Judge Orders Chicago MLS to Restore Zillow Access to Listings

The Windy City’s war over home listings just got a major judicial intervention.

In a dramatic legal victory for Zillow, a federal judge ordered the Multiple Listing Service operator for northern Illinois, Midwest Real Estate Data, to immediately restore the portal giant’s access to its Chicagoland listing feeds on Friday. The ruling by Judge John Tharp Jr. grants a temporary restraining order, bringing roughly 43,000 vanished listings back to Zillow’s platform and temporarily halting a high-stakes standoff with MRED and megabrokerage Compass.

The feud hit a boiling point early Wednesday morning when MRED pulled the plug on Zillow’s listing data feeds, erasing more than half of all active Chicago-area home offerings from the search platform. The sudden blackout sparked a wave of panic among local agents whose sellers unexpectedly lost exposure to Zillow’s audience of millions of users.

At the heart of the antitrust dispute is the controversial practice of “pocket” or private listings. In 2025, Zillow rolled out its “Listing Access Standards,” which effectively ban listings that are marketed privately for more than a day before being submitted to the open MLS. Compass, which heavily promotes its own private exclusive network, bristled at the policy.

Zillow claimed in its lawsuit against MRED last week that Compass and MRED orchestrated a ploy to protect the brokerage’s hidden inventory. MRED reportedly demanded that Zillow display nine specific Compass private listings located in Florida, Georgia, and California — well outside the Chicago MLS’s typical jurisdiction. When Zillow refused to abandon its national transparency standards for the handful of off-market listings, MRED made good on its threat and cut the Chicago feed entirely.

Zillow claimed the move was an illegal group boycott under the Sherman Antitrust Act aimed at enriching Compass’s walled garden.

“Today’s ruling is an important first step for the Chicago home buyers, sellers and agents who have been harmed by a coordinated scheme by MRED and Compass to reduce transparency in the housing market,” Zillow said in a statement following the ruling. “In the middle of a housing affordability crisis, powerful industry players colluded to hide listings, suppress competition and steer consumers toward a single dominant brokerage.”

Even at the height of the data drought, Zillow’s map of Chicagoland wasn’t completely barren.

While the MRED cutoff wiped out tens of thousands of traditional agent-represented properties, listings from some brokerages that established their own direct feeds with Zillow — bypassing the MLS bottleneck entirely — stayed live. Among the brokerages that kept feeding their listing to Zillow were Baird & Warner, Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Chicago, Keller Williams OneChicago, eXp Realty, and Re/Max franchises.

While Friday’s injunction restores the status quo for now, the broader antitrust battle over who controls listing data is just beginning. For Chicagoland agents and sellers, however, the immediate legal relief means their properties are back in front of eyeballs scrolling Zillow.