The new narrative for our industry should be a call for restoration. On behalf of the broader brokerage community, we are advocating for the multiple listing service (MLS) to return to what it was built to be: a B2B engine for professional cooperation.
Real estate is a business built on the stability of professional relationships, and currently, that stability is being undermined by a system that has traded its core mission for a culture of over-regulation.
Historically, the MLS was never meant to control how homes are marketed. It was designed as a mutual sharing of information among peers to facilitate the sale of properties. In this model, real estate professionals were the customers, and the MLS was the service. Its primary value was to make it easy for one agent to coordinate with another.
As Geoff Lewis, former RE/MAX chief legal officer, shared at the 2006 DOJ/FTC Workshop on Competition Policy and the Real Estate Industry: “The concept is simple: you earn a customer, you get to use the MLS with the customer. The concept is not: you get free access to the MLS and then you use it to advertise the properties of your competitors in order to attract customers.”
Over time, the MLS has drifted. It has moved beyond its role as a cooperative platform and into a system of rules and enforcement that regulates how agents market homes, controls the distribution of data and dictates how professionals are “allowed” to serve their clients.
The industry is now recognizing a fundamental disconnect: Fragmented power structures and binary “all-in or all-out” rules are no longer compatible with the demands of today’s professionals.
If our advocacy has felt more pointed lately, it is because we must stand up for the primary stakeholders in an environment that is increasingly out of step with what real estate professionals and their clients actually want.
Our goal is to cooperate with all brokers
The MLS’s strength is derived entirely from its members. It only remains viable if it is responsive to the needs of those who fuel its existence. We are deeply interested in cooperating with other brokers. We want to share listings. But the MLS should be in the cooperation business, not the marketing business.
The MLS’s strength derives entirely from its members’ participation. It only remains viable if it is responsive to the needs of those members and the clients they serve.
What Compass International Holdings is advocating for is not disruption, but restoration: a return to what the MLS was built to be and what it should be again — a platform for cooperation that helps real estate professionals serve their clients.
Seller choice over MLS mandates
Sellers have the right to choose how, when and where their homes are marketed. That includes choosing a public coming-soon strategy, which gives sellers flexibility for final preparation, added privacy, or price-testing before a broader launch. The MLS should support that choice, not restrict it.
When MLS rules force exposure, they override seller intent. They are asking a real estate professional to choose between following their client’s lawful seller-directed marketing plan or losing access to the MLS.
This is an all-or-nothing mandate that will ultimately push sellers and brokers to look outside the MLS to protect strategy and privacy. A rigid system doesn’t preserve cooperation; it drives it away.
To remain a relevant and effective tool for the modern real estate professional, the MLS must evolve its rules.
Our specific asks are centered on the privacy and strategy our clients expect:
- Elimination of arbitrary timelines: The duration a listing remains in a coming-soon status should be determined by the seller and their real estate professional, not by a deadline set by the MLS. There’s no market‑based reason for mandatory auto‑activation triggers.
- Stop punishing listings before they launch: Days on market and price‑change histories shouldn’t accrue during a coming-soon phase. These metrics are routinely used by third‑party platforms to frame listings as stale or distressed before they’ve ever been fully introduced to the market. That hurts sellers, not transparency.
- Seller-centric distribution control: The right to decide where property data is broadcast belongs to the seller. The MLS should be a hub for real estate professionals to easily share listings with each other, but it should not be an automatic pipeline that pushes a seller’s photos and data into competing lead‑generation systems without clear, informed consent.
Some argue that restrictive rules “protect the system.” Actually, they fracture it. When the MLS refuses to adapt to how sellers actually want to market their homes, it creates a vacuum. Ignoring pre‑marketing strategies and seller‑directed privacy doesn’t preserve the MLS as the source of truth; it erodes it.
Every rule should pass a simple test: Does this respect seller intent and help real estate professionals serve their clients?
If a policy prioritizes data distribution over homeowner strategy and privacy, it fails real estate professionals.
The MLS can remain strong, but only if it evolves with the professionals who sustain it. The time to listen to them is now.
Caitlin McCrory is Vice President and Head of Industry Relations at Compass International Holdings. Connect with her on LinkedIn.
Robert Reffkin is the Chairman and CEO of Compass International Holdings.
