In the latest twist involving the industry debate over how, when and where real estate listings are marketed, one of the nation’s largest multiple listing services announced on Friday that it is expanding nationwide — and doing so with support from Compass International Holdings.
MRED, the Chicagoland MLS with over 48,000 subscribers, said that it had reached a partnership with Compass International Holdings, which committed to providing its nationwide inventory of listings to MRED’s Private Listing Network (PLN) participants. That inventory includes Compass Private Exclusives and coming-soon listings.
The megabrokerage also said that it would subsidize part of the cost of joining MRED for the first 100,000 Compass agents who join MRED as full members, and provide a data feed of all of its listings to MRED.
“Giving homeowners choice in marketing their listings is the right thing to do,” Compass International Holdings CEO Robert Reffkin said in a statement. “We also want to support MLSs, like MRED, that value, support, and protect their customers, who are real estate agents, from retaliation by other MLSs and portals, and ensure that agents can fulfill their fiduciary duties to their home seller and home buyer clients.”
For about a decade, MRED’s private listing network offered agents a way to market listings to other agents without wider public distribution.
However, policies allowing that pre-marketing phase were the subject of debate heading into 2026, when Zillow began taking aim at MRED’s private listing distribution network. The portal has argued that such networks reinforced segregation and obscured consumer access to homes for sale.
At the time, Zillow was attempting to tamp down on growing interest in brokerages looking for ways to market listings before they were distributed via the MLS to the broader public, in part via real estate search portals.
Since then, Compass struck a partnership with Rocket to display all of its listings directly to consumers searching Redfin.
Shortly after that partnership was announced, Zillow unveiled its own pre-marketing option, dubbed Zillow Preview, along with partnerships with dozens of brokerages.
MRED has long defended its Private Listing Network, saying that it provides sellers with more options to market their homes for sale.
“The MLS is meant to facilitate cooperation between agents in support of their clients’ needs, not dictate marketing or business model practices,” MRED CEO Rebecca Jensen said in a statement. “Our recent improvements in listing display options continue our goal of listening to evolving needs from our subscribers. We are thrilled to expand our service offering nationwide with Compass and hope that other brokerages also want to participate.”
Notably, MRED moved last month to remove the requirement that its members must belong to the National Association of Realtors.
The nationwide expansion means that MRED is poised to become an MLS option for agents looking to pre-market listings in ways their local MLS rules don’t allow.
MRED also said that it would “protect and safeguard agents who participate in its PLN from being banned or penalized by third party portals and IDX feed recipients.”
