Thad Wong Opposes Clear Cooperation in Clash with Baird

Chicago real estate brokerages are butting heads over the National Association of Realtors’ Clear Cooperation Policy, with larger firms ready to ditch it for a “fresh start” that will help them keep raking in market share, while smaller firms are fighting for survival.

Industry insiders consider the 5-year-old policy dead in the water after NAR reevaluated it last year, and many are waiting on the Department of Justice to take a clear position on the matter.

It requires Chicagoland agents to add a listing to the local multiple listing service within 24 hours of marketing it publicly, with a yard sign, on social media or a brokerage website, as examples. “Office-exclusive” listings that are shared only between real estate agents in the same company are only allowed under clear cooperation if the listing isn’t marketed publicly and the seller signs a disclosure form. Such listings must also be filed with the local MLS within 24 hours, but will not be disseminated, according to the updated policy.

Zillow has taken a stance in favor of the policy, banning listings from its platform that don’t comply, including office-exclusive listings if they are featured publicly on a brokerage’s website and not listed on the MLS within 24 hours.

Thad Wong, co-CEO of Chicago’s largest brokerage @properties, opposes the policy, saying small brokerages should work smarter to stay competitive. Removing it would empower agents to work creatively to fetch higher prices for sellers, he said. Wong’s position is in line with vocal opponent Robert Reffkin, the CEO of Compass, which recently acquired @properties for $444 million. Reffkin, leader of the nation’s largest residential brokerage firm by market share, has called the policy anticompetitive and said he wants NAR to do away with it completely.

There are financial incentives to ditching clear cooperation for big brokerages. Agents from their firms are more likely to be on both ends of deals, and they may have a leg up in recruiting agents and clients if they don’t show listings to other companies right away.

For smaller brokerages, financial survival is on the line. Their decreased visibility into homes for sale that could result from a higher prevalence of office-exclusive and private listings threatens to cut them out of the market and hurt their efforts to recruit and retain agents, Baird & Warner President and CEO Steve Baird said. Baird & Warner has about 2,000 agents and came in at No. 4 on TRD’s most recent ranking of the city’s top brokerages, but it’s not as big as Compass and @properties.

Beyond the financial health of smaller firms, allowing private listings to go unchecked thwarts fair housing efforts in a city still dealing with the effects of segregation and redlining, Baird said.

Reffkin is using “sleight of hand” to tear down the policy, not because it’s in the best interest of consumers, but because he wants to corner the market, Baird said. eXp Realty and Windemere Real Estate are among the brokerages that support clear cooperation.

The Zillow ban

Zillow is butting heads with Reffkin, taking a stand in favor of clear cooperation. The site and its affiliates, such as Trulia, will begin blocking listings that don’t comply next month.

What does this mean for Chicago?

Midwest Real Estate Data, called MRED, is the MLS that covers the Chicagoland area, and it has been running a private listing network open to all local agents since 2016. This more formalized way of pre-marketing, or privately marketing, a property is in compliance with Zillow’s policy, depending on how it is used.

Sellers can list their homes on MRED’s private listing network — without the offering appearing on portals such as Zillow — for as long as they wish, and can still later place them publicly onto the MLS without triggering the Zillow ban. But if they market it publicly, on social media or a brokerage site, for example, they’d trigger the Zillow ban and wouldn’t appear on the platform when they move onto the public MLS. If listings begin public marketing, even with a yard sign, then it must be listed on the MLS within 24 hours to avoid being blocked from appearing on Zillow and Trulia.

Consumer housing groups including the Consumer Policy Center, the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals and Consumer Advocates in American Real Estate support clear cooperation and the Zillow ban.

Private or “office-exclusive” listings can be used to discriminate by advertising to people of a specific demographic, which sets the industry back when it comes to fairness and transparency, Courtney Johnson Rose, president of the National Association of Real Estate Brokers, a trade association for Black real estate professionals, told Real Estate News.

However, aggregators like Zillow have their own financial reasons to support clear cooperation, as access to listings keeps them in business, and to underscore fair housing standards is a red herring, Wong argued.

Zillow declined to answer direct questions about clear cooperation or the local backlash to its new rules, and instead pointed to internal studies published in recent months. An MRED representative also declined to comment.

Repealing clear cooperation?

Sellers can withhold listings from the public market for privacy reasons, which is typical for high-profile people who don’t want the general public to know where they live.

MRED created its private listing network in 2016 to standardize a more low-key marketing process that was already playing out as a way to “bring transparency to listings which had previously been held off the multiple listing service while respecting sellers’ unique needs,” according to a 2025 MRED report titled “Private, Not a Secret.”

Four years later, NAR created its Clear Cooperation Policy in response to concerns around the increased use of off-market or “pocket” listings like office-exclusives. In contrast to MRED’s private listing network, office-exclusive listings are not accessible to all Chicago agents.

“What was a very narrow exemption to the policies has been expanded into these private listing networks, and they have characterized them as somehow exclusive or somehow a better way to market, which is just absolutely not the case,” Baird said. “Consumers are not being fully informed that they’re embarking on a limited marketing program.”

Sellers who did not list their homes on the MLS “left more than $1 billion on the table” in 2023 and 2024 and off-market sales disproportionately harmed sellers of color, according to Zillow.

Sellers themselves often ask to market their homes privately, or to list them as pre-marketing or price-testing, for a variety of reasons, Wong said. Sellers use private marketing options to get feedback that they may need to lower their price or rehab their kitchen, for instance, without the pressure of having their days on market or price reductions tracked publicly on Zillow, Wong said. He said he has never heard of clients requesting private listings as a way of discriminating against certain buyers.

Wong said private and office-exclusive listings can allow agents to create “more urgency” among potential buyers and can even lead to bidding wars that result in better terms for the seller and a quicker sale.

Sellers who want to market their home privately are supposed to sign a document acknowledging that given this decision, they can’t advertise their home publicly to one segment of the population or, as Baird put it, they “can’t be public and private at the same time.”

But larger brokerages have muddied these waters in a way that consumers aren’t always aware of, he said. Even private listing networks aren’t accessible to buyers who aren’t working with an agent or are relocating from another metro, Baird said.

Compass has come out strongly in favor of repealing clear cooperation altogether, which Wong supports due to diminishing faith in NAR’s leadership in recent years — the organization has recently settled costly antitrust complaints and was also rocked by a sexual harassment scandal involving former president Kenny Parcel.

“There is a fresh start that can be made that can be in the best interest of the American consumer and in the best interest of the real estate brokerage industry,” Wong said.

Decades before they sold their firm to Compass, Wong and Mike Golden co-founded @properties as a small brokerage in 2000. They built up their business in part by creating their own private listing network through an app in the early 2010s, becoming one of the first in the local market to do so.

“Trying to stifle the opportunity for someone to be creative or have to fight for a position in the market, you never know what kind of innovation you’re going to miss out on,” he said.

Editor’s note: This story was updated to note that Zillow will begin blocking listings that don’t comply with Clear Cooperation Policy next month.