The Long Road to Anywhere Requires a Compass
The Long Road to Anywhere Requires a Compass. How a 1971 Franchise Idea Outlived Every Corporation That Bought It
Saul Klein
September 6, 2026
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The Long Road to Anywhere Requires a Compass. How a 1971 Franchise Idea Outlived Every Corporation That Bought It
“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.”
Private marketing probably does help when a home is unusual, expensive, and hard to price, and when the likely buyers are few and reachable through agents. Broad public exposure probably does help when the home is ordinary and there are many possible buyers, because competition is what drives the price up.
Industry Crossroads™ is built on the belief that the residential real estate industry benefits when informed professionals are willing to think critically, challenge assumptions, and engage respectfully with competing idea. Our goal is not simply to report events, but to elevate the conversation.
Today, a listing is no longer simply a property record. It is the industry’s most valuable business asset. Whoever controls the listing controls consumer relationships, lead generation, advertising opportunities, artificial intelligence training data, and billions of dollars in downstream services
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.
The MLS is built for cooperation among professionals representing sellers and buyers. Can the MLS service both subscribers?
That’s a complex question that requires awareness of a number of topics as shown by the Nomenclature list below, as well as from articles appearing in The Data Advocate (TDA).
Most importantly, it reframes the association as a value provider rather than a gatekeeper. This is not theory or advocacy. It is operational evidence from one of the longest-running Open MLS environments in the United States
If an advertisement or promotional material described in paragraph (1) is posted on an internet website over which the real estate broker or salesperson, or person acting on their behalf, has control, they shall include the unaltered version of the images from which the digitally altered images were created in the posting
The debates are not about technology. They are about which rights travel with which feeds, to whom, at what price. Read any new rule with the feed and license distinction in hand and it becomes legible. Read it without, and it looks like plumbing. It is not plumbing. It is property.
The Language of Real Estate With a Ground Lease, you own the improvements, but not the land. Common in Hawaii when I was
Agency Disclosure in the late 1980s is the force that created the MLS Offer of Compensation as the MLS Compensation Vehicle. Prior to that. all Subscribers and Participants of an MLS had an Agency Duty to the Seller, and Buyers were not aware of this fact