Standing Together Beats Standing Alone
MLSs should form a voluntary alliance to protect the open marketplace through shared standards, legal defense, and consumer advocacy.
I have been thinking about roads.
Stay with me. The reason a house in your town is worth what it is worth has a lot to do with roads. Open, public roads connect every home to every buyer, and every buyer to every home. Anyone can travel them. Nobody owns the intersection. That openness is what makes the whole system valuable, and we mostly forget it is there until someone proposes putting up a toll booth.
Our industry has its own version of those public roads. We call it the open marketplace, the shared MLS system that lets a listing in one brokerage reach a buyer working with another. It is the most valuable thing we have built, and here is what worries me: no single organization in our industry wakes up every morning with the job of protecting it.
We have the National Association of REALTORS®, which reports more than 1.5 million members. We have RESO maintaining the data standards. We have 489 separate MLS systems keeping listings accurate and visible. All of that is real, and none of it is a body whose only job is the marketplace itself. For a long time, that gap did not matter. Today, with national companies negotiating, advertising, and litigating at a scale no single MLS can match, it matters a great deal. If you want to understand exactly how that pressure is playing out right now, Compass Just Showed Its Hand — And It’s Not About Sellers lays it out plainly.
So here is the idea I keep coming back to. Picture an alliance of MLSs, voluntary, open to any system willing to meet a shared standard, with five jobs.
The first job is to set a national floor.
Every member agrees to the same minimums: every listing registered and visible to all participants, a written seller disclosure before any private or delayed marketing, the same definitions for Coming Soon and office exclusive, the same timelines. No one drops below the floor. Anyone can build above it. It is the same idea as a building code, a shared minimum with room for local character on top.
The second job is to negotiate data licensing as one body.
Right now, a national portal can sit down with our 489 MLS systems one at a time and let them bid against each other. An alliance changes the seating chart. Members adopt one licensing framework, and a portal negotiates once, with a group that speaks for well over a million subscribers. The alliance never owns the data. Each MLS still licenses its own. It just gives everyone the same ground to stand on. For more on what those dynamics look like in practice, Stop Watching the Zillow vs. Compass Spectacle is worth your time.
The third job is a shared legal fund.
Members pool their resources for defense, so when a national player sues, pressures, or threatens one MLS, the rest are standing right there with it. I do not think people appreciate how much that single fact would change the conversation. We are seeing the alternative right now, in the ongoing litigation over private-listing and listing-access policies, where individual MLSs are left to weigh a national balance sheet against their own budget. A fund means no member ever has to do that alone again.
The fourth job is to build shared tools.
Working from RESO’s standards, the alliance can fund what every member needs and few can build on their own: cross-market search, fraud detection, compliance tools, clean data feeds for consumers. The smallest MLS in the country gets to use what only the giants can afford today.
The fifth job is the one closest to my heart, because it is about the consumer.
Right now, the pitch for private listings is being made to sellers by companies with serious advertising budgets, and the case for the open market is being made quietly, one kitchen table at a time, if at all. The alliance would fund a steady national campaign around one honest message: the open market is how your home reaches every buyer, and every buyer reaches every home. Sellers deserve to hear both sides of that story before they sign anything. Agents who want to make that case compellingly at the kitchen table will find practical tools in The Listing Report Card™: A Smarter Way to Measure Market Response.
Let me say clearly what this is not, because good ideas die from misunderstanding. It is not a national MLS.
No central database, no merged systems, your data stays home with you. It is not a replacement for NAR, which represents brokers and agents; this would represent MLSs, including the many outside NAR. It is not anti-brokerage and not anti-portal. Brokerages and portals are essential, and a fair, open, complete marketplace is good for them too. And it is not mandatory. Nobody gets conscripted.
That last point is the whole spirit of it.
Visa was not built by forcing banks to join. The Associated Press was not built by forcing newspapers to join. They grew because a roomful of competitors looked at the world and decided that on a few specific things, standing together beat standing alone. Then membership simply became the obvious choice.
I have spent more than 40 years cheering for the real estate professionals who make this business work, and I am not interested in bashing anyone in it. Portals, brokerages, associations, they all have a place. But somebody has to keep the roads open, and tend them, and make sure no one quietly closes a lane. That is not a job for any one company or any one MLS. It is a job for all of us, together, on purpose.
The open market did not happen by accident, and it will not survive on autopilot. We built it on the simple bet that standing together beats standing alone, and the moment to make that bet again is now.
Want to keep a hand on the pulse of everything shaking up today’s market? Head over to PrivateListingsDebate.com — a portal built to track the disruptors, the debates, and the developments every real estate professional needs to know about.
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