Over half of all listings in Chicago vanished from Zillow on Wednesday morning as the portal and the region’s multiple listing service went to war over pre-marketed listings.
MRED, the newly national MLS based in Chicago, said that it had cut Zillow’s feed of listings in the region over a dispute related to pre-marketed listings early Wednesday morning.
“This morning, MRED suspended Zillow’s access to that listing data and asked them to remove listings from their websites that Zillow no longer has a license to display,” MRED said in a statement. “Continued display of MRED’s listing data is in violation of Zillow’s license agreement and federal copyright law.”
At the time, there were nearly 5,000 active listings in the city of Chicago. Shortly after, listings began disappearing in batches of hundreds at a time, falling to a low point of 699 active listings as of around noon Central Time, a drop of 86 percent of its active listings.
Many of the listings that remained were from eXp Realty and NextHome, two companies that struck listing feed agreements with Zillow last year. Other listings were from EXIT Realty and for sale by owner.
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About an hour later, Zillow had 2,070 active listings in Chicago, or about 42 percent of the listings it had before its feed was cut.
Brokerage listing feed agreements have historically been a backup plan for Zillow to ensure that it has a source of listings in case its direct listing feed with an MLS is disrupted, as it was in Chicago.
EXIT Realty didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about whether it had signed a listing feed agreement with Zillow.
Zillow has been encouraging brokerages to sign their own listing agreements, including with a website called BeOnZillow.
However, Compass International Holdings, which represents approximately a third of the listings in Chicago, terminated its listing agreement with Zillow earlier this month.
MRED and Zillow disagreed on which one was actually violating the agreements that are in place to facilitate the distribution of active listings out of Chicago.
Zillow said that MRED’s license agreement allows it to block listings that started in a private listing network before being distributed widely via the MLS and portals like Zillow and Redfin.
In a statement, Zillow acknowledged that it was losing its supply of listings in Chicago.
“Chicagoland home buyers and sellers this morning have far worse access to the housing market than they had yesterday, because their local MLS decided one megabrokerage’s profits mattered more than their ability to achieve the American Dream,” a spokesperson for the company said in a statement.
Zillow sued MRED and Compass in a federal antitrust lawsuit last week, alleging that the two parties were working together to cut Zillow’s access to listings in Chicagoland.
The company asked the court to stop MRED from cutting its access to listings, which it said would cause “irreparable harm” to the company.
“Absent an injunction, Zillow will be forced to jettison its pro-transparency practices and aid competitors against its will, or else lose the essential listings necessary to compete, all of which would degrade Zillow’s services and irreparably harm Zillow’s platform, business, goodwill, and reputation,” the company said in a court filing earlier this week.
This is a breaking news story and will be updated.
