Opinion: Compass has made the MLS its proxy

When an industry’s incumbents can’t win on merit, they stop competing and start restricting. The MLS feed cutoffs to Zillow are the latest version of this pattern.

Taxi commissions tried to slow Uber in 2014. They didn’t fight on product. They couldn’t. Uber was easier, cheaper and the cars were cleaner. So they pushed regulators to restrict licensing, restrict pickups and restrict pricing.

The legacy taxi cab structure kept shrinking anyway. The restrictions may have actually hastened the collapse.

And this is a pattern that repeats whenever incumbents stop being able to compete.

Residential real estate is in that moment now. Two large companies — Compass and Zillow — are fighting over the future, and the cooperative MLS is being asked to choose a side.

Both have market power. Both are running playbooks that serve their own interests. But the one forcing the cooperative into the fight is Compass.

And Compass can’t win on the merits of its own business.

Compass’ strategy rests on three premises:

1. That walled gardens beat open portals.
2. That private listings serve sellers better than public ones.
3. That consumers will follow brokerage-controlled distribution.

None of those is true.

• Zillow has 235 million monthly unique users. Consumers picked that audience.
• A Drexel University study of Bright MLS data found homes marketed through the MLS sold for 17.5% more than homes marketed off it. Sellers lose money on private listings.
• The publicly traded brokerage sector did $15 to $19 billion in revenue last year. Almost none of them made money. eXp lost $22.7 million. Real lost $8.1 million. Douglas Elliman is at $1.80. Anywhere sold itself to Compass. Compass lost $58 million on $7 billion in revenue. Q1 2026 showed a $22 million GAAP profit, but the actual business lost $351 million — the headline came from a tax accounting move, not from selling houses.

The whole brokerage model is broken. And Compass, the one running the private listing playbook hardest, hasn’t been profitable in 14 years.

So what do you do when you’ve run a playbook for years that isn’t profitable for your business, goes against consumer preference and doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for standard seller economics?

You start restricting access.

When you can’t beat the competition on the product, you try to change the rules of the game. Compass’ move is to restrict Zillow’s access to the listings consumers actually want to find.

To pull that off, you need a new plan and a “useful idiot.”

The mechanism Compass is using to implement its new plan is the cooperative MLS. The cooperatives hold the rule-making authority and the feed contracts.

If Compass can get the cooperatives to cut Zillow’s feeds, Compass doesn’t have to outcompete Zillow on anything. The MLSs do the work Compass can’t do on its own. Compass spends nothing. The MLSs take the political and legal exposure.

Before you say, “but Zillow.”

Zillow is no white knight. It’s a public company with market power, and the Listing Access Standards serve Zillow’s interests. 

Both companies are self-interested, but the difference lies in what each strategy does downstream.

Zillow’s standards push toward transparency. Listings that are publicly marketed have to be displayed publicly. Consumers find inventory in one place. Smaller brokerages get parity with bigger ones. That said, transparency doesn’t fix brokerage profitability, but it preserves the public market and consumer access.

Compass’ strategy pushes toward fragmentation. Listings split between the public market and the private network. Consumers without the right relationships can’t see all the inventory. The strategy serves Compass’ profitability at the expense of transparency and consumer access.

The MLSs are choosing to enforce the strategy that fragments the market and harms consumers.

The Soviets coined “useful idiot” for unwitting adversaries who advance the manipulator’s interests while believing they’re acting on their own principles. The MLSs threatening or executing feed cutoffs fit the definition.

MLSs believe they’re enforcing rules and protecting member equity. In reality, they’re being used to attack the cooperative’s own purpose by one member who benefits most when the cooperative model breaks down.

The receipts.

In October 2025, Robert Reffkin sent messages to at least eight MLSs, according to Zillow’s federal antitrust complaint filed May 12, 2026, in the Northern District of Illinois. The complaint alleges Reffkin urged the MLSs to “discipline” Zillow for its Listing Access Standards and to block Zillow from IDX and VOW feeds if those standards remained in place.

MRED was one of the recipients, and within weeks, it changed its rules in ways that mirrored what Compass had asked for.

Fran Broude is a Compass vice president and the president of Compass Illinois. She also sits on MRED’s board.

According to Zillow’s filings, Broude called a Compass agent on May 11 to tell him MRED was going to ban Zillow from all listing feeds. MRED hadn’t formally voted yet. A Compass executive on the MRED board was telling Compass agents about MRED decisions before MRED had made them.

And then:

• Bright MLS adopted similar rule language and announced a direct Compass feed deal.
• Realtracs in Nashville signed with Compass on April 30, then threatened to cut Zillow’s feed on June 1.
• California’s MLS/CLAW signed one on May 6.
• Hive MLS received a Compass demand letter on May 11.

The pattern was undeniable enough that on May 22, Judge John Tharp granted Zillow’s preliminary injunction, requiring MRED to restore Zillow’s feed access while the antitrust case proceeds.

Compass wins if this strategy works. But a lot of folks get harmed as a result:

1. Other brokers in the cooperative. Their listings disappear from the portal where their buyers are searching, while those same listings keep appearing on Compass-owned and Compass-adjacent properties.
2. Consumers. Buyers who can’t find homes and sellers whose listings are hidden from the largest audience available. And it goes both ways; a chunk of buyers will be locked out of participating in the market at all unless they happen to know a Compass agent who happens to like them.
3. The MLSs lose the most. The behavior alienates every other broker in their cooperative and gives them real reasons not just to consider an alternative to the MLS, but to act on one.

Every feed cutoff makes the cooperative model look less worth participating in.

Zillow Preview signed nearly 60 brokerages and franchisors in the first six weeks after launch, including Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices, SERHANT., Engel & Völkers, Samson Properties and The Keyes Family of Companies.

Those brokerages are now doing listing input directly on Zillow, routing around the MLS. The brokers are voting with their feet.

And the MLSs? The ones running the Compass playbook are just accelerating the pace at which they’re putting themselves out of business.

The choice.

The taxi companies chose restriction; they’re significantly smaller now than they were.

The MLSs picking the same play get the same outcome. The brokers leave, and the consumers route around.

But let’s be clear: The taxi commissions ran their own restriction strategy because their own incumbents picked it.

The MLSs are running someone else’s strategy.

They’re doing the work of dismantling the cooperative for a single brokerage that benefits when the cooperative breaks down. The institution that exists to keep the market open is being used to close it off, and the people running the institution don’t see it yet.

This is one of the most thorough self-owns in modern industry history. 

The MLSs are alienating the brokers who provide the data, hurting the consumers their members serve and helping put themselves out of business. 

All to satisfy one brokerage’s strategy. 

A brokerage that, on the merits, can’t beat the competition without their help. 

The cooperative MLS wasn’t founded to serve consumers. It was a broker cooperative for cooperation on listing access and commissions. 

But the role has changed. MLS data feeds the portals consumers use. MLS rules shape what’s visible in the market. 

As a result, the MLS became consumer-critical by function, whether the founders intended it or not.

Every MLS executive in the country knows what’s happening. Each one has a choice.

The cooperative as it exists today is being used against itself. The MLSs that figure that out get to be part of what comes next. The ones that don’t get to explain, in five years, why they spent the most important window of their careers running someone else’s playbook.

Amit Kulkarni is the interim CEO of Homes for Heroes and a co-founder of Alloy Advisors