AGNT CEO Leo Pareja, Real REMAX CEO Tamir Poleg, Keller Williams President and CEO Chris Czarnecki, and HomeServices of America President and CEO Chris Kelly have spent the past two months becoming a team of rivals, with the hopes of creating a revolutionary, industry-led platform that will protect market transparency by removing the friction surrounding listing data entry and distribution.
Leo Pareja
“We’re all colleagues. We’re always bumping into each other at industry conferences,” Pareja said on a joint Zoom call with Inman. “And [the idea behind Open Real Estate] was a thought on our minds. We just came together and put our differences aside. Because don’t forget, we compete quite viciously every single day, but the subject of protecting the American consumer is really important to us. It’s [at] the forefront of what we do.”
“This is all about making sure that Americans have access to the complete data set, and we can maintain the financial system that we have,” he added, noting that consumers in foreign markets are often required to put down 20 to 30 percent and take out two-year balloon mortgages. “That led us to pursue avenues to address what we saw as a industrywide problem for the consumer that was coming down the road … and we realized that working together in a capacity like this would actually get us further in the end goal of protecting what this system is for the buyers and sellers out there.”
Not a national MLS
Open Real Estate, which is slated to launch in the first quarter of 2027, allows participating members to create listings using standardized fields (i.e., MLS number, listing status, location details, property specifications, listing price, etc.) and simultaneously share them with other members, local multiple listing services (MLS), real estate portals and other authorized sites through an Internet Data Exchange (IDX) feed. Brokers have the option of making the listing available only to fellow Open Real Estate participants in good standing, but they cannot publicly market it anywhere else.
The company said brokers will only need to enter listings once and must submit them within one business day of executing a listing agreement with a homeowner. Open Real Estate said it also has a monetization agreement that guarantees participating brokerages will share earnings equally — keeping in line with its ethos of creating a collective that puts all brokerages on the same playing field.
“This is not a walled garden or another marketplace that favors one company over another,” Open Real Estate said in an open letter on Monday. “This effort is bigger than any one company. No single brokerage, technology company, portal or trade organization should determine the future of housing information for everyone else.”
Tamir Poleg
The hours since the announcement have brought a flurry of questions about the founders’ long-term play — they were adamant about never becoming a national MLS or consumer portal — and whether the system they’re creating will actually make agents’ day-to-day operations easier or become another shiny thing that fails to deliver. The foursome said technology is the easy part of the process, and with the end goal being fewer fields, the introduction of application programming interface (API) and user experience (UX) capabilities for participating brokerages.
“Success two years from now is that agents still can serve consumers the way they have in the best way possible, and not have to go to 20 websites and have it feel like it’s a disjointed, fragmented system,” Pareja said. “We can’t say it enough. This is to protect the American consumer. We want appraisers to find all the comps. We want loan-to-value ratios for first-time homebuyers that are available to them.”
Doing what’s right for consumers
The group said the harder part will be getting industry members to buy into the vision, especially in an environment buzzing with fear and anxiety over who will guide the future of listing data ownership, distribution, monetization and MLS policy. However, Kelly said he has faith in the industry’s overarching goal to do what’s right for the consumer.
Chris Kelly | Credit: Ebby Halliday
“There is so much alignment actually around wanting to do the right thing by the consumer,” he said. “And maybe what hasn’t existed over the, let’s say, last 12 to 18 months is that contentiousness [that’s been] brewing. But that’s actually something to rally behind. And we think the introduction of Open Real Estate at this time is actually giving a place for all of that to be channeled. We can direct all that energy into something now, as opposed to, like, sitting around at conferences and just talking about it.”
The leaders said the next six months will be a proving ground as they continue building the platform and start taking feedback from brokerages, franchisors, agents and MLSs. Open Real Estate said it will meet with prospective participating members (Brown Harris Stevens, Lamacchia Realty, Samson Properties, Windermere Real Estate and Iron Valley Real Estate make up the first cohort) and host industry informational sessions.
Those sessions, they said, will let Open Real Estate benefit from industry knowledge and, hopefully, give more shape to an initiative that, to some, currently feels more symbolic than substantive.
“This is definitely not a symbolic move. It’s a statement, and I think that the gap that people are articulating is because the system is just not ready. We haven’t launched the technology, and people cannot share the listings with Open Real Estate,” Poleg said. “But as soon as they do, people will understand that this is a strategic direction for the industry.”
“We strongly believe in the benefits that this can drive for buyers and sellers, and this is why we decided to both partner, invite everybody else in the industry to partner with us, and we also committed to very substantial capital investments in order to make it happen,” he added. “And I don’t think that anyone here would have been happy to spend a lot of money just for something symbolic. So we truly believe in this direction.”
Chris Czarnecki
The group also said they’re sincere about creating a platform that, as the name says, is open to everyone. Pareja, Poleg, Kelly and Czarnecki said they all saw Compass International Holdings CEO Chairman and CEO Robert Reffkin’s LinkedIn post, which congratulated them for creating a platform that “returns the power back” to homesellers and listing agents.
Most of the men have had strong words for Reffkin’s marketing and legal strategies, the latter of which has recently yielded two antitrust lawsuits involving some of the nation’s largest MLSs, including the California Regional Multiple Listing Service (CRMLS), the Arizona Regional MLS, Bridge MLS, Canopy MLS, Doorify MLS, Hive MLS and REcolorado.
Still, they said Compass is “absolutely welcome” to become a participating member and contribute to Open Real Estate’s vision of protecting homebuyer and homeseller rights, data integrity, fair competition and market transparency.
“The four of us will sleep very well at night with all the other noise that could come from the space by knowing we’re doing what’s in the best interest of the American homeowner, the consumer, the buyer and the seller,” Czarnecki said. “That’s a good place to be, and that’s a place we feel good about as people and leaders and those supporting our amazing agents who are trying to do good things every day on their behalf.”
