The last time Google dipped a toe into real estate search, it walked away. Now, it’s going all in.
The search giant announced it was expanding its real estate listings pilot to all 50 states this summer, powered by a partnership with data firm HouseCanary. As more brokerages and MLSs sign on to the initiative via HouseCanary’s ComeHome platform, it could take a substantial bite out of search dominance for the property portals—and transform how consumers find their next home.
After all, Google processes 16.4 billion searches per day.
The syndication deal is straightforward: Mobile users searching for homes in a specific market see a carousel of listings above paid results, with a direct line to the listing agent and a paid Local Services Ad (LSA) slot for tour requests. HouseCanary said it provides participating brokers and agents with enhanced visibility for their listings and direct brand attribution at no extra cost.
Two brokerages—eXp Realty and NextHome, both subsidiaries of AGNT Inc.—are supplying most of the inventory to Google, and four MLSs have signed on (so far): Bright MLS, California Regional MLS (CRMLS), San Diego MLS and My State MLS.
Google describes its role as a “supporting bridge” between buyers and real estate agents. Meanwhile, Chris Rediger, CEO of HouseCanary, told RISMedia Founder & CEO John Featherston in a webinar Thursday that the goal of the partnership was to maximize exposure for agents’ listings. He emphasized that the listing data is coming directly from MLSs and is compliant.
“If you have the belief that the largest level of exposure will sell the house the fastest, then you want it everywhere,” Rediger said. “This is a way to get it literally everywhere because of the user base.”
The industry is now facing questions that run much deeper, covering data ownership, MLS relevance, fair housing and whether the portals that have lorded over real estate search for two decades are facing a real business threat—or just another headline. And it’s grappling with these questions as various legal battles over private listings rage on.
Google wants your data, not listings
Some industry watchers assume Google is muscling into the territory of Zillow, Homes.com and Realtor.com® as a direct competitor. But not everyone sees it that way.
“Google is not a licensed real estate brokerage,” Rediger said. “They do not have rights or entitlements to any commissions. Their current revenue structure is that of an advertising company, which they have been forever.”
Google’s core search-and-ads business is being cannibalized by AI chatbots, leaving the company scrambling to feed its own AI engine with content, said Amit Kulkarni, co-founder of Alloy Advisors, a real estate strategy firm that advises brokerages, MLSs and proptech companies. But Kulkarni doesn’t think Google has any real interest in competing with the property portals due to the low margins and regulatory exposure involved.
“Their competition isn’t Zillow; their competition is OpenAI and Anthropic,” Kulkarni says. “They’re all gunning for the search business, so Google’s got to do something to mitigate what they’re doing on search.”
The real prize, he says, isn’t property listing traffic. It’s the consumer intent data that those listings generate.
“You can make a lot more money with the behavior data and repackaging that to sell intent signals, which are way more profitable than one-time listing signals,” Kulkarni says. “If you get behavioral intent signals, you now have a profile of a consumer over a lifetime with different intent signals…there’s all these inflection points in someone’s life, and Google has intent signals for all of them.”
Zillow pushed back on the idea that Google’s move is a business threat. A spokesperson said that 80% of Zillow’s traffic comes directly to the site and has held steady for years. During the eight-market Google pilot phase, the company saw no impact to its traffic and even saw traffic increases in some markets, the spokesperson noted.
“What you get from this is essentially an ad carousel, which is a pretty poor search experience,” the Zillow spokesperson told RISMedia, “which half of us are just trained to scroll past anyway.”
But Kulkarni observes that there’s a longer arc at play.
“Everything those companies do runs on the pipes that Google has laid,” Kulkarni says. “Google can exist without those players; those players will have a very hard time existing without Google.”
His advice to portals is to stop competing for placement on a platform they don’t control and instead integrate wherever consumers are actually discovering things next. Zillow has already taken a huge step in that direction as the first real estate app within OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
James Dwiggins, president of NextHome and a third-generation real estate professional, says he isn’t convinced Google is even the final destination for real estate search. “The future is going to be AI agents that are unique to me searching through platforms like Claude or Grok or Gemini or ChatGPT,” he says.
eXp Realty CEO Leo Pareja predicts less of a battle and more business segmentation.
“There’s no such thing as winner-take-all,” Pareja says. “You win on experience, you win on value, you win on service, and different offerings focus on different parts. I think Zillow and Google and Realtor.com and Redfin—they could all have a segment of the market, maybe in even different parts of the journey.”
Familiar compliance debate re-emerges
The nationwide partnership has reignited debate over IDX rules and broker consent, prompting criticism that HouseCanary, which operates as a licensed real estate brokerage in all 50 states, is using agent sign-ups to pressure MLSs into participating.
HouseCanary noted that its program is built on the integrity and data quality of MLSs. That framing might give MLSs some negotiation leverage for their own syndication terms with HouseCanary.
“As real estate marketplaces face unprecedented fragmentation, this program gives brokers and agents a simple, easy way to ensure more buyers can discover their listings from the industry’s most validated, comprehensive source: the MLS,” Rediger said in a previous statement.
Pareja pushed back on the idea that broker consent is some new lever HouseCanary invented. Brokers, he said, have always owned the decision on where their data goes; most just lack the infrastructure to act on it at scale. He pointed to eXp’s own normalized feed across 83,000-plus agents and 219,000 listings on its consumer-facing site, Lyvve.com (still in beta phase), as proof that a brokerage can route its own data without relying on an MLS.
On the Google partnership itself, Pareja stressed that it isn’t an exclusive deal. “That goes against our theory, and I don’t think Google would do that with anybody,” he adds.
Additionally, Pareja says eXp is syndicating its Coming Soon listings to HouseCanary and Google ahead of MLS submissions, but only in markets where the local MLS has no coming-soon field of its own.
That places the partnership squarely in the ongoing thorny debate over so-called “pre-marketing,” as portals, brokerages and MLSs diverge on policies related to exclusive syndication and the inclusion of callouts such as price history.
Dwiggins makes a clear legal distinction between a pocket listing limited to a handful of agents and a publicly advertised coming-soon listing getting pushed to all portals and the MLS.
Allowing private listings to flourish unchecked, he warned, would roll back the Fair Housing progress the industry has made over the past 40 years.
“If we think hiding inventory and allowing people to hold inventory back and create a bunch of paywalls is going to decrease discrimination or make Fair Housing better, we’re out of our f__ing minds, to put it bluntly,” Dwiggins says. “That is insane to me.”
A call for MLSs to ‘evolve’
As of this publishing, there are 489 MLSs nationwide, with each organization setting its own rules and policies for local participants, according to the Real Estate Standards Organization (RESO). By the end of May, there were roughly 1.06 million active listings on the market, according to Realtor.com data.
But Pareja says he doesn’t think the current MLS map survives this moment intact. About 15 years ago, the country had 975 MLSs. Today, that number is below 500, Pareja said, adding “that’s still way too many.”
“We’re seeing consolidation on the brokerage side; we should see more consolidation on the MLS side,” Pareja says, noting that smaller MLSs simply can’t move fast enough to negotiate data deals, fund technology or hold the line against brokerages that route around them. “If an MLS is too small and can’t make decisions, can’t move quick enough and can’t do this, I would ask the question, ‘Why don’t you merge with one that can?’”
Brokerages and agents have some leverage to “use your voice” to lobby their MLS if their listings aren’t yet flowing to Google, Pareja says. Eventually, enough brokers will demand it the way they once demanded syndication to Zillow and other search portals, he adds.
Dwiggins agrees that “a lot” of MLS consolidation is necessary, but safeguarding the MLS structure itself is critical, because so many aspects of a transaction, including comps, appraisals and financing, rely on having a single trusted data source.
Breaking MLSs apart in the name of competition could backfire badly and break the U.S. housing market, he says. “We look like the rest of the world, which candidly, is a mess,” Dwiggins says.
The hope is that MLSs continue to “evolve” in a way that encourages broker innovation, he says. If an MLS gets in the way of innovation, however, “then brokerages will go around them.”
“Because we don’t serve the MLS; we serve the homebuyer and seller,” Dwiggins says.
Who owns the data after Google has it?
Once Google has sellers’ listing data, who owns it? More importantly, does it end up training Google’s AI models? And did sellers ever consent to that
According to HouseCanary’s FAQ site, “Google does not retain listing data for use in AI/LLM (large language model) products or other Google services beyond the agreed placement.”
Dwiggins said that MLS data carries existing consent language tied to MLS membership, but he acknowledged that syndicating data directly, outside of that feed, is a grey area for smaller brokerages.
“How do small players do it and protect that data for sellers? I can’t answer that,” Dwiggins says. “I simply can tell you that’s certainly something that those organizations need to figure out with their legal counsel.”
For real estate agents and brokers, Pareja says, the job hasn’t changed even if the way consumers search for homes is evolving.
“Let’s not forget what it is we’re doing: We are listing and representing a property to get exposure, so a ready, willing and able buyer could find it,” he says.
“As consumer behavior shifts—that could be the LLM directly, or it could be the Google search bar—it’s our job to find those eyeballs. So if Google is coming into this space, we want to make sure our listings are there. It’s that simple for us,” he adds.
