For a quarter century, Carla DeYoung was part of the system. She held a real estate license, paid her dues to the local association, the state association and the National Association of Realtors® (NAR). She played by the rules because she believed in them.
Then the rules changed in ways she believed crossed a line.
Now, DeYoung is fighting back. Without a lawyer, representing herself in federal court, she’s taking on NAR and nearly a dozen affiliated organizations in what has become a rare second chance at challenging the system. She says she’s not seeking money. And she’s not trying to destroy the industry. Instead, DeYoung says she simply wants the right to access the data her profession needs without being forced to join an organization whose rules she believes are unethical and anticompetitive.
Her case has become part of a larger, quieter battle playing out across the country. In Texas, Pennsylvania and Michigan, other real estate professionals have made similar complaints to courts, hoping judges would hear them. None have succeeded. But DeYoung remains undeterred. Her amended complaint, filed just last month, represents a rare second chance, she says.
When asked to comment on the case, NAR provided an emailed statement from a spokesperson.
“NAR supports pro-competitive, pro-consumer local broker marketplaces. Local associations that operate a REALTOR® owned MLS may choose to include these marketplaces as a member benefit, and each local MLS sets its own requirements for determining access to the platform and for governing participants’ conduct on the platforms.”
The moment everything changed
The conflict didn’t start with the MLS, according to DeYoung. It started with a rule about contracts.
In 2024, NAR and its affiliated local associations rolled out a new requirement, precipitated by class-action lawsuits: Real estate agents must have buyers sign a buyer’s broker agreement before showing them a house. The rule was strict; violate it and you’d face fines. According to DeYoung, NAR told her this was required by Louisiana law that the governor had signed, she recalled during a recent interview with RISMedia (the law and the new NAR rule were both proposed at roughly the same time, in March of 2024).
So she looked into it. DeYoung found the governor had indeed signed legislation about buyer broker agreements (Act 690), but the law didn’t specify when they had to be signed—just that an agreement must exist.
NAR’s rule had a timing requirement that wasn’t in the law itself. The “before showing” rule was NAR’s policy, not Louisiana’s legal requirement. Yet they presented it as law, DeYoung claimed.
“It wasn’t a good feeling to know that we were being told a story,” she said.
For someone who had spent 25 years in this industry, the move felt like a betrayal.
The bundled trap
Around the same time, DeYoung made a professional transition; she became a certified residential appraiser after years of working as a broker. Appraisers need access to MLS data—the same database where real estate agents list homes for sale. But appraising is fundamentally different from selling homes. Appraisers analyze comparable sales to determine property values. They don’t list homes or show homes and don’t need the tools designed for agents.
When DeYoung asked to access the MLS as an appraiser—just an appraiser, with no agent responsibilities—she expected a straightforward answer: yes, here’s the cost, sign up. Instead, she was told she couldn’t.
“They told us we could not have it unless we joined all three,” DeYoung recalled. She was explicit about what she asked for: “I requested to join just as an appraiser.” But the answer was absolute. “You have to join all three associations in order to be able to purchase the MLS.”
According to NAR, access to the MLS is set by the local associations and not by NAR itself. In four states—Georgia, Florida, California and Alabama—it is illegal to require Realtor® membership for MLS access, based on decades’ old court decisions.
But this distinction raised an immediate question: If NAR doesn’t require bundling and local associations independently set their own requirements, why do all the Louisiana associations require it? And why wasn’t DeYoung offered an alternative?
From DeYoung’s perspective, the result was the same regardless of who was enforcing it: the associations had bundled three separate memberships into one mandatory package. You couldn’t take them apart, even if you needed only one piece of it.
For her, it was $600 a year in dues and fees to access a tool for professional work. But the cost wasn’t the real issue—and this is crucial to understanding her frustration.
“This has never been about how much we’re paying,” she emphasized. “We have never said we weren’t willing to pay for it. Ever. It’s not about the money.”
It was about principle. She was being forced to become a member of an organization she declined to join, following rules she rejected, just to access essential professional data.
What pushed her to the edge
To understand what made DeYoung go from frustrated to litigious, she points to the foundational structure of the MLS, and questions of who controls the data—a debate that is playing out at a much higher level right now in the industry.
“The MLS is just data,” she says. “It’s a software program, like something on your computer. Real estate agents put the information in. The associations don’t put the information in. Associations don’t even have a right to sell those properties being advertised.”
Agents photograph the properties, write the descriptions, upload the listings, update them when prices change or contracts are pending. They generate the content. The associations maintain the database and provide the platform.
“Everything you see in the comments on Zillow or Realtor.com® came from the agent,” DeYoung notes. “The associations don’t do that. We do all of that.”
So why, she reasoned, should joining an association be a prerequisite for accessing a data platform built and populated by the agents themselves?
The answer, she believed, was that the associations had engineered a monopoly. By making MLS access conditional on membership—on all three levels—they could force compliance with rules they wanted to enforce. They could charge membership fees regardless of whether members needed the benefits. And they could exclude anyone who refused to join.
For real estate agents, this was merely frustrating. For appraisers, home inspectors and other licensed professionals who needed MLS data but didn’t need agent membership, it was an artificial barrier to their profession.
“We’re all licensed professionals,” DeYoung said. “We’re independent contractors, licensed by the state, regulated by the state, with all kinds of rules from the state about advertising, ethics, fair housing. We already have all of that. The MLS is just a tool we need. Why should we have to join an association to get it?”
Other professionals were in the same position. Some gave up. Some paid the fees and complained privately. DeYoung decided to file a lawsuit.
But DeYoung feels strongly enough about these issues that not only has she continued to push forward with her lawsuit for the past 18 months, she’s doing it on her own—without a lawyer. For over a year, she’s been navigating federal court procedure, fighting multiple well-funded defendants with armies of attorneys, all while continuing to run her appraisal business.
March 2026: “All” claims dismissed?
In March, the court issued a ruling. Judge Shelly Dick ruled on a motion to dismiss, and she threw out two of the federal antitrust claims.
But the ruling allowed DeYoung to amend the complaint—legalese for “you can file a new version with updated legal arguments.” The federal antitrust claims weren’t dead. They were being given another chance.
Meanwhile, the judge explicitly deferred ruling on the state-law claims, saying they would be evaluated later. Those claims never went away; they were just on a slower track.
April 2026: The second amended complaint
DeYoung spent the next month putting extraordinary work into her lawsuit. She—a self-represented litigant with no law degree—wrote a 100-page amended complaint, covering complex areas of antitrust, fair housing and contract law, at both the state and local level.
Only a tiny fraction of self-represented lawsuits succeed—around 3% of plaintiffs, according to a study by the University of Chicago Law Review.
But DeYoung seems determined to continue pushing forward.
“Nobody seems to be able to get it past the threshold of being heard,” DeYoung says. “We’re trying to get to where we can be heard. That’s where we’re at.”
NAR’s response
In its statement to RISMedia, NAR went further to defend the benefits of the three-way agreement as something that is in the best interest of those who practice real estate.
“Similar to other national membership organizations, NAR’s federated ‘three-way’ structure connects members at every level, giving them a unified voice on policy issues, access to business tools, professional development opportunities and a uniform Code of Ethics, among many other benefits,” the spokesperson said.
In its legal defense filed May 5, NAR’s attorneys take a harder stance. They argue that conditioning MLS access on membership does not violate antitrust law, citing precedent holding that “private organizations may reasonably tie their benefits and services to membership,” something that judges across the country have broadly agreed with going back years.
But DeYoung says she isn’t objecting to the MLS or its benefits; she’s objecting to being forced to join associations she disagrees with in order to access data her profession requires.
What comes next
Cases similar to DeYoung’s have been filed in Texas, Pennsylvania and Michigan. Real estate professionals across the country have tried to get judges to hear these claims. So far, none have broken through, with most dismissed (though some of these other plaintiffs have appealed those rulings).
DeYoung is not under any illusions about her opponent’s size and power. NAR is a 1.5 million-member organization with vast resources. DeYoung is a self-represented appraiser in Louisiana fighting them in federal court.
But she’s also someone who spent 25 years inside the system, who believes in the principles of professional ethics and fair competition, and who couldn’t look away when she believed those principles were violated. For her, the lawsuit isn’t about winning—it’s about making sure someone has to listen.
“We’re just hoping that the court understands,” she said. “We just want to be heard.”
