For decades, college athletes generated billions for their schools, and the NCAA and the athletes saw none of it. It took years of litigation before courts ruled that players, and not just the institutions built on top of them, had a right to profit from their own name, image and likeness (NIL).
Residential real estate runs on a strikingly similar imbalance. Today, there are over 1.4 million residential real estate agents in the U.S., and collectively, they generate the content the entire industry is built on: the photographs, videos, floor plans, descriptions and local knowledge.
The real estate “porn” everyone jokes about is, in reality, the aggregation of all these agents’ hard work and investment. And like collegiate sports before NIL, a handful of institutional players have been able to extract tremendous value from that content while the people who created it have been cut out.
How much money is at stake
To understand the magnitude of value being created, consider that Zillow, whose primary business model is turning agent-generated listing data into a multi-billion-dollar advertising business, now carries a market cap over $7 billion.
Zillow is just one player in a real estate tech and portal advertising market that collectively generates billions in annual revenue. In addition, the National Association of Realtors (NAR) collects over $300 million in dues each year from its members on top of hundreds of millions more collected by local MLSs.
The value of that data is only increasing as AI models train on real estate imagery and descriptions and search engines are built on top of it.
Agents have not been able to participate in that downstream value because the vast majority of residential agents are independent contractors with no mechanism for coordination. These independent agents have no leverage to negotiate collectively and no seat at the table where the rules get written.
Some argue that agents are already paid for their “content” through commissions. The flaw in this argument is that a commission is a one-time fee for facilitating a transaction and not a royalty on the content itself. That distinction didn’t matter much when a listing’s content had a short shelf life. It matters enormously now.
How other industries handle content and compensation
Compare this to how almost any other creative industry works. Creators earn an initial payment for their labor plus downstream royalties as their content keeps generating value.
For example, TV actors are paid for their initial performance and then earn residuals every time an episode re-runs; photographers collect shoot fees and residual income on reuse; musicians get paid for the session and earn ongoing streaming revenue.
In each case, the creator keeps some claim to the value of what they made. College athletics was the last major industry that didn’t work this way, until the courts decided that wasn’t right either.
There are early signs of the balance shifting, and Compass is leading the charge. For example, Compass has spent the past 16 months in litigation with the Northwest Multiple Listing Service (NWMLS) in Washington State over rules that blocked agents from marketing listings on their own terms before full MLS exposure.
In August, the two sides settled: NWMLS agreed to a new “First Look” pre-marketing option, giving agents more control over how and when their own work gets exposed to the market.
Earlier this month, a different federal judge also denied Zillow’s preliminary injunction request in its antitrust lawsuit against Midwest Real Estate Data (MRED) and Compass. Zillow sought to stop MRED from cutting off its data feeds (and Compass from withholding direct feeds) after Zillow restricted listings initially marketed away from its platform.
These are just two specific cases, limited in scope, but their implications mirror the early NIL cases: incremental and contested, but a real step toward agents sharing in the value they create.
With Compass’ success in changing the script, other brokerages have begun experimenting with their own approaches. Douglas Elliman and Howard Hanna, for example, launched similar strategic marketing platforms following Compass’ rollout.
Portals have responded as well: Zillow introduced Zillow Preview, which allows participating brokerages to place pre-market listings on Zillow and Trulia, and subsequently added firms including SERHANT.
Critics call Compass’s scale “anti-competitive.” That gets it backward. Compass doesn’t set blanket commissions for its agents, and it doesn’t stop the relentless, individual agent competition for the next listing, the next buyer, the next closing.
Compass looks less like a monopoly and more like a bargaining agent: an organization giving its 340,000-plus affiliated agents enough collective leverage to push back against the institutions (Zillow, NAR, the MLS monopolies) that have profited from their fragmentation for decades.
The comparison to college athletics isn’t perfect, but the underlying dynamic is the same: an enormous, talented, fragmented workforce generates the value, and the institutions built on top of it capture most of it. Compass isn’t stifling competition. It’s resetting the balance and giving agents a seat at the table.
Hans and Steve Wydler, the “Wydler Brothers,” are luxury real estate agents with Compass and are currently ranked the No. 1 Compass team in Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia. The views expressed are their own.
