Chicago MLS Drops Mandatory Realtor Membership

In another seismic shift for the residential brokerage world, Chicago’s multiple listing service operator Midwest Real Estate Data officially decoupled MLS access from required trade group membership this week.

MRED — one of the largest MLSs in the nation — voted Monday to eliminate the requirement that its subscribers maintain membership in the National Association of Realtors and its state and local affiliates, according to Illinois Realtors, the state arm of the national organization. The move, which has been under deliberation for over a year, marks a pivotal moment in the ongoing debate about how listing data is controlled and who gets to see it.

Zillow has been at odds with MRED over use of the Private Listing Network offered by the Chicago MLS, which shows homes for sale to other local brokers while keeping them off of portal websites open to the public. But it’s still undetermined how Monday’s decision by MRED will impact access to its private network. Leaders of the board governing MRED didn’t discuss whether Realtor designations would continue to be required for access to the PLN, according to Jim Haisler, CEO of the Heartland Realtor Organization and president of Multiple Listing Service of Northern Illinois. (Heartland is one of the 15 real estate associations that make up MRED.)

The PLN subject “might need further conversation about the pros and cons,” Haisler said in an email to The Real Deal.

The decision regarding NAR membership follows a broader national trend of unlinking, as the industry grapples with antitrust scrutiny and a changing legal landscape regarding commissions and data access. In the fall of 2025, NAR cleared the path for such moves by scrubbing language from its policy handbook that local MLSs had long interpreted as a nudge toward membership, especially for MLSs owned at least partly by local or state trade organizations. (Trade groups don’t have a stake in MRED, although MRED imposed the membership requirement on its subscribers until Monday.)

Despite the potential for a dip in membership revenue, Illinois Realtors is framing the development as a win for “broker choice.”

“Whether it is access to forms, legal and educational resources, or simply the use of the term ‘Realtor,’ the simple fact is, it is still overwhelmingly to the advantage of a broker to remain a Realtor member,” Illinois Realtors CEO Jeff Baker told The Real Deal in a statement.

Under the previous mandate, a standard Chicago agent was locked into a bundled fee structure approaching $1,000 per year. According to the Chicago Association of Realtors’ 2025–2026 membership fee schedule, an agent would typically face $859 in mandatory annual dues — consisting of $354 for local (CAR), $304 for state (Illinois Realtors), and $201 for national (NAR) dues — to keep their MLS access active.

With MRED’s new policy, those dues become optional, and access is open to any agent or broker certified by the state. A broker could theoretically strip their costs down to the $414 base MLS fee, effectively cutting their annual professional overhead.

While Illinois’ largest MLS joins others across several states in severing the tie between access and trade group membership, Haisler emphasized MRED’s change isn’t a mass exit from NAR. To gain non-Realtor access, licensees would have to leave their Realtor-affiliated firms and forfeit the brokerage’s benefits — a move he said few agents actually desire to make, citing Florida, Georgia and Alabama markets that have been free of the Realtor requirement for four decades. More recently, Washington state and Arizona opted for an “Open MLS” with little defection from NAR, Haisler said.

While NAR’s guidance never explicitly required membership for MLS access, each MLS operator has been able to decide whether or not to make it mandatory for access to listings. For access to MRED’s portal, though, trade association membership has always been required until Monday, when the final vote was made by its founding member boards to eliminate the rule.

“It’s a mess right now, but in the mess there are signals that consumers are showing with how they intend to transact in the future,” said Grigory Pekarsky, co-founder and managing broker of Chicago-based Vesta Preferred Realty, who ranked by TRD as the fourth-largest broker in Cook County for 2025 transaction volume. “It’s certainly, ‘give me access and all information NOW or I’ll find my workaround.’ MRED is just reacting to what the reality is.”

In November, NAR updated its handbook for 2026 as part of an overhaul following an antitrust risk assessment of its policies. The updates, totaling 18 policy revisions, most notably revoked a clause that previously declared “the National Association remains firmly and unequivocally committed to the principle that association membership is a reasonable condition of participation in the association’s multiple listing service.”

In the wake of the MRED decision to detangle, NAR is positioning itself as an ally of MLSs.

A spokesperson for the trade organization said in a statement: “Each MLS has full discretion to set their own participation requirements to suit their local marketplace, including whether to require Realtor membership. NAR remains committed to protecting the benefits MLSs provide agents, consumers and the industry.”

Haisler, CEO of Heartland Realtor Organization, said the move could open MRED to partner with other MLSs and international entities to share data.

“Non-Realtor access is a key component to those discussions and future expansion,” Haisler said.