers will stop trusting them. They said the quiet part out loud, in the official minutes. And remember the debate on disclosure of referral fees? Oy vey.
For as long as I’ve been in this business, people have talked about “raising the bar.” Make it harder to become a REALTOR®. Raise the standards, raise the professionalism, and the public’s trust follows. Great speech. It gets a standing ovation at every conference and dies in every committee, and the knowledge-gaps vote is just the latest body. Here’s why it always dies: NAR is paid by the head. At $156 a year times 1.44 million members, every agent who can’t clear a higher bar is revenue walking out the door. To NAR, a bad agent and a great agent are worth exactly the same $156. The organization that profits from more agents can never be the organization that demands better ones.
But you know who doesn’t get paid by the head? Most real estate brokerages. Compass makes money when transactions close, and in an AI world it makes more money when fewer, better agents close more of them. Reffkin is the one guy in the industry whose economics actually allow him to raise the bar. Thirty years of conference talk, and the manifestation of “raising the bar” turns out to be a brokerage, because it was never going to be the trade association selling memberships at the door.
Which brings me to the billboard I’d actually buy if I were Reffkin: “Compass agents are NOT REALTORS®.”
Think about what the REALTOR® brand carries right now. A $418 million Sitzer/Burnett settlement after a jury found the whole commission structure was rigged. A president who resigned days after a New York Times story detailing years of sexual harassment allegations. And now a trade association that formally voted against telling clients the truth about what its members don’t know. NAR’s own budget tells you where this is heading: membership sits at 1.44 million and they’re budgeting for 1.2 million, which means NAR is planning for a quarter of a million people to walk. Reffkin wouldn’t be starting an exodus. He’d be getting in front of one that NAR’s own finance committee already sees coming.
Yes, “Realtor” is synonymous with real estate agent. It’s Kleenex. That’s exactly why breaking from it is a story. Nobody writes about a brokerage quitting a trade association. Everybody writes about the largest brokerage in America announcing its agents are held to a higher standard than the one actual REALTORS® just voted to reject. And the exit ramp already exists. The ARA just landed RE/MAX the same week NAR subpoenaed them. An alternative association with franchise-scale membership and a chip on its shoulder is sitting right there.
(The honest hedge: yeah, I know the mechanics are messy. Anywhere’s brands are franchises, and Reffkin doesn’t own the franchisees or their NAR memberships. This starts as a Compass-brand move or it doesn’t start at all.)
There’s one more asset hiding in plain sight, and it’s the one I keep writing about. Everybody in this industry is fighting over supply. The next fight is demand. I wrote Monday about Gitcha publishing structured buyer demand into the MLS, and 48 hours later the M&A started. Who knows more buyers than the company with 330,000 agents? Compass is sitting on the largest book of buyer demand in America and treating it like a Rolodex.
Now, the riddle. Reffkin just spent $1.6 billion to own the most agents. Raising the bar implies standards, accountability, culling. You don’t get to be the biggest and the best at the same time, and in an AI world where consumers will only pay for agents worth paying for, best beats biggest. That’s an uncomfortable math problem for a guy who just bought 330,000 of them.
Step back and every Compass strategy has been the same strategy: an attempt to be something other than a real estate brokerage. Tech company. Inventory gatekeeper. Industry landlord. Wall Street told him what Compass was back in 2021.
For a year now the whole story has been the same. Compass, MRED, Howard Hanna, everybody racing to pull listings off the MLS and into a private network of their own. Build the wall, control the door, charge for the key.
Then the single biggest distribution player on the planet walked in and did the opposite. Per Darryl Davis at HousingWire, Google now shows MLS listings inside mobile search across all 50 states through Local Services Ads, with the data flowing in through HouseCanary’s ComeHome under MLS agreements. Davis reports three MLSs are live so far, CRMLS, San Diego MLS, and My State MLS, with the rollout going market by market through the summer.
Here’s the line that stuck with me, from Davis’s companion piece over at Inman:
“Google looked at every private network, every pre-market feed and every walled garden, and built its national home search on MLS data.”
Sit with that. Google had its pick. Every coming-soon feed, every pocket-listing club, every velvet rope in the business was available to it. And the company that knows more about how people actually search than anyone alive looked at all of it and bet on the open MLS. As Davis puts it, “the search bar chose the MLS.”
I’ve said where I stand on private listings more than once. I’m not a fan of hiding the ball, and the exposure data has never been a close call. So the question Google’s move quietly asks is the one nobody in the walled-garden camp wants on the table. If the biggest search engine on earth runs on MLS data and the data says full exposure is worth real money, what exactly is a Compass Private Exclusive worth when Google can’t see it?
Now, this is the same playbook we’ve watched before. And honestly I delayed writing about this because HouseCanary’s reputation in regard to listing data has been, how you say, sus. But HouseCanary holds brokerage status, which is how it gets the feed, the same move Zillow pulled to get at IDX years back. New player, old door (barn door?). And Davis notes that even this open pipe already has a private back channel, reporting that eXp sends its Coming Soon inventory straight to ComeHome, brokerage to platform, no MLS required. So nobody’s hands are clean here.
But here’s the part to keep an eye on. LSA is a paid product. Davis flags the obvious trap, that MLSs and brokers could end up paying Google to surface their own listings. We’ve seen that movie. It’s the portal era all over again, and the ending is you buying back your own demand.
Davis has high expectations for CMLS. CMLS Open House convenes at the end of September. His argument is that CMLS ought to be the one table where this gets negotiated, before 484 MLSs cut deals one at a time and get picked off individually. But what he and others don’t understand is that this isn’t a thing CMLS can do.
Still, his point is valid. The biggest distributor on earth just told you what your MLS data is worth. Don’t sell it back to them a county at a time.
I’ve known Mike Simonsen for a while, and catch his market update videos often. Here’s his argument in this Inman News piece: nearly 1.4 million homes were withdrawn from the MLS in 2025, which proves sellers already want limited exposure. So Compass didn’t invent off-market marketing. It built a structured version of what agents were quietly doing all along. He even gives it a stat, “days off market,” or DOFF. Love a good acronym and this one is great!
But, here’s the line I keep chewing on:
“What nobody is talking about is the 1.4 million listings that demonstrate how often sellers seek periods of limited exposure during the selling process.”
The word doing all the work is “exposure.” And it’s pulling double duty.
There’s exposure as time, how long a home is visible. And exposure as audience, how many buyers can see it. Withdrawals are a time move. Sellers pull the listing to reset days on market, repaint the kitchen, wait out the holidays, then relaunch. Mike’s own piece calls those windows “total invisibility.” That’s not limited exposure. That’s zero, on a timer.
Compass private listings are an audience move. The home stays for sale. Only a slice of buyers gets to see it.
So he’s collecting time-axis evidence and spending it on an audience-axis product. A withdrawal defers exposure. The seller still lands in front of everyone when it relists. A private listing forecloses it. Plenty of those buyers never see the place at all.
And if 1.4 million sellers really are begging for a pause, the clean fix isn’t a private network. It’s an MLS “coming soon” or hold status that stops the DOM clock while the listing stays wide open to every buyer. That’s a feature your MLS can ship. Funny how the data points there instead.
Sellers may want a pause button, not a velvet rope.
A thought experiment about unintended consequences.
I don’t typically write longer posts but I recently heard someone on a recent podcast (only tangential related) describe a branding exercise that stuck with me. Imagine Nike opened a hotel. You can picture it instantly, can’t you? World-class gym. Sleek minimalist rooms. Maybe LeBron in the lobby. You’d book it tomorrow.
Now imagine Hyatt launched a running shoe. What would that look like?
Exactly. It would look like nothing. Some brands carry a gravity that extends naturally into adjacent spaces, and some don’t. The exercise isn’t about who’s better. It’s about which direction the brand energy flows.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot as I watch Compass, a handful of MLSs, and the broader industry slowly, maybe accidentally, push Zillow toward becoming something it has deliberately avoided for twenty years: a full-service brokerage.
The people doing the pushing should be very careful about what they’re wishing for.
The Corner
In January, Compass closed its acquisition of Anywhere Real Estate, becoming a conglomerate with 500,000+ affiliated agents across Compass, Coldwell Banker,Century 21, Sotheby’s, and ERA. In February, Compass and Redfin/Rocket announced an exclusive Coming Soon partnership, routing Compass listings to Redfin before they hit the MLS. In March, Zillow launched Preview as a response.
Then came the MRED situation. Nine Compass Private Exclusive listings triggered a feed suspension that removed 43,000 listings from Zillow overnight. Within hours, Compass launched a coordinated marketing blitz across its owned brands while competitors’ listings were invisible on Zillow. A federal judge ordered restoration in 48 hours. Zillow filed an antitrust complaint alleging a Compass regional VP sits on MRED’s board. The same board that pulled the trigger.
Private listings withheld from the MLS. An exclusive portal deal that bypasses the MLS. An MLS governance action that punishes Zillow while Compass capitalizes. A brokerage executive on the board that enforced it.
If you were in Zillow’s Seattle headquarters watching this, would you conclude the system is going to treat you fairly? Or would you start thinking about what your company looks like if it didn’t need any of them?
The Nike Hotel
Here’s the thing about Zillow becoming a full-service brokerage: you can picture it.
Two hundred million monthly visitors. A brand synonymous with real estate search. Zillow Home Loans already in place. A Premier Agent network that already connects buyers with agents, agents who could, with a different employment agreement, become Zillow agents.
You search on Zillow. You find a home. You click “Schedule a Tour” and a salaried Zillow agent shows you the property. You get pre-approved through Zillow Home Loans on the drive over. You make an offer through the app. The whole thing feels like booking a flight.
That’s the Nike Hotel.
Now imagine Compass launching a consumer portal to compete with Zillow. Five hundred thousand agents, sure, but what’s the consumer brand? What’s the reason a buyer in Tampa opens the Compass app instead of Zillow? That’s the Hyatt running shoe.
Zillow has resisted this model because Wall Street rewards asset-light platforms, not brokerages. But Redfin proved you can be both. And Redfin’s hybrid approach, salaried agents in key metros with partner agents handling the rest, showed you don’t have to employ everyone to control the transaction. If Zillow’s current model is being slowly strangled by private listings, feed disputes, and exclusive pre-market deals, the multiples question becomes academic. You can’t monetize traffic you can’t serve.
Meanwhile, at Compass
While Compass plays chess with Zillow, something is happening inside its own house.
Compass was built on exclusivity. Robert Reffkin recruited the industry’s top producers with a simple pitch: you are the best, and you deserve a platform that treats you that way. Reffkin’s personal cell phone number was part of the deal. It was the velvet rope.
Then they bought Anywhere. Now those same elite agents share a corporate parent with Century 21 and ERA. The holiday party got a lot more crowded. No top-producing Compass agent wants to make small talk with the Century 21 agent from the strip mall office, but here they are, under the same roof. Ew.
And the technology edge? Compass positioned itself as a technology-enabled brokerage, and for a while that mattered. But everything they built before 2026 now feels like last season’s phone. AI has leveled the playing field so completely that every brokerage, every MLS, every single agent has access to tools that match or exceed what Compass spent hundreds of millions developing. The tech moat is gone.
So the cachet is diluted and the tech advantage has evaporated. I’m hearing that some of these high-end agents are looking at Side and other alternatives, trying to recapture the exclusivity that Compass used to represent. Compass bought scale and may be losing the thing that made the scale worth buying.
The Unintended Consequence
Rob and I talk a lot about 2nd and 3rd order consequences on our Industry Relations podcast. Here’s the scenario that should keep Compass up at night.
They’ve spent the last year building private listing infrastructure, cutting exclusive portal deals, and creating an environment where Zillow’s access to inventory is increasingly uncertain. They’ve poked the bear.
And the bear has $2 billion in cash, 200 million monthly visitors, a mortgage company, an AI platform, and a brand that every American consumer already trusts for real estate. If Zillow decides the only way to guarantee access to inventory is to control the inventory, they have every asset they need to do it. And unlike Compass, they start with the consumer, not the agent. That’s the high ground.
What would happen to Compass’ stock price when the Wall Street Journal reports, “Zillow Launches Mega-Brokerage”?
The industry has spent years worrying about Zillow’s power as a portal. They should be much more worried about Zillow’s potential as a brokerage. A portal can be starved of data. A brokerage that controls its own listings can’t be.
Every feed suspension, every exclusive pre-market deal, every private listing that routes around the open market is a data point in a Zillow board presentation titled “Why We Need to Control Our Own Inventory.”
Can you picture what a Zillow brokerage looks like?
“Zillow has effectively decided not to display 99.98% of MRED’s listings on its platforms because it, in its own judgment, disagrees with the lawful marketing strategy associated with the remaining 0.02% of listings.”
Let that sink in. Nine listings.
That’s MRED’s line, and it’s a good one. But it works in both directions.
Zillow pulled 43,000 Chicago listings off its platform because it refused to display nine Compass Private Exclusives. That’s the hill Zillow chose. And honestly? I think it’s the right hill. Because if Zillow caves on nine today, it’s not nine tomorrow. It’s ninety. Then nine hundred. Then every listing that got pocket-listed first gets laundered through an MLS and shows up on Zillow like nothing happened. Zillow’s whole pitch to consumers is “see everything.” The moment they start making exceptions for Compass’s private listing machine, that pitch is dead.
But here’s the thing. Those nine listings? They’re not even in Chicago. They’re Compass Private Exclusives in California, Florida, and Georgia. MRED, a regional MLS in Lisle, Illinois, cut off 43,000 Chicagoland listings to force Zillow to display nine homes thousands of miles away. That’s also a hill to die on. And it’s a weird one.
MRED changed its own rules last October, after Compass CEO Robert Reffkin personally emailed MLSs across the country asking them to cut Zillow’s feeds. Then MRED went national with Compass as its first partner, with Compass subsidizing the first 100,000 agents. Then MRED demanded Zillow display Compass listings nationwide or lose everything. And when Zillow said no, MRED pulled the trigger.
That’s not rules enforcement. That’s a favor.
Now, Zillow isn’t doing this out of the goodness of its heart. Their “transparency” standards happen to protect a lead-gen business that made them $1.8 billion last year. They know that. I know that. But being self-interested and being right aren’t mutually exclusive.
The judge seemed to agree… sort of. The TRO put MRED’s listings back on Zillow but told Zillow it can’t exclude MRED listings either. Both sides claimed victory. Which means nobody actually won.
And that brings us back to nine.
Nine listings that Compass didn’t want on the open market. Nine listings that Zillow refused to display. Nine listings that MRED was willing to nuke 43,000 Chicago listings over. Nine listings that a federal judge had to sort out on a Friday afternoon.
Compass calls this “seller’s choice.” But when 72% of your private listings double-end and 68% of sellers say their agent never explained what private even means, that’s not choice. That’s a sales pitch wrapped in a permission slip.
I don’t know how this ends. But I know the number everyone will remember.
