Rebecca Jensen dug the trenches being used in today’s real estate portal battles.
She picked up her shovel long before Zillow’s rise into a company synonymous with property offerings, and fought turf wars dating back to the industry’s transition to digitize multiple listing services.
After the listings giant tried to bank on its popularity with buyers and pick a fight with the Chicago-area multiple listing service Midwest Real Estate Data, Jensen, the CEO of MRED, pulled the plug on Zillow’s listing feed, axing 43,000 Chicago-area homes from the platform.
A federal judge ordered it restored, with the caveat that Zillow could no longer block a few offerings outside Illinois that were previously marketed off of MLSes and on private channels instead. But the move put MRED, and Jensen, on the national stage as the biggest names in residential real estate duke it out for inventory and fight to come out on top in the industry’s shifting power balance.
While a growing wave of MLS leaders and state lawmakers are reining in private listings, Jensen has taken the opposite approach, doubling down on the legitimacy of the practice as long as brokers follow certain rules. And Jensen made good on her arguments for far-flung visibility in April, when MRED formally announced its partnership with Compass to make its Private Listing Network nationwide.
Jensen is among the MLS heads thrust into the spotlight of the real estate industry. These leaders, long members of the faceless back office of the core of the industry, are now forced to pick sides in the controversy over the proliferation of off-market dealmaking that agents have increasingly used to sidestep their MLS and portals like Zillow.
With MRED’s recent moves against Zillow, and Zillow’s disdain for Compass’ business model and the founders of MRED decrying the addition of the MLS’s latest customer, the traditional factions of Illinois real estate are breaking apart after many years of relative alignment.
So far, Jensen has been hailed for taking a stance against Zillow by many leaders of the business, most notably Robert Reffkin, who has led Compass to its status as the strongest force behind the expansion of private listings kept off of consumer-facing portals.
“It was never contemplated on our part that we would be competing with an organization who we collect dues for.”
While Zillow has accused MRED of “acting against its own interests by prioritizing Compass’s private listing business model” over transparency, Jensen and those who work closely with her say she’s a fitting champion for the MLS as it faces existential questions.
“I don’t get the impression she feels pressure from anybody. She’s a very independent decision maker,” said Jeff Lasky, CEO of the North Shore Barrington Association of Realtors, one of the original seven Chicago-area real estate boards that founded MRED.
Jensen has rewritten the rules of engagement. While local associations are managed by rotating volunteer boards wrapped up in external legal liabilities and municipal grant disputes, Jensen treats MRED as a hyper-focused technology business.
For local board executives scrutinizing her recent moves, they aren’t just challenging their tech vendor, but also her newest client: a state-level political machine in Illinois Realtors.
Coder to courtroom
In an hour-long video interview with The Real Deal, Jensen gave off the vibe of a computer programmer with the mind of an antitrust hawk crossed with an intellectual property lawyer.
In conversation, she easily toggles between citing case law she feels backs up her move against Zillow, and explaining the inner workings of how real estate listing data is transported from a seller’s broker to the MLS, and then to other brokerages while maintaining compliance with intellectual property standards. She’s quick to note she serves Realtors (and, for the first time as of April, non-Realtor agents licensed by any state), without being a broker herself: Jensen hasn’t ever held a real estate license or Realtor membership.
She calls herself a geek and “MLS nerd,” but her role depends on her ability to size up the group’s priorities with respect to its key stakeholders. She has said her operating ethos comes from MRED’s hybrid ownership structure, which is built on buy-in from both brokerages and local associations.
“Our first strategic planning association, we very clearly voted on brokerages being the primary, above associations and above agents,” Jensen said in a previous interview. “You have to make different decisions based on that.”
Tension is nothing new for Jensen’s career, she said.
After skipping a high school diploma and starting community college classes at age 16, she landed a job in 1998 as a contractor for the Utah MLS while still earning an undergraduate degree in computer science.
When Jensen joined, the system was transitioning from physical books of listings published and distributed to real estate brokers periodically into an online marketplace. She was tasked with training agents in how to use computers, and was eventually hired full-time to the MLS’s help desk.
She recalls hearing from agents that threatened to protest the move away from the paper books, and telling them they’d have to get a computer for their office, hook it up to a modem and get on the internet.
As she was ascending the ranks of the Utah MLS before moving to lead MRED in Chicagoland, she got a lesson in how cutthroat the real estate technology world could be.
During the launch of her MLS’s consumer-facing portal UtahRealEstate.com,
the company paid an outside software engineering firm to build the platform. Once the site became a runaway commercial success, the engineering firm attempted a digital stick-up, claiming it owned the intellectual property simply because it registered the web domain. The MLS prevailed in a complex industry war, she said.
The fight pushed her to explore the legal side of the business — and how to protect the value of brokerage listing data while staying on the right side of antitrust laws.
In 2007, she graduated to heading war rooms for major players as she became CEO of Utah’s major MLS. She moved to take the top job for MRED in 2015, shortly before the creation of its Private Listing Network that Zillow has opposed, as it allows MRED-subscribed brokers to view homes being quietly shopped for sale while kept out of sight from everyone else, Zillow users included.
Zillow has framed the network as a tool for mega-brokerages like Compass to hoard leads, but Jensen points to its deeply human origins. She claims the PLN wasn’t born in a corporate boardroom, but from buyer agents complaining about “For Sale” signs popping up at homes that weren’t listed on the MLS.
When she investigated, she uncovered a litany of seller circumstances requiring grace and discretion. There was the family with a mother in hospice in the front room, needing to declutter but unable to host open houses. There were domestic violence victims trying to quietly liquidate assets before fleeing. There were messy divorces and widows begging for dignity.
To force these sellers onto a public portal within a rigid time limit was wrong, she felt.
Critics of private offerings dismiss that justification as spin, and some have even alleged agents with private listings have failed to take higher and better offers to their clients in order to keep dealmaking inside their own brokerage instead — which would mark a breach of fiduciary duty and open up an agent to disciplinary action, if investigated and proved, neither of which frequently occur.
MRED said it has sent 35 notices for failure to report a new listing since January, with only one resulting in a fine, and that figure hasn’t changed much from historical averages since the inception of the Private Listing Network.
Crossing lines of Chicago’s old guard
When Zillow last year announced its new “Listing Access Standards” to block listings previously marketed on MRED’s private network, Jensen saw its selective listing display not as a portal’s editorial right, but as a brokerage violating a Department of Justice settlement meant to prohibit full-service brokerages from blocking display of discount brokers’ listings.
The Private Listing Network’s growing popularity has given MRED an edge with brokerages who want the option, but also brought its customers in the local boards more competition.
Jensen’s latest move to expand MRED’s reach has unnerved her oldest clients: the seven local real estate associations that came together to form MRED in the 2000s and remain its owners. The eight additional associations that have joined the MLS since aren’t thrilled, either.
Illinois Realtors was traditionally a statewide organization meant to serve local associations, executives for those groups, like Lasky of North Shore-Barrington Associations of Realtors, have argued.
“Our first strategic planning association, we very clearly voted on brokerages being the primary, above associations and above agents.”
“It was never contemplated on our part that we would be competing with an organization whom we collect dues for,” Lasky said.
The addition of Illinois Realtors to MRED’s roster of association customers was enabled by the MLS’s decision earlier this year to sever the so-called three-way agreement that required its subscribers be members of local and state chapters of the National Association of Realtors as well as NAR itself.
Now, even non-Realtors, as well as Realtors already subscribed to a different MLS can sign up for MRED through Illinois Realtors to access the Private Listing Network where Compass plans to deploy its off-market inventory. Local associations partnered with MRED have also begun to roll out light MLS-only membership packages to compete for agents outside the MLS’s traditional Chicagoland boundaries.
Illinois Realtors has said it’s focused on bringing on out-of-state agents to MRED who want access to the inventory on the Private Listing Network, and not necessarily competing with the local associations. But there’s nothing stopping the state organization from bringing on local agents, as well, including those who may have previously subscribed to the MLS through one of the founding associations.
“When [Jensen] struck that deal with Illinois Realtors, it showed her lack of confidence in her local associations to handle the load. You change the culture of an organization when it becomes a competitor, taking on new responsibilities that you never had that all your locals have been doing for years,” said Chris Studebaker, CEO of the Realtor Association of Fox Valley. “She is very focused on where she wants to go, and doesn’t entertain a lot of different options or variables of getting to the same place.”
Illinois Realtors declined to respond to a detailed list of questions for this story.
Jensen said she understands her local association clients’ surprise, due to her obliging Illinois Realtors’ request to keep under wraps the plan to add it as an MRED dealer until it was a done deal. But she dismisses the debate over the locals collecting dues for what’s now a competitor. That’s on the Realtors’ side of the equation, she said.
She contends it’s important for her to prevent her clients from voting to disallow a fellow real estate association — which Illinois Realtors is — from joining the MLS, due to antitrust rules.
“It comes down to us needing to trust them, which can be difficult at times,” Studebaker said of the state trade group.