This is the second in a two-part series. Part 1 examined how Zillow Preview and the Compass-Redfin deal signal the end of consumer-first pretense in real estate. This piece looks at what happens next — for every constituency in the industry.
Let’s start with the person nobody is actually talking about: The person sitting at a kitchen table trying to figure out if they can afford to move.
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That’s the person who will spend more money on this transaction than on anything else in their entire life and who, in an ideal world, should trust that the system they’re navigating is working in their interest.
That person is about to get a very uncomfortable education.
Compass with Redfin. Zillow with Keller Williams, REMAX, HomeServices of America and others. Every announcement comes wrapped in the same language — seller choice, broad exposure, better outcomes for everyone. The press releases are immaculate.
The reality is messier.
What’s actually happening is that the industry’s largest players are carving the market into tiers.
- Tier 1: Your agent is connected to the right portal deal. As a seller, your listing builds early momentum and buyer interest with a select few people before it ever hits the open market. If you’re a buyer connected to the right network, you see it first.
- Tier 2: Your agent isn’t connected. As a seller, your listing enters the market cold against properties that already have a head start. As a buyer, you’re piecing together inventory across multiple portals and networks, hoping you didn’t miss the window on the listing that just went active, after it already had two weeks of momentum somewhere else.
The consumer doesn’t know which tier they’re in, for now. But that information gap is closing. AI is putting plain-language explanations of what these private networks actually mean directly into the hands of buyers and sellers. No industry insider required.
Here’s what that means for every corner of this industry.
What comes next?
Consumers
Homebuyers lose the most and complain about it the least because they don’t know what they’re not seeing. The coming-soons are technically visible if you know where to look, but most buyers don’t know to check eight different portals, and the industry is counting on that. But that assumption has an expiration date.
AI tools are already giving buyers access to market data, pricing analysis and neighborhood intelligence that used to require an experienced agent to interpret. Soon, those same tools will aggregate across every network and surface every coming-soon regardless of which portal deal created it. At that point, the private network isn’t a competitive advantage. It’s a disingenuous speed bump.
Sellers face downside as well. They’re being told that a pre-market window builds momentum and protects their price. What they’re not being told is that limited exposure is not the same as broad market demand.
A seller who could have had 40 buyers competing is instead getting eight inside a curated ecosystem and calling it a win because nobody showed them the alternative. When AI shows sellers exactly what they left on the table, that conversation is going to get uncomfortable fast.
There’s also a fair housing dimension that is real, underreported and not being discussed seriously enough. When access to inventory is determined by which brokerage network you’re connected to, the people most likely to be left out are the people who have always been left out. Eventually, someone in D.C. is going to notice.
Another thing nobody is saying: These programs lose their shine the moment the market turns. The pre-market window stops being a strategy and starts being a liability. The entire architecture of pre-market advantage is built on a seller’s market assumption. That assumption will not hold forever.
Brokers
The brokers with scale are going to keep signing deals like this, and they should — on their terms, not the portals’.
But nobody wants to say: Brokerage is a bad business.
Thin margins, high overhead and most of the commission walks out the door with the agent. The industry made a bet decades ago that competing on price and making it up on volume would work. It never did.
But something is shifting. Brokerages are starting to realize they can influence how much volume an agent does — through portal partnerships, pre-market access and data advantages that only flow through the brokerage. That leverage comes at a price. To the agent.
And then there’s AI, which accelerates the whole thing. Right now, brokers do most of the work, carry all the risk and hand 85 percent of the commission to agents. AI is going to do a lot of what agents do today. When that happens at scale, keeping that 85 percent in-house stops being a fantasy.
The brokers who figure that out first will finally own a business that actually makes money. The ones who don’t will keep grinding on thin margins until a bigger fish makes them an offer they can’t refuse.
Consolidation was already happening. This speeds it up.
Agents
Top producers at major franchises benefit from all of this. Earlier access, better lead flow and the advantage of being connected to the right network. For them, the pre-market window is a feature, not a bug.
For everyone else, it’s more complicated.
There are 2.5 million licensed agents in this country, and most of them don’t do enough deals to be genuinely good at the job. AI is going to accelerate the shakeout that should have already happened.
What’s left will be a smaller, more professional group of agents who actually know what they’re doing. But the consumer they’ll be serving will be more informed, more demanding and a lot harder to bullshit. The brokerages that build for that reality will attract those agents. The rest won’t.
Portals
Portals’ influence on how real estate gets done is wildly disproportionate to their position in the transaction. Portals own the top of the funnel, but that’s not where the money is.
The money is in mortgage, title, closing, repeat relationships. Zillow, Rocket/Redfin and Realtor.com are all racing toward the same thing: owning the full transaction, not just the search. The pre-market deal buys traffic and relevance for now. It doesn’t solve the fundamental question portals have to answer eventually.
Why do you exist?
There are only three answers:
- Become a super app that owns the full transaction and stays in the consumer’s life for decades
- Go deep on a niche — a geography, a price point, a buyer type — and own it completely
- Become a utility, a data pipe that powers other people’s experiences and stops pretending to own the consumer relationship
What’s not viable is staying exactly what you are today and hoping the market doesn’t notice.
Mortgage
Rocket showed everyone that mortgage is the sleeper asset in all of this. The lender inside the pre-market relationship owns the financing conversation.
But what makes mortgage even more powerful than the portal play: servicing.
A lender who closes your mortgage has a reason to stay in your life for the next 30 years. Mortgage companies with servicing portfolios know exactly when their customers are ready to move again, often before the customer does. That’s not a lead. That’s an economic relationship. The question for independent mortgage companies: Can you get into the pre-market conversation before the door closes?
MLSs
Local and regional MLSs had decades to build something brokers actually needed. They didn’t. And the market has moved on without them.
The core problem isn’t technology, innovation or governance. It’s scale. The pre-market deals being signed right now require the kind of infrastructure, relationships and data sophistication that a regional MLS serving three counties cannot deliver. Brokers have figured that out. The listings are moving upstream, and nobody asked the MLS for permission.
The honest prognosis: Most local and regional MLSs are done. They’ll just slowly become irrelevant secondary distribution pipes for listing data that was already monetized elsewhere. A few of the larger ones may find a way to pool resources and offer brokers something worth paying for. But the brokers who have lost faith aren’t coming back, and more importantly, they need a differentiation play to generate new economic value to their agents.
There is one play that could change this. Not a long shot; it’s actually the most logical move on the board. But it requires the National Association of Realtors to do something organized real estate has never been good at. More on that in a moment.
NAR and associations
Local and state associations exist in direct proportion to MLS health. As the MLS becomes less relevant, so do they. Less leverage, less membership value, less budget, less reason to exist.
One of the last remaining pillars of NAR relevancy was MLS access and the membership that flowed from it. That pillar just cracked. MLS participation erosion means membership erosion, which means revenue erosion. The math is simple, and the implications are serious.
But NAR actually has a play.
It owns RPR, a national property data platform that has been sitting underutilized while the industry fragmented around it. A national MLS built on the back of RPR is not a fantasy. The infrastructure and data exist. What doesn’t exist yet is the institutional will to admit that the current model is finished and that survival requires building something entirely different.
With every portal deal signed, every broker who routes listings upstream, every agent who stops seeing the MLS as the starting point — that decision gets harder. NAR has the assets, the relationships, and theoretically, the mandate to pull this together. They’ve never had the urgency.
Now, they do. The question is whether they’ll use it before the window closes.
Does NAR have the competency to pull something like this off? History tells us no.
The same people won’t build a different industry
Let’s be honest about one more thing. The leadership that got MLSs and NAR to this moment is not the leadership that gets them out of it. The people who spent 20 years going to the same conferences, sitting on the same committees, and calling incremental tweaks progress are not equipped to compete with Zillow, Rocket and Compass International Holdings.
What’s needed isn’t a new strategic plan. It’s new people, leaders who have actually built things at scale, who understand data as a competitive weapon and who are willing to make enemies in the process.
If NAR and the MLS community want to execute the RPR play, the first decision isn’t a technology decision or a governance decision. It’s a people decision. Get the right leaders in the room, give them real authority, and get out of the way.
The consumer deserves better than what’s being built in their name right now. The industry is capable of delivering it. What’s missing isn’t the talent, the technology or even the will.
It’s the urgency. And time is running out.
Amit Kulkarni is co-founder of Alloy Advisors. Connect with him on LinkedIn.
