Above, Joe Hayden, Principal Broker, simpler.realestate
Howard Hanna’s CEO Hoby Hanna published a recent op-ed in RISMedia titled, “The MLS is Not a Product. It’s Infrastructure.” I read it before my first coffee, and I agree with the central claim. I am writing this so I can add the part of the conversation that the industry is not having.
The MLS is infrastructure. Yes. And the seller you are protecting in this debate is also the buyer you are harming. Most homeowners are both, three or four times in their lives, often within months of each other. Until we stop pretending sellers and buyers are different populations with different interests, we will keep designing policies and products that serve one side at the expense of the same person on the other.
The MLS is infrastructure. We agree.
The Multiple Listing Service is the only reason a 150-agent independent brokerage in Louisville, Kentucky, can compete on the same listing as Compass, Howard Hanna, or a national franchise. It is the reason a buyer in Indiana sees every available property in the community of Floyds Knobs, not just the ones marketed by a single brokerage. And it is why the data on what homes are actually selling for, in what condition, on what timeline, lives in one place rather than scattered across proprietary networks.
That is not a feature. That is the framework. Hanna calls it infrastructure. The economist’s word is “public good.” Either way, the point is the same: it is the underlying utility that makes everything around it possible. Profit and competition should run at the perimeter of the MLS, in marketing, technology, service, advice and execution. They should not run through the MLS itself.
When the MLS becomes the place where firms compete by hoarding data, restricting access or building proprietary networks that operate alongside it, the framework stops being a framework. It becomes a participant. And once the infrastructure starts picking winners, the people who lose are not just the small brokerages. They are the consumers.
The tension nobody is naming
There is, however, a tension in the current debate that I do not want to leave unspoken. Many of the same brokerages defending the MLS as cooperative infrastructure are also building products that route around it. HannaList is one. Compass Private Exclusives is another. Zillow and Realtor.com have rolled out “preview” and “pre-listing” programs that pull listings out of the MLS-first flow and into portal-first lead generation.
The case for these products is real. Sellers want options. Some homes benefit from staged exposure. Privacy matters in certain transactions. I have no quarrel with any of that.
The problem is that “innovation” and “fragmentation” can look identical from the outside. If every large brokerage builds an internal network and every portal builds an exclusive program, the cumulative effect is a market where listings live in dozens of silos and the cooperative picture quietly disappears. The MLS becomes the floor, not the field. And the firms with the scale to run their own networks become the ones who decide which buyers see which homes.
That is not infrastructure. That is consolidation dressed in the language of choice.
The insight the industry keeps missing
Here is the part I most want industry leaders to absorb. Most sellers are also buyers. In the same transaction or the next one, the person handing you a listing agreement is also writing a purchase offer. The seller-versus-buyer framing that runs through every policy debate, every portal pitch, and every press release is, in practice, a fiction.
When a brokerage builds a private network that gives its seller a controlled-exposure advantage, that same brokerage’s next seller, who is also a buyer somewhere else, pays the cost on the other side of their next transaction. When a portal builds a preview program that funnels exclusive inventory to its partner agents in exchange for referral fees, the seller whose listing is the bait is also a buyer whose next agent is paying that same fee structure.
You cannot help “sellers” by structurally harming “buyers” when the same human being is both, six months apart, on opposite sides of two different closing tables. The asymmetry chains forward and backward through time, and most homeowners cycle through it three or four times in their adult lives. The math of who wins and who loses in the new private and preview era is not a clean transfer from buyers to sellers. It is a redistribution from consumers to the firms collecting fees at the points of fragmentation.
That redistribution is the actual business story. It deserves to be named clearly.
What we stand for
simpler.realestate is a 145-agent independent brokerage in Kentucky and Indiana. We rebranded out of a 40-year affiliation with a national franchise in February of this year. We are small enough to be honest about what serves a consumer and large enough to be a real participant in the market. From that position, three principles:
First, sellers should have real choice. That means showing them the trade-offs of every path, including private networks, preview programs, Coming Soon and the standard MLS launch. It does not mean defaulting to the path that produces the most referral revenue for a portal or the most internal commission capture for a brokerage.
Second, buyers deserve a complete inventory picture. Every buyer is someone’s future seller. A buyer who cannot see the full market becomes a seller who cannot trust the full market. Fragmentation that harms buyers today produces sellers who cannot price, negotiate or strategize well tomorrow.
Third, the market should be equitable for participants of every size. The MLS is the reason that equity is possible. Defend the framework. Compete on everything else.
What we are asking of the industry
To my fellow brokers, large and small: engage with your MLS governance. The vacuum Hanna names is real, and it gets filled by whichever interest shows up. Independent brokerages have to be in the room.
To the portals: stop describing yourselves as neutral distributors when you are buyer-lead generators collecting referral fees on the back end. Be honest about the business model. Sellers and buyers both deserve to understand who is paid by whom.
To NAR and the local MLSs: defend the cooperative framework with discipline, and let local markets adapt within it. National one-size-fits-all rules and proprietary fragmentation are both threats to the same thing.
To sellers and buyers, who are usually the same people in different years: ask which path serves you, not which one the company pitching it is set up to monetize. Follow the money. It tells you what you need to know.
The MLS is infrastructure. Let’s keep it that way.
