After Compass filed an antitrust lawsuit against CRMLS on Friday, Robert Reffkin posted the following on social media: “Every single member of CRMLS’s Board of Directors is a direct competitor of Compass, and they are dictating how Compass and our agents can and cannot compete, how our agents can and cannot serve their clients, and how homeowners can and cannot publicly market their own homes.”
On the surface, the post sounds like a fair gripe. Who wants the other guy writing the rules? But look at the word he used. Competitors.
That one word tells you everything about how the business is being framed. And the problem with that framing is that it describes about half of what we actually do.
The league is the product
Here’s the other half. Think about the NFL. Thirty-two owners who would run each other over for a Super Bowl ring. On Sunday they are the purest competitors in American business. On Monday they sit in the same room, split the television money, agree on a schedule, hire the same referees and submit to the same rulebook. Why?
Because every one of them understands something: Nobody buys a ticket to watch one team. The league is the product. The game only exists because the competitors agreed to cooperate.
Now imagine if one owner stood up at that meeting and said, “Every person in this room is my competitor, and I don’t appreciate my competitors telling me how to run my franchise.” He’d be right about the first part. And he’d be missing the entire point of the second.
The rules aren’t the league telling him how to compete. The rules are the reason there’s a league to compete in.
That’s us. A listing is only worth what the whole market will pay for it, and the whole market only shows up because every broker in town agreed to show up. Take away the cooperation and you don’t get a tougher competitor. You get 32 teams playing scrimmages in empty stadiums.
Cooperating, not competing
Before there was an MLS, before there was a National Association of Realtors, before anybody had a fax machine, brokers in the 1880s were walking into their local real estate exchange, laying their listings on the table and shaking hands on a simple deal: If you bring me the buyer, I’ll pay you for it.
That handshake is where our entire industry comes from.
The term “multiple listing” was coined in 1907. The national association was formed in 1908. Its very first Code of Ethics, in 1913, treated cooperation between brokers as a duty, not a courtesy.
So, when somebody tells you the cooperation model is just a rule a board made up, understand that it’s older than the board, older than the association and older than the word Realtor. It’s the foundation. Everything else was built on top of it.
Yes, we compete. We compete with the office across the street for listings, for recruits, for the sign in the front yard. Fiercely.
And then the minute we obtain the listing, we turn around and invite that same office to help sell it. Competing and cooperating at the same time, on the same deal, every single day. That’s not a contradiction. That’s the whole business.
Why the rest of the world envies us
In plenty of countries, there’s no MLS, and brokers don’t share listings as a matter of course. The listing agency works for the seller, period.
A buyer who wants to see what’s for sale walks from agency to agency, because each one only knows about its own inventory. A seller who wants more exposure hires three or four agencies at once and hopes for the best.
Buyers get a fraction of the market. Sellers get the audience of one shop.
The American system is the envy of the world because we figured out something those countries never did. We figured out how to compete and cooperate at the same time.
Attacking the cooperation half of that formula is attacking the thing that makes us different, the thing that took decades to build and the thing that is better for the person at the kitchen table.
The question the ‘competitor’ framing can’t answer
If every other brokerage is a competitor, then what about Century 21 and Coldwell Banker and Corcoran, which all sit under the same corporate roof?
When a Coldwell Banker agent shows a Century 21 listing, is that cooperation or is that treason? When a Corcoran listing goes into the MLS and a Coldwell Banker buyer snaps it up, did the parent company just lose to a competitor or win with a teammate?
The model falls apart at the first question. Because the honest answer is that the Coldwell Banker office and the Century 21 office across town compete with each other every day, and they cooperate with each other on every deal.
If “everybody is a competitor” were really true, the parent company would have to break itself up and sell off every brand so none of them were caught cooperating under the same umbrella. Nobody is proposing that. Because it’s ridiculous.
Whose listings are they, anyway?
The MLS rules aren’t competitors telling a broker how to market. They’re an agreement every member signed, voluntarily, that says when one of us takes a listing, all of us get to bring it a buyer. That’s not an imposition. That’s the membership.
If you don’t want to share your listings with the other members, don’t join. Tens of thousands of brokers and agents in this country don’t, and that’s their right.
Follow the message
When a broker says every other firm is a competitor, listen to what that message really says.
It says the company’s bottom line matters more than the seller’s outcome. Because what’s better for the consumer is brokers who cooperate. What’s better for a brokerage’s market share is brokers who don’t.
I’ve been in this business more than 40 years. I started at 19. I have watched this industry fight about commissions, technology, portals and about everything under the sun. But through all of it, the one thing we never fought about was the deal itself: You show mine, I’ll show yours, and the client gets the whole market.
I, for one, don’t want to work in an industry where every broker competes over dollars and cents and no one cooperates for the seller. That’s not a better industry. That’s a worse one with better marketing.
The board is the feature, not the bug
So yes, the MLS board is made up of other brokers. That’s not a flaw in the system. That’s the system.
Those are the people who agreed to share. They’re the reason your seller’s house gets seen by every buyer in town, including the ones working with the company you can’t stand. If you’d rather not share with them, there’s a word for that too. It isn’t “competitor.” It’s “pocket listing.” And we’ve already seen how that story ends.
Cooperating brokers. Not competing brokers. Let’s keep it that way.
The views and opinions expressed here are those of the contributor and separate from the Inman newsroom.
Darryl Davis is the CEO of Darryl Davis Seminars. Get connected on Facebook or YouTube.
