The proposals now competing disagree about almost everything except the starting point. The listing database is valuable because working brokers build it, one listing and one represented client at a time. Every proposal on the table is, at bottom, an argument about how to honor that fact
That trade has broken down, because some firms now take data out without putting listings in, and others want to hold listings back while staying in. In the summer of 2026, three documents from three organizations proposed three different repairs. Here they are, in plain language.
The database your neighborhood built is worth understanding, because everything about how homes are bought and sold runs through it.
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.
One habit will keep you oriented across all of these. For any feed, ask two questions. What may the recipient do with what arrives, that is the license. And is the output a listing being shown, or something new being made?
THE LANGUAGE OF DATA | PART 2 OF 7 How the Data Travels: FTP, RETS, and the Web API The industry has rebuilt the pipe
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.
…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.
UNDER ALL IS THE DATA | PART 8 OF 8 Reciprocity With Nothing to Take Private networks and paper brokers are mirror images of
“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.”
Key takeaways: The median purchase rate rose 1/8 ppts. over the past week to 7 1/4%, setting a new series record. Mortgage News Daily reported
A digital shared service allows all market participants to “plug in” and reduce their homeownership transaction processing costs by 70%
We agree with the attorney’s expectation of a DOJ intervention. And I’ll add our prediction that we will hear from the DOJ by the end of October. Webase that prediction on signals from the DOJ in a series of pleadings and actions over the past 4 years and before,
