Where Real Estate Gets Its Dirt

National MLS?

Cameron Paine calls bullshit…

Don’t believe the hype: There is no ‘national MLS’

“If we accept that the role of the MLS is to facilitate a collaborative marketplace of timely, accurate, comprehensive and transparent listing data, how can an MLS legitimately claim to be “national” if it lacks both accuracy (i.e., significant gaps in listing coverage) and comprehensiveness, (i.e., no national listing coverage)? 

Maintaining a high level of data quality and interconnectivity plays a critical role in both data compliance and the contextual placement of listings within the marketplace. The ability of the MLS to understand local market trends and generate accurate market insights, CMAs and statistical data is what makes it far more valuable than a simple ad on a marketing platform. “

Louder, so the people in the back can hear!

Limited exposure, limited how?

Compass chief economist: The off-MLS marketing debate is ignoring 1.4M listings

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 Here’s his argument in this Inman News piece: nearly 1.4 million homes were withdrawn from the MLS in 2025, which proves sellers already want limited exposure.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.

Going dutch with “nora”

MetroList and Lundy Launch “nora,” Ushering in a New Era of Personal AI Assistants

MetroList, the biggest MLS in Northern California, teamed up with Justin Lundy’s crew to launch an AI assistant named “nora“. She’ll read your email, run your calendar, answer MLS rules questions, dig through property data, and help with forms and transactions. The usual personal-assistant wish list, now with an MLS behind it.

Here’s the part that caught my eye:

“nora operates on a wallet-based system powered by Stripe. MetroList-specific features are provided at no charge to MetroList subscribers, while other services such as email reading, calendar management and other advanced task execution functions are micro-transactions to get tasks done.”

So the MLS picks up its tab. Everything else, you’re going dutch.

I think this is the front edge of something. LLMs cost real money to run, and every task nora does burns tokens. The flat per-seat SaaS price is about to get company. Call it usage-based pricing, the AI remix. Load a wallet, spend as you go, top it up when it runs dry. Same energy as the arcade, except the tokens buy task completions. Get used to it, because nora won’t be the last vendor to price this way.

Then there’s the other thing. I haven’t seen a company build real estate business tools and then stroll straight into everyday consumer territory like this. Reading your email and running your calendar is Siri’s job. Alexa’s turf. A vertical real estate tool just signed up to compete with the assistant already living in your phone. Bold.

Credit where it’s due. MetroList has been quietly stacking up Lundy products for a while, and they tend to ship before the rest of the industry finishes its committee meeting. I like that somebody’s running the experiment instead of writing a white paper about it.

Nora looks sharp. Now we find out how agents will respond.

Poking the Bear

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?

I can. And it looks like a Nike Hotel.



9 Listings

MRED cuts off listing feeds to Zillow

“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.

Nine.

DAY 3: No Soup for You!

Cotality [Sponsor]

Floor plans—from scan to listing-ready in MINUTES

AI is opening up new possibilities in real estate—and at Cotality, it’s built directly into everyday workflows to improve listing quality, strengthen marketing, and give agents more time back.

Cotality’s new CorePlans™ is a great example. It lets agents automatically generate detailed floor plans, room dimensions, and descriptions directly from their iPhone Pro. 

Leveraging LiDAR technology and Cotality’s proprietary CoreAI, agents can create ANSI-compliant floor plans in minutes—eliminating the traditional 24–48 hour processing turnaround— with 99.96% accuracy. Fully integrated into Matrix™, everything uploads with one tap, with room dimensions and descriptions automatically added to the listing.

According to a 2025 WAV Group study, 85% of buyers find floor plans extremely valuable. They are the new essential marketing standard that buyers expect. 

There’s a clear gap between what buyers want and what most listings deliver. CorePlans help close that gap. 

Available first to MLSs with the new Matrix Listing Manager, then rolling out to additional providers that meet requirements. Want to learn more? For more information, reach out to your Cotality rep to schedule a demo or visit cotality.com.

Did MRED Blink?

I’m not sure of the particulars of how the feeds work, and I know that some Chicagoland brokerages have already worked out sending listings directly in to Zillow. But this listing (from Keller Williams) this morning appears to be new, “1 minute on Zillow” and source is MRED. There are several others as well.

Did MRED back off on its threat to shut down Zillow’s IDX feed?

Anybody have the scoop?

Zillow sues MRED and Compass

Zillow sues MRED and Compass for conspiring to hide home listings from buyers and restrict competition

“In April 2026, MRED and Compass announced a formal partnership to expand MRED’s private listing network nationwide. It allowed Compass agents anywhere in the country to enter listings into MRED’s system — supposedly to “protect” those listings from pro-transparency platforms like Zillow. The explicit purpose was to extend MRED’s monopoly leverage far beyond the Chicago region and force competitors nationwide to abandon consumer protections. 

MRED made good on the deal almost immediately. By early May 2026, MRED demanded that Zillow reinstate Compass private listings in states hundreds of miles outside MRED’s territory — listings from agents who had already been warned they were violating Zillow’s consumer standards. 

The same day, the technology provider that distributes MRED’s listing feed threatened to terminate Zillow’s access entirely if it did not comply. MRED CEO Rebecca Jensen also serves as chair of that distributor’s board of managers, meaning the same person controlled both the threat and the mechanism for carrying it out.”

It’s a fight that had to happen. And it’s going to get really messy. In my estimation Compass has a lot more to lose than anyone else. Zillow has shown it can pivot. But Compass has gone all in on their 3-phased marketing strategy and that’s what’s at stake.

And at the end of the day, can anyone tell me what MRED is fighting for? What do the other members of MLS GRID think?

My main fear is that the biggest loser will be the organized real estate industry itself. Zillow in my estimation has the strongest voice to the consumer. And as the saying goes, “you don’t fight the man with the microphone.” If Zillow can successfully push the narrative that Compass is hiding listings from buyers and restricting competition, then the blow back will affect all of us.

Is anyone else afraid of checking their email nowadays? Can we all just pop a gummy and chill out for a while?

RPR-RVM-BPP-CHA-CHA-CHA

RPR® and Broker Public Portal Collaborate to Bring RVM® Valuations to Participating Cribio Markets

“The integration brings together two industry-aligned platforms with a shared commitment to accurate data, transparency and consumer trust. BPP, owned by brokers and MLSs, was created to deliver a national consumer home search experience powered by real-time MLS data and guided by Fair Display Guidelines. RPR, a wholly owned subsidiary of the National Association of REALTORS®, provides REALTORS® with parcel-centric property data, valuation tools, market insights and client-ready reports.

Through this collaboration, participating MLSs and associations that have partnered with BPP, may authorize the display of RVM® values within their local Cribio-powered consumer experience. RVM®permissions will be controlled by each MLS and enablement will require the appropriate authorization and permissions process between the MLS, BPP and RPR.”

I hadn’t checked out Cribio.com in a while. I have to say they’ve done a nice job with the site. Comparing their respective Listing Detail Pages (LDP) side to side with Zillow, it’s amazing to see how many pixels Zillow dedicates to their “Request a tour” button and ad for “Home Loans” product.

Without the ad space, Cribio is able to show a map of the area and a lot more information on the property.

Right now on Cribio you can search any off-market property and on the upper left of the right column you get a Zestimate button that goes to Zillow. The RVM, I’m told, will be displayed on the page (no clicking). I’ve also heard they might keep the Zestimate as is, and maybe add a third AVM — I believe Homes.com has four.

One other thing I appreciate about Cribio’s LDP is that the right column is scrollable, while the left column of property photos is static. It’s a subjective design choice, but I like it.

Will this RVM integration move the needle on consumer adoption? Probably not. But I do like to see the industry collaboration and some of the cool stuff Dan’s team is working on.

Sponsored By ICE