About three weeks ago, when Compass and Rocket-Redfin announced their coming-soon listing partnership, I made a few predictions.
- First: Everyone was going to do something similar.
- Second: The smart players would attach themselves to Zillow, not Redfin.
- Third: The winning framing would be devastatingly simple: “Why would you hide your listings on the No. 3 portal when you can broadcast more widely on the No. 1 portal?”
Earlier this week, Zillow announced Zillow Preview, a partnership with Keller Williams, REMAX, HomeServices of America, United Real Estate and Side that lets agents pre-market coming-soon listings directly on Zillow and Trulia before MLS submission.
And just like every announcement before it, the press release is full of language about seller choice, consumer empowerment and broad market exposure. KW’s Gary Keller said sellers deserve “the opportunity to reach the broadest pool of potential buyers.” Zillow’s CEO called it “giving agents the ability to bring listings to market sooner.”
Everybody wins, apparently.
So I’m 3 for 3 on predictions, and the industry is 0 for 3 on transparency.
But while this announcement was predictable, the implications are far messier than any of these companies want to admit. And I think it’s time to stop letting Zillow, Compass, KW and Rocket dress this up in the language of consumer advocacy, because that ship has sailed.
What we are watching is a raw, unvarnished battle for listing inventory. The altruism was always just a costume.
‘Open market’ for me, not for thee
Let’s stop pretending we don’t understand what’s happening. “Open market” is not a principle here. It’s a positioning strategy.
For Compass, it meant: Syndicate to Redfin, strip out days on market, price history and home valuation estimates — two things Robert Reffkin, Compass CEO, has called “killers of value” — and call it “seller empowerment.”
For Zillow, it means: feed us listings before they go to the MLS, get priority placement and broker branding, and oh, listing agents may receive a share of Zillow’s revenue associated with that transaction.
The difference between Zillow Preview and what Compass is doing with Redfin is not philosophical. It is not structural. It is not about consumer access or market transparency. It’s the logo on the portal and which company gets paid.
Zillow needed a business answer to Compass-Redfin, and this is it.
Zillow banned this, then built it
In June 2025, Compass sued Zillow for antitrust violations over what some in the industry have referred to as the “Zillow ban”: Zillow’s policy mandating that any home listing marketed to consumers be posted on Zillow within 24 hours.
Zillow’s position was unambiguous.
“Zillow believes everyone deserves equal access to the same real estate information at the same time,” the company said at the time. They called Compass’s pre-MLS marketing strategy “hiding listings away in its private vault, harming consumers and small businesses.”
Zillow, the company that went to court to stop pre-MLS marketing on the grounds that it harmed consumers, just built its own pre-MLS marketing product.
Zillow’s now using the same strategy, just dressing it up in a different way.
When Compass controlled the pre-market window, it was a consumer crisis. When Zillow controls it, it’s “priority placement” and “real-time listing insights.”
That’s not seller empowerment. That’s a toll road, and the toll is paid by buyers who don’t even know they’re in the game yet. The buyer who isn’t plugged into the right brokerage network, the right portal partnership, the right pre-market ecosystem finds out about the listing when the window is already closing.
And if buyers are the collateral damage in all of this, there is one institution that isn’t even collateral anymore, it’s just being bypassed entirely.
The MLS.
The MLS had 1 job left. Now that’s gone, too
For a long time, the MLS served everyone, and that was the point.
Sellers got maximum exposure, their listing flowing to every portal, every IDX feed, every syndication partner the moment it went in. Buyers got to see all of it because the MLS was the central hub for distribution.
The MLS wasn’t just a database. It was the on-ramp to the entire ecosystem, and it protected everybody in the process.
Until now.
Listings from nine of the top 15 franchise brands in the country, the No. 1 and No. 2 brokerages by sales volume, and the No. 1 franchise by agents, transaction sides, and total volume are all now operating in a workflow where listings go to portals before they go to the MLS.
Zillow’s own Chief Industry Development Officer Errol Samuelson said it plainly. Preview listings exist “prior to going into the MLS,” fed either through a broker data feed or direct agent entry.
And that is an existential problem for every MLS in the country.
The MLS’s last truly unassailable value proposition wasn’t technology. It wasn’t data quality. It wasn’t innovation.
It was mandatory input. Agents had to put listings in. That requirement, that one remaining non-negotiable, was the load-bearing wall of the entire MLS value structure. It’s what made the data complete. It’s what made the MLS the source of truth. It’s what kept the level playing field possible for buyers and sellers alike.
That wall just developed a very serious crack.
For years, critics (including myself) accused MLSs of failing to steward broker data, of not innovating, of not solving actual business problems. MLSs could always shrug that off because, whatever their shortcomings, they controlled the input. They were the mandatory on-ramp. You could complain about the MLS all you wanted, but you still had to use it first.
That shrug is what got them here.
The brokers stopped waiting.
They didn’t start with a boycott or a lawsuit or even a manifesto. They just did what MLSs have been unable to do for over 20 years.
They signed deals with Zillow and Redfin and started feeding listings upstream of the MLS.
The tragedy isn’t that the MLS got disrupted. Disruption was inevitable given the decades of inaction. The tragedy is what replaced it.
Not a better, more transparent marketplace. Not a system that serves buyers and sellers more fairly. Just a series of bilateral deals between the industry’s largest players, each one optimizing for their own economics, each one moving the consumer a little further from the center of the transaction.
The MLS failed to innovate. But what’s filling the void isn’t innovation. It’s consolidation. And those are very different things.
And most importantly, let’s not forget the consumer didn’t ask for any of this. Regular people just want to buy a house.
The “seller choice” and “broad exposure” language is marketing copy written for broker recruitment decks, not for the family sitting at a kitchen table trying to figure out if they can afford to move.
Amit Kulkarni is co-founder of Alloy Advisors. Connect with him on LinkedIn.
