Zillow is picking fights with not only what’s still a fairly new brokerage in Compass, but also the traditional and established infrastructure of residential real estate.
Multiple listing service operators in major markets, including Chicago and San Antonio, are under fire from Zillow for giving agents platforms to list homes where fellow brokers can see offerings without blasting them to the broader public through online portals like Zillow’s.
The Chicago MLS operator Midwest Real Estate Data’s perspective, that every member‑broker should have equal access, is under pressure — especially from Compass’ push for brokerage exclusives. MRED’s own recent defense of its private listing system emphasized its commitment to ensuring “all our brokerages and brokers have access to all listings within your market.”
Yet MRED described its private‑listing network as an “alternative to a one‑size‑fits‑all model,” and Zillow’s demand that its brokers ditch it as “devoid of compassion and understanding.”
There’s a problem with that logic. While MRED is defending itself against Zillow’s crackdown on private listings — which the real estate tech company says could start leading to listings being blocked from its website — the MLS is also taking a stand against office exclusives like those Compass is pushing its brokers to use.
Office exclusives offer a shade of privacy even beyond private listing networks, by ensuring that only agents from within a particular brokerage have access to them before the rest of the industry.
Homes marketed on the MLS-owned private listing network, on the other hand, are still visible to all agents subscribed to MRED’s operation. There are 45,000 real estate professionals in Chicagoland, southeast Wisconsin and northwest Indiana who subscribe to MRED. That’s a lot of people.
Without judging the economics of whether private or exclusive listings benefit sellers, buyers or nobody in comparison to the standard MLS, can’t MRED’s argument that there’s a need for privacy in the marketplace also be applied to the Compass stance? For sellers seeking discretion during sensitive life events such as death, divorce or a recently incurred disability, wouldn’t limiting their listing’s exposure to a single brokerage rather than every broker in the region offer more shelter?
Yes, Compass has more agents than that overall throughout the nation. But you could argue that a smaller slice of a seller’s local peers would be likely to catch wind of a listing marketed as an office exclusive rather than to every real estate agent in a region.
One notable point is that MRED’s “compassionate privacy” argument is internally consistent: the listings are still shared among all MLS participants (via private listing networks) and eventually enter the public domain. But MRED needs to be careful with its line of defense, if it doesn’t want to lose ground over the listing flow to Compass. Without caution, the “privacy” logic becomes a shelter for brokerage exclusivity.
The same line of thinking invoked for protecting sellers’ privacy can, and arguably should, be applied to scrutinize brokerage practices that limit buyer or agent access. If MRED is right to say that “one‑size‑fits‑all” transparency are inconsiderate to seller circumstance, then the converse could also be argued: brokerage access models that favor some agents and buyers over others risk being insensitive to the broader buyer community and to the premise of market fairness.
The implication for the industry is real. As listing controls evolve — via private networks, coming‑soon phases or brokerage‑only platforms — the MLS ideal of open cooperation becomes harder to sustain. Brokerages will need to defend both their marketing strategies and the impact they have on the exclusivity of markets; MLS operators will need to decide whether to uphold broad access or tolerate tiered systems masked as “seller choice.”
The discussion invites inquiry: when does seller privacy slide into buyer disadvantage? And when does brokerage exclusivity masquerade as choice? That challenge goes beyond Illinois and Chicago‑area MLSs; it’s central to how the brokerage‑portal‑MLS ecosystem will be defined in the next chapter of U.S. residential real‑estate.