Jessica Edgerton, who takes over as CEO of the Council of Multiple Listing Services (CMLS) on July 1, gave RISMedia an interview last week that every agent should read—not because it sounds an alarm, but because it doesn’t.
Edgerton gets the most important thing exactly right. Asked what is worth protecting as private listings and portal pre-marketing pull listings in different directions, she pointed to the one asset the rest of the world envies: “We have cohesive data…a really robust, complete picture at any given moment of what the data and what the listing environment looks like. That’s the MLS.” Her caution is that the industry “cannot catch the MLS in the jaws of these battles and break it.” On that, she is unimpeachably correct, and it’s encouraging to hear it from the person about to lead the MLS trade body.
It’s the next move that should give agents pause. Edgerton, an antitrust attorney, welcomes the competitive fight—”Let’s battle it out”—and accepts that some “fractionalization” of the data is “inevitable,” if she hopes, temporary. She would rather see the dispute resolved through competition than in court. That is a reasonable instinct for a litigator tired of business-by-motion. But it understates what fragmentation costs the people we actually work for while the battle plays out.
Here is the problem with “temporary.” Fragmentation may be temporary for a brokerage—a phase in a strategy, a bargaining chip in a feud that eventually settles. It is not temporary for the transaction that closes in the meantime. The seller who is steered into a monthslong private-marketing phase, tested at one price and quietly reduced, and only then sent to the open market doesn’t get a do-over when the corporate dust clears. The buyer who never saw the home because it lived inside one brokerage’s network doesn’t get those weeks back. Whatever the industry decides in 2027, those 2026 outcomes are permanent. “Temporary” is a comfort available to companies, not to consumers.
And we should be honest about why a listing gets routed into the private channel in the first place. The marketing language is “seller choice.” The financial logic underneath is harder to say out loud: a listing kept inside one brokerage is more likely to be sold by that same brokerage, capturing both sides of the commission instead of splitting it with a cooperating agent. Zillow’s own analysis tied roughly $1.49 billion in seller losses over three years to deals where one brokerage represented both sides. Reasonable people can argue about the precision of that number. They cannot argue away the conflict it describes. When the party recommending a marketing strategy is also the party positioned to earn more from it—and the strategy tends to net the seller less and take longer—a checkbox labeled “informed consent” does not make the conflict disappear. It documents it. As CRMLS chief executive Art Carter put it, a broker’s fiduciary duty “includes clearly communicating the potential trade-offs associated with limited-exposure strategies.”
This is where I’d push Edgerton to be less neutral, not more. She drew one connection in her interview that deserves to be the headline rather than a footnote: there is, in her words, “a direct line between transparency and completeness of industry data…as it ties to fair housing and accessibility.” She’s right, and it cuts harder than “let’s compete.” A market where the full inventory is visible to everyone is a market where the buyer’s access doesn’t depend on knowing the right agent at the right firm. Fragment that inventory and you don’t just shave a few basis points off a sale price—you rebuild the exact information barriers that fair-housing law spent decades trying to tear down. The buyer locked out of the private network is disproportionately the buyer without the relationships, and that is not a competition problem the market will quietly fix on its own.
None of this is an argument against competition, and it is certainly not nostalgia for an MLS that earned every bit of the scrutiny it got after Sitzer. The governance fights and the commission fights are real and overdue. But the cooperative, complete record is a different thing from the commission structure bolted onto it, and it is the part worth defending hardest—precisely because it is the part that protects the consumer rather than the broker.
So I’ll end where Edgerton began, and ask her to finish the thought. Yes, let’s battle it out. Yes, resolve what we can through competition rather than the courtroom. But the referee of that battle has one non-negotiable job: make sure the complete, honest record survives the fight intact, and make sure the consumers caught in the middle aren’t treated as acceptable, “temporary” collateral. That clarity—stated plainly, early, and often—is the most useful thing the new head of CMLS could bring to the room.
