Arguments about real estate data are conducted in a specialized vocabulary, and the vocabulary is doing real work. These terms decide who may see your home listing, who may build products from your sale price, and who pays whom for what.
A well capitalized brokerage underwriting a single MLS’s national footprint challenges the geographic MLS model that has organized this industry for a century. Every regional MLS should be discussing what that means for its market, its Participants and Subscribers, and its future.
An AI model trained on listing data is a derivative work at industrial scale, which is exactly why the newest MLS rules address AI by name, and why the question of whether listing data may touch a training environment at all has become the sharpest edge in data licensing.
Guard Rails: Why the MLS Must Become the Governance Layer for Artificial Intelligence By Saul Klein Artificial Intelligence is rapidly becoming the next interface to
That explains why brokerages want greater control before MLS entry, why portals insist on broad consumer access, and why MLSs find themselves caught in the middle.
Just completed a podcast discussing the graphic. There’s a lot to unpack in our follow-up post.
“MLS Router™ has fundamentally changed how we think about MLS data. It’s no longer just about distributing feeds. It’s about governance, transparency, and creating new revenue opportunities in a way that scales. For the first time, we can measure usage, manage licensing, and monetize data through a single operating system.”
As the CEO of the San Diego MLS, Saul was quick to respond with the fact that MLSs should be looking for alternative ways to showcase the value of the MLS. He explores the concept of flipping the current subscription-based business model and finding opportunities to monetize the data and bring benefits back to the providers of the data.
The mid-1990s marked a monumental turning point with the conceptualization of putting real estate listings on the “worldwide web.” Saul Klein, acting as a consultant for the National Association of Realtors (NAR), was a central figure in this ambitious endeavor.
Data from an MLS to recipients (brokers, agents, and vendors) is provided to them through a “data feed.”
…because the database is built cooperatively, someone has to decide who gets to use it, for what purposes, and at what price. For most of a century that question answered itself, because everyone at the table was a working broker making the same trade. That is no longer true, and the argument about what to do about it is now the biggest fight in the industry.
Latest Resources to help members understand the recent lawsuits NAR Top KMs_15Dec23 NAR Top FAQS_8Jan24 NAR Top FAQS_8Jan24 NAR Sugg in Support of Rule 50(b)
In announcing its decision not to join the settlement, the NWMLS argued that removing commission offers from home listings hurts transparency and could lead to “deceptive practices.”
