Google Went National. Now Who Negotiates for the MLS?

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.