Where Real Estate Gets Its Dirt

Everybody’s building walls. Google bet on the open field.

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.

A field guide to the private listings laws

Anthony Mannino wrote a tidy little explainer over at HousingWire, and if you’ve been trying to keep the state-by-state private listings rules straight, this is the one to bookmark. The laws are piling up. Connecticut just passed one. New York’s bill is almost across the line. Wisconsin and Washington already did it. Hawaii and Illinois are loading up for January.

Mannino sorts the whole mess into three buckets, and the buckets are the useful part.

Washington went with the mandate. List it publicly, period, unless there’s a real safety or privacy reason not to. No form, no signature, no disclosure to bury. Public exposure is just the default.

Connecticut and New York went with the opt-out, with the legislature writing the warning right into the statute. Here’s a taste of Connecticut’s language:

“The Seller understands that foregoing public marketing may reduce competition for the property, may result in fewer offers to purchase the Seller’s property and may adversely impact the final sale price and terms of the sale of the Seller’s property.”

Wisconsin and Illinois also went opt-out, but punted the actual wording to the associations and agencies. Mannino’s point on this is the sharp one. A warning written into law is hard to change. A form drafted by an agency is easy to change, which means it’s also easy to lobby.

And then he asks the question I’ve been asking. Do these opt-out forms actually stop anybody?

“…opt-out forms may prove to be more of a liability protection for brokerages than an impediment to executing a private listing strategy.”

There it is. He calls it “warning fatigue,” and anybody who’s sat at a closing table knows exactly what he means. You hand a seller a stack of agency agreements, consumer notices, and affiliated business disclosures, then slip in one more “the government makes me tell you this” page, and it gets signed with everything else. It doesn’t change behavior. It just protects the brokerage when the seller complains later.

Which is why Washington’s model is the honest one. If you actually believe public marketing is better for sellers, you make it the default and let people opt out for cause. You don’t make sellers initial a warning nobody reads and call it informed consent.

A form you can ignore isn’t a guardrail. It’s a receipt.

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.

Zillow Wins Preliminary Injunction – MRED Must Restore IDX and VOW Feeds

Judge orders MRED to restore Zillow listing feeds in Chicago

“In an emailed statement, a Zillow spokesperson told HousingWire, that the ruling on its motion was “an important first step for the Chicago home buyers, sellers and agents who have been harmed by a coordinated scheme between MRED and Compass to reduce transparency in the housing market.” 

“In the middle of a housing affordability crisis, powerful industry players colluded to hide listings, suppress competition and steer consumers toward a single dominant brokerage,” the spokesperson wrote. “The court immediately recognized what was at stake, not just for Zillow, but for every person trying to find or sell a home across Illinois and beyond. We will continue to fight to ensure this anti-consumer conduct is not allowed to take root permanently.”

Welp, it looks like Mr. Reffkin will need find a place to store his billboards.

DAY 2

MRED to shut off feeds to Zillow starting tomorrow

No Chicagoland Listings on Zillow

MRED Announces Potential Disruption to Listing Data Feeds to Zillow Group

“The rules of this MLS exist to protect every participating broker and every consumer who relies on a complete and accurate picture of the market,” said Rebecca Jensen, President and CEO of MRED. “Those rules apply equally to every participant, regardless of the size of their audience or the reach of their platform. MRED enforces its rules consistently and fairly, and hopes that Zillow returns to operating consistent with its longstanding agreements with MRED.”

Translation: Dracarys.

Dracarys

Compass International Holdings Gives a Data Feed of All of its Listings to MRED

“MRED is announcing nationwide expansion of its MLS service, including the Private Listing Network (PLN), to any licensed agent.”

“Compass International Holdings is also committed to subsidizing some of the cost of MRED access to the first 100,000 Compass International Holdings agents to join MRED as full members.”

Holy shit! A regional MLS in Lisle, Illinois just announced it’s going national. And the largest brokerage in the country is picking up the tab.

Let me back up.

A few weeks ago I wrote about Reffkin’s proposal for a brokerage-owned national MLS. At the time, sources told me he’d pitched the idea on stage of Brian Donnellan CEO, of Bright MLS leading the charge. Apparently that didn’t go anywhere. So Robert went shopping and found a willing partner in Rebecca Jensen, who has been running MRED for years and has never been shy about doing things differently.

I once compared Rebecca to Daenerys Targaryen from Game of Thrones on Industry Relations. She’s been building dragons for a decade with the Private Listing Network, quietly, while the rest of the MLS world debated whether private listings should even exist. Now she’s burning the map.

This is MLS consolidation, but not the kind we’ve been tracking. Not two neighboring MLSs merging to save on overhead. This is a single MLS going national overnight, powered by Compass’s inventory and Compass’s checkbook. MRED goes from 250,000 listings annually to… what exactly? Compass alone does over a million transactions a year post-Anywhere. That’s not expansion. That’s a whole new animal.

Now let’s talk about what they’re actually offering. MRED says agents can “manage price history, days on market, and automated valuation models.” That sounds an awful lot like suppressing information that buyers would find useful. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I’m not a fan of less information in real estate. Full stop. But here’s my real question: is MRED still capturing actual DOM and price changes on the backend, just not displaying them publicly? Because if the data exists internally but gets hidden from consumers, that’s one conversation. If it’s not being tracked at all, that’s a much scarier one. And will other MRED brokers like their MLS getting so cozy with Compass?

Then there’s this line: “MRED also commits to protect and safeguard agents who participate in its PLN from being banned or penalized by third party portals and IDX feed recipients.”

Bold. Really bold. But how? Zillow has already shown it will punish listings that get marketed outside their ecosystem before hitting the MLS. What exactly is MRED going to do when Zillow bans a Compass agent’s listings? Send a strongly worded letter? File a lawsuit? Kick them out of the MLS? I’d genuinely love to know, because that promise is either the most important sentence in this press release or the emptiest.

Look, I see what’s happening here. Reffkin has been playing chess all year. The Redfin syndication deal. The war on Clear Cooperation. The national MLS pitch. And now he’s found an MLS CEO willing to go full Dracarys with him. Rebecca gets to go from running a midwestern MLS to running a national platform. Robert gets an MLS partner who won’t fine his agents for pocket listings and will actually fight the portals on his behalf. It’s a hell of a deal for both of them.

Whether it’s a good deal for everyone else… that’s the part I’m still working out.

Giant Steps offers free “Pre-marketing Listing Toolkit”

We Built a Pre-Market Listings Toolkit for MLS Leaders. Here’s Why — and It’s Yours.

“If you’ve been following the real estate industry over the past year, you know the conversation around private listings and pre-marketing has moved fast. Zillow Preview, the Compass-Redfin partnership, eXp’s deals with Homes.com and Realtor.com — it feels like the landscape shifts every few weeks. And if you’re an MLS executive or board member trying to brief your leadership team on what’s happening, keeping materials current is its own full-time job.

We know because we’ve been living it.

At Giant Steps, we work with MLS organizations and proptech companies navigating exactly this kind of complexity. Over the past several months, we’ve been fielding the same questions from clients and colleagues: What’s the difference between a pocket listing and a private listing? How does Zillow Preview actually work? What does this mean for my MLS?

So we decided to build a set of materials that any MLS organization can use to get their board and leadership up to speed — quickly, clearly, and without spin…


Head over to the Giant Steps Advisors blog to download the PDFs

Zillow Has Receipts

Zillow economist calls out Redfin for ‘mischaracterizing’ research

Zillow Chief Economist Mischa Fisher wrote that the analysis is modeled around assumptions, not hard data: “The estimate works roughly like this: take a share of sellers assumed to be uncertain about pricing, multiply by an assumed share who would benefit from early feedback, then apply an assumed relationship between listing confidence and eventual inventory. Stack those fractions, add a ‘multiplier’ for sell-then-buy chains, and you get 6-12%.”

So let me get the timeline straight. In February, Compass signs a three-year deal with Redfin to syndicate its Coming Soon and Private Exclusive listings. Two weeks later (two weeks?) Redfin publishes a study claiming pre-marketing could boost inventory by 6-12%. And some of the data Redfin cited to support this claim? Pulled from Zillow’s own surveys… which Zillow says Redfin “mischaracterized.”

I don’t think Fisher is wrong. The methodology is basically: assume a bunch of things, multiply the assumptions together, tack on a 1.6x multiplier for sell-then-buy chains, and Boom! You get a headline that just happens to validate the business deal your parent company signed last month.

Look, I get it. Every company funds research that makes their strategy look smart. That’s not new. But most companies have the good sense not to borrow their competitor’s homework and then get the answers wrong.

Redfin’s response? “We appreciate the engagement with our research and welcome discussion about the model and its parameters.” Which is corporate speak for “we’re not changing anything, but thanks for reading.”

This whole pre-marketing war has been fascinating (and frustrating) to watch. You’ve got Compass trying to build a parallel listing universe, Redfin handing them a storefront, Rocket greasing the mortgage side, and now they’re publishing research to justify the whole thing while Zillow’s economist is out here doing peer review on LinkedIn! Meanwhile the MLSs are watching their relevance get chipped away one “Coming Soon” at a time.

Fisher also pointed out what should be obvious: pre-marketing creates “information asymmetry” — meaning the buyers who aren’t plugged into Compass’s network don’t get to see these listings. That’s not boosting inventory. That’s just moving it behind a velvet rope, but also what I would expect the incumbent to say.

But who can tell?

Sponsored By FBS