The MLS pushback is mounting. Where do things go from here?

On Sept. 8, Compass sent California Regional MLS a demand letter. Stop fining agents who publicly market office exclusive listings by 5 p.m. on Oct. 6, the letter said, or face a federal antitrust suit.

The company added that it would spend millions of dollars to sue CRMLS and other MLSs to get what it wanted.

CRMLS did not wait for the clock. On Oct. 5, it filed suit in federal court in New York, Compass’s home district, asking a judge to declare its cooperation rules lawful and to bar Compass from suing over them. The next day, Unlock MLS in Central Texas refused, too.

Their point is hard to argue with: Rules that bend to whoever threatens the biggest lawsuit stop being rules at all, and an MLS run that way is not one anyone can depend on.

I want to begin with gratitude, because our industry does not hand it out often enough. Two organizations looked at a company that now describes its network as more than 300,000 professionals across nine brands, a company that is also one of their biggest customers, and decided the rules mattered more than the relationship. That takes a kind of courage this business talks about constantly and practices very rarely.

The part about Unlock that should bother everyone

Here is the detail that tells you what this fight is really about. In March, Compass and Redfin published an open letter to MLS leaders, and Unlock MLS was on their list of MLSs doing it right, the ones building seller choice into their rules.

Six months later, Unlock’s rules had not changed one word. Compass’s position had. The same MLS went from a model to a defendant without touching its rulebook.

That is not a disagreement about policy. That is an appetite growing.

Think about a league where the richest team sends a letter to every referee: Stop calling fouls on us, or we will sue you personally.

Some referees look at the size of the team, look at their own bank account and quietly put the whistle away. The game goes on. It just stops being a game anyone can trust. Two referees in this league kept the whistle in their mouth, and the rest of us should notice who they are.

Courage in this business is cheap to admire and expensive to practice. Two MLSs just paid the bill, so your seller’s house can be seen.

The Compass-MLS lawsuit is not about homeowner choice

Compass frames every piece of this as a seller choice. I have been in this business for four decades, and I can tell you that no homeowner has ever been stopped from keeping a home private. Every MLS in America has an office-exclusive provision. A seller who wants privacy can have it today, and the agent pays nothing for it.

What Compass is actually fighting for is the right to advertise a home to the public while withholding it from the current MLS structure our industry has taken decades to perfect, hurting all non-Compass/Anywhere agents and their buyers. CRMLS said it in its complaint: You cannot have it both ways. You cannot market a property to attract buyers and simultaneously keep it from the cooperative whose listings you still use.

Why would the largest brokerage in the country spend millions to win that right? Not for homeowners. For the balance sheet. A company that keeps the majority of its listings inside its own walls controls the inventory, sells its own listings to its own buyers and collects both sides of the transaction. That is good for shareholders. It is not good for the family whose house is the asset being withheld.

The research says what common sense says: Bright MLS studied two years of sales and found homes marketed on the MLS sold for nearly 17 percent more than comparable homes sold off it, about $45,000 on a median-priced home. A later Bright MLS analysis found office exclusives took a median of 37 days to go under contract against 20 for homes listed straight on the MLS, with no price advantage to show for the wait.

Fewer eyes, longer wait, lower number. There is no version of marketing where that math changes.

Your license is not held by your brokerage

Here is where this stops being about MLS politics and starts being about you.

Your fiduciary duty runs to the client. Not to the office. Not to the company whose logo is on your sign. The day a brokerage strategy and a seller’s interest point in different directions, your license requires you to follow the seller.

Agents who keep listings in-house because leadership asked them to are building a file for somebody else’s lawsuit. The homeowner who learns later that a comparable house down the block sold for $45,000 more with full exposure is going to ask one question: “Did my agent push me to the MLS or push me toward their in-house exclusive?” The answer will determine if you lose a lawsuit and/or, even worse, your license. So fill it now.

• Write down what you recommended and why. Simple. For every appointment, write down two sentences stating what you recommended.
• Hand the seller both sides of HONEST research on paper. I personally would not share your company’s own study, as a study conducted within the four walls of a company does not reflect the whole market.
• Put a date on the exit. The calendar day it goes to the MLS, if it has not sold. Not when we regroup but an actual date on the listing agreement.

I hope more MLSs follow CRMLS and Unlock in the weeks ahead. I hope the ones that folded find a reason to stand back up. But whatever the boards decide, the standard for you has not moved an inch. Serve don’t sell, coach don’t close, and never let a company’s revenue plan become your client’s exposure plan.

Imagine the majority of MLSs standing with one voice and fighting back together. I do not care how big the other side is; they would lose.

Now imagine more MLSs doing what CRMLS did and filing first instead of waiting to be sued. That puts the other side back on its heels and puts the MLSs in the driver’s seat of this conversation, where they belonged all along.

The views and opinions expressed here are those of the contributor and are separate from the Inman newsroom.