When I wrote about the escalating portal wars a few weeks ago, the central question was who ultimately gets squeezed when brokerages and platforms fight for control over listings and distribution. Two weeks later, the ground has already shifted.
Last month, StreetEasy announced a policy requiring sale listings to appear on its platform the same day they are publicly marketed elsewhere.
Corcoran’s CEO, whose brokerage now sits under the Compass International Holdings umbrella following the Compass-Anywhere merger, responded by urging New York City agents, with seller approval, to remove listings from StreetEasy, dangling a $1,000 digital advertising package for those who did.
Sotheby’s International Realty, also under that same umbrella, has begun promoting inventory that isn’t available on StreetEasy.
Meanwhile, the fight over listing access continues to play out nationally, including Compass’s recent settlement with Northwest MLS and Zillow’s ongoing battles over listing-access policies. The developments are moving quickly, but the more this fight escalates, the less interested I am in which company wins it.
I’m interested in what it is doing to the consumer’s confidence in all of us.
The question consumers shouldn’t have to ask
For years, our industry has been trying to convince consumers that real estate is becoming more transparent: more information, more access, more choice.
Now we are publicly debating which homes appear where, when they appear and what happens when a brokerage or portal decides not to play by the other’s rules. In the process, we’re introducing a question into the consumer’s mind that I’m not sure we want there.
Am I actually seeing everything?
That is a dangerous question for an industry that doesn’t exactly enter this fight with a surplus of consumer trust. In Gallup’s December 2025 Honesty and Ethics survey, just 17 percent of Americans rated real estate agents’ honesty and ethical standards as high or very high, near a record low for the profession.
And yet, according to the National Association of Realtors’ 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, 91 percent of buyers said they would use their agent again or recommend them to others, and 62 percent already had. That contradiction matters.
People may be skeptical of real estate as an industry, but they often trust the person helping them navigate it, and we should be protecting that trust.
2 arguments, 2 business models
Compass says this is about seller choice. StreetEasy and Zillow say it’s about transparency and giving consumers access to listings.
Both arguments deserve to be taken seriously, and both sides also have enormous commercial interests in where listings appear and where consumers go to find them. Those things can be true at the same time.
But consumers don’t experience this as a philosophical debate about seller choice versus open access. If I’m buying a home, am I seeing everything that’s available? If I’m selling one, is every potential buyer seeing mine? If the answer is “it depends,” we have a problem.
A fight over leverage
This is bigger than New York. The specifics will vary by market, but the underlying fight is increasingly familiar: Brokerages want greater control over their inventory and client relationships, and portals want comprehensive inventory because comprehensiveness is what makes consumers keep coming back.
Inventory gives brokerages leverage. Consumer attention gives portals leverage. Right now, both sides are testing exactly how much leverage they have.
Those are important business questions, and if you run a brokerage, you should absolutely be asking them. But there’s another question I think matters more: What does all of this look like to the consumer?
The consumer doesn’t care about syndication agreements, MLS politics, portal economics or brokerage strategy. They want the house.
Until recently, we had trained them to believe that searching online gave them a reasonably complete picture of what was available, and the portal wars are muddying that assumption. That may ultimately be more damaging than any individual policy in this fight.
Suspicion doesn’t stay with 1 company
Because once consumers start wondering what they aren’t seeing, the suspicion doesn’t necessarily attach neatly to Compass or StreetEasy or Zillow. It raises broader questions:
- What else am I not being told?
- Is my agent showing me everything?
- Is this website showing me everything?
- Whose financial interest is determining what I see?
It attaches to real estate itself.
Those are exactly the kinds of questions an industry with an existing trust problem should be trying to eliminate, not create. There’s an irony here that is hard to miss: everyone involved says they’re fighting for the consumer, but if the end result is a consumer who trusts the market less, we’re doing this backward.
I’m still less interested in choosing a side than I am in the person who doesn’t know there are sides. The average buyer or seller shouldn’t need to understand the machinery behind the real estate industry. They just need to trust that the machinery is working in their interest, and maybe our biggest mistake is teaching them that there are sides.
Right now, we’re giving consumers more reasons to look under the hood at precisely the moment our industry needs them to have confidence in what they see. For an industry still trying to earn their trust, that should concern all of us.
The views and opinions expressed here are those of the contributor and separate from the Inman newsroom.
Dezireh Eyn is CEO of Platinum Forbes Global Properties and holds a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from New York University.
