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.
UNDER ALL IS THE DATA | SPECIAL EDITION The First Draft of the Next Decade CRMLS proposes to abolish IDX and VOW, license everything, and
The decree’s core principle fits in one sentence: a broker may not decide what a rival broker’s customers are allowed to see. Display decisions belong to the seller. Data flows to every cooperating broker on cost based, equal terms.
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.
The Settlement here does not overlap with any of the existing home seller settlements. Rather, this Settlement resolves the legal claims of homebuyers who were not included in the home seller settlement
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.
On June 15, 2026, MLex reported that Stanley Woodward, the Associate Attorney General, has been placed in charge of running the Department of Justice Antitrust Division. The step matters because of who Woodward is and how he reached it. It matters more because the division he now controls has spent the better part of a decade as the principal federal antitrust threat to organized real estate.
Together they crystallize the central question facing the industry: should a residential listing belong first to the open MLS marketplace, or first to the brokerage that signed the seller? The answer will reshape how listings flow, where consumers find homes, which businesses capture the revenue, and what the Multiple Listing Service exists to do
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
The Per Se approach provides a more rigid framework for identifying and condemning certain anticompetitive practices, while the Rule of Reason approach offers a more flexible and nuanced analysis that considers the broader context and effects on competition and consumer welfare.
MiM is almost ready to launch. But before we do, we’re inviting a small group of real people—what we lovingly call Trailblazers—to test the app with us in real time.
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?
