“Believe it or not, there was a time when people needed to be convinced that the internet would matter. In 1995, when web browsers were first becoming commercialized, I had the opportunity to tell the real estate industry that the internet was going to change the way business was done. That turned out to be true.”
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.
In practice, it’s hard to reason about the “purpose” of a product as broad as ChatGPT, or the “purpose” of the entire internet. A better framing is: do the market harms from ChatGPT come from it producing substitutes that compete with the originals? Or is it an indirect effect, like a book critic review could have on a book?
A vendor seeking a site license must have a program that takes the MLS or association through these steps and be ready to fund the necessary efforts to ensure high usage and value for the fee paid.
After more than 15 years of visionary leadership, Merri Jo Cowen, CEO of Stellar MLS, announced she will step down from her role in Q1 2026.
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.
Roger P. Alford will serve as Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General. Mr. Alford previously served in the first Trump Administration as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Antitrust Division, including as an expert witness in the landmark 2023 real estate $1.8 billion litigation against the National Association of Realtors
Phoenix REALTORS® stated that it has eliminated its “MLS Choice” membership option but will continue to offer non-REALTORS® access to ARMLS as it has done since 1996. In addition, Phoenix REALTORS® will provide certain products and services to non-REALTOR® licensees who purchase non-member MLS Access.
While we’ll be looking at the increasing number of lawsuits centering around the Three-Way Agreement issue, it is worth keeping a close eye on the reaction of local associations to challenges voiced by some of its members to lessening the costs for services they don’t consider essential to their business.
The most difficult questions focused on why the DOJ took the position that the written buyer agreements required to show a property were possibly an antitrust violation.
There’s a lot of meat in her simple one-sentence writing style. You’ll find lots of spot-on insight as you quickly scroll through. We’ll give you a peek at a few of her descriptions of Coming Soon
The DOJ has wanted to cripple organized residential real estate for decades…with the help of the FTC and the Consumer Federation of America.
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.
