3 Western MLSs launch ‘Orion’ data exchange

ODS founders Tina Grimes, CEO of Southern Oregon MLS, and Casie Conlon, CEO of Cascades East MLS, explained the genesis of this initiative: “Naming the initiative Orion Real Estate Data Exchange reflects our mutual vision for a borderless, data-informed real estate ecosystem. With consumer migration between Oregon, Nevada, and California, our objective is to empower our members with tools and access that help them best serve clients wherever they are.”

We’ve spent two years arguing about whether a national MLS should exist. Panels, position papers, a declaration of principles. Meanwhile MetroList, Northern Nevada Regional MLS and Oregon Data Share just built a working piece of one across three states and framed it as a service for people moving to Reno.

That’s the third one of these I’ve written up this year. Back in April the Southeast MLS Alliance added realMLS and got to 118,000 subscribers across five markets, and I tipped my hat to Joesph Cullom, because connecting the pipes without merging is the humane version of consolidation. I still think that. I’ve just started wanting to know who ends up owning the pipes.

One line in the announcement is doing more work than the rest of it combined:

“We’re starting with practical access today while building the infrastructure for a much deeper level of data sharing tomorrow.”

That’s George Pickard at NNRMLS, and the tomorrow half is the part worth reading twice.

Phase one is a shared front end. Members see listings across all three markets in Rapattoni-powered tools. Nice benefit. Not a story. Phase two pushes the data into each organization’s own primary MLS system. That’s shared infrastructure. And shared infrastructure eventually needs somebody to run it, fund it, and decide who else gets in.

Nobody’s saying who that is. No governance structure, no subscriber counts, no word on who’s funding the build. What we do get is the Rapattoni mention, and Rapattoni is the quietly interesting part. Niki Rapattoni is still running the company she and Andy started in 1970. While Cotality and most of the rest of the legacy MLS stack were getting tucked into private equity portfolios, MLS system vendors like Rapattoni and FBS have managed to stay independent. So the connective tissue for three states is now sitting on top of the one of the MLS vendors nobody managed to roll up.

And MetroList keeps shipping. I said the same thing about them when Nora launched, so at this point it isn’t a compliment, it’s a pattern. Now they’re doing it again with two neighbors and a migration stat: 129,000 people moved between California, Nevada and Oregon in 2024. That’s a refreshingly boring reason to build something. Consumers moved, so the data should follow them.

So here’s the question nobody asked at launch. In year three, who owns Orion? Phase two is when that answer gets expensive to change.