The real estate industry is consolidating around national MLS platforms like MRED and Realtracs. On the surface, it’s a straightforward story; bigger platforms offer better technology, lower costs and easier operations for brokers who work across multiple states.
But when you talk to the brokers actually managing this transition, a different picture emerges. The shift toward national MLSs isn’t just about efficiency. It’s forcing a fundamental reckoning about what brokers actually need from an MLS—and what happens when they decide they can build it themselves. It’s even raising a more basic question: whether a truly “national” MLS exists at all.
The operational problem that started it all
Hoby Hanna, president of Howard Hanna Real Estate, one of the largest independent brokerages in the country, described the problem in stark terms.
“We belong to about 85 MLSs, and we’re in 15 states. Some states, we have 10 MLSs,” he says. “Our data has to go to them to get back to us. Every MLS has different rules. Every MLS, the feeds to just connect your data—one MLS may have certain rules of display versus another.”
The result is a nightmare of operational complexity. Brokerages have to maintain separate integrations for each MLS, pay separate dues and comply with different syndication rules depending on which system they’re using.
“You have to pay for those multiple MLS dues. You have to support that. You have to have a technology department support it. It just doesn’t make sense,” Hanna says.
This is where national MLSs become attractive to brokers; they promise to collapse that complexity: one system, one set of rules, one integration point.
Lila McCann, managing broker at MW Real Estate in Tennessee, described how consolidation has made sense for her brokerage’s growth. MW Real Estate has been with Realtracs since the beginning, and as the platform evolved from a closed system to a more open one, it offered precisely what her firm needed.
“The decision was ultimately rooted in growth, accessibility and staying aligned with the direction the industry was already moving,” McCann said. “We viewed it as an opportunity to continue offering agents strong market visibility, reliable data access and modern tools, while adapting to a changing real estate landscape.”
The consolidation, at least from an operational standpoint, is happening. Hanna expects it to accelerate.
“There’s consolidation happening in the brokerage business. There should be consolidation in the MLS space,” Hanna says.
He predicted that technology improvements could eventually make MLSs unnecessary altogether. “Or it could get to a point, with technology improving and AI, that brokers just decide we don’t need the MLS; we can share our data with each other.”
The NAR settlement and MLS rules
The shift in how some brokers view MLSs started with the NAR antitrust settlement and the removal of compensation offers from MLSs, according to Hanna.
“When the compensation was taken away, all of a sudden brokerage firms, who are especially strong listing firms, may look at that and say, wait a minute, that was one of the values of an MLS,” Hanna says.
That shift forced brokers to look more critically at what they saw as MLSs increasingly tried to control how their listings were displayed and distributed.
“It was an infrastructure; it was never a utility,” Hanna says. “But over the years, the MLS went from that basic B2B premise to then moving into, well, we’re going to decide rules on how things can be displayed, where they can be shared, how many different websites somebody’s listing can go to.”
He characterized this shift as MLSs becoming more of a regulatory authority than a cooperative service.
According to Hanna, this dynamic pushed brokers to take more control themselves. Howard Hanna launched HannaList—a proprietary data layer that Howard Hanna owns and controls, with MLSs receiving data from them under contract rather than the other way around.
“We’re now not relying on the MLS to distribute our data, we’re distributing it to them. They have a contract with us to receive our data. We’re the originator of the data,” Hanna says.
He explained that this approach gives brokers discretion over syndication. “A broker can decide; ‘I don’t want to list this house on every website,’ or ‘I don’t want it on Zillow.’”
The fragmentation issue
As brokers have gained more control over their data through national platforms and proprietary systems, listing fragmentation has emerged as a concern.
McCann flagged this directly. As larger brokerages gain the ability to keep listings private or control their syndication, smaller sellers and buyers lose visibility.
“One of the larger challenges has been the increasing presence of ‘private exclusive’ listings promoted by some larger brokerage companies prior to properties entering the MLS,” McCann said. “From my perspective, that can limit a seller’s overall market exposure and reduce access to the full buyer pool.”
She’s not opposed to consolidation or innovation, but she expressed concern about where it’s heading.
“The MLS has traditionally served as a centralized marketplace designed to create broad visibility and equal access,” McCann said, “as we are currently seeing in the news among major MLS and listing platforms. My hope is that exposure stays wide-stretching for all sellers.”
The Zillow conflict: A window into broker priorities
Last month, MRED—the Chicago-based national MLS—cut off Zillow’s feed, saying Zillow had violated IDX rules. Zillow sued, alleging the real issue was that the MLS was pressuring it to fall in line with rules favored by an industry competitor—Compass, whose private listing-focused marketing has divided the industry.
When asked about the lawsuit, Hanna offered a more critical assessment of Zillow’s role in the market.
“They’re not a real estate brokerage firm; they don’t practice real estate, and they don’t list houses—they advertise,” he says, referring to Zillow. He outlined his core argument: Brokers and agents do the work of curating listings and marketing them, while Zillow monetizes that work without compensation.
“Eighty percent of the work is done with an agent at the kitchen table who convinces the seller that ‘I’ve got the best marketing plan and strategy,’ and that marketing plan sometimes doesn’t include Zillow,” Hanna says. “They don’t really curate or develop a product. They take a feed off of the curated business that myself and other real estate companies garner.”
From Hanna’s perspective, Zillow should compensate brokers for that data. “Maybe they should be paying the brokers for that inventory, no different than a media station; a TV station pays somebody for the production of a TV show,” he says.
McCann’s perspective on the issue was more cautious. She acknowledged the IDX compliance issue but also saw the broader impact.
“Realtracs has stated that Zillow is not currently complying with certain IDX rules established by the MLS,” she said. “While there may be alternative ways for listings to gain visibility outside of Zillow, the reality is that many consumers rely heavily on major search platforms during their home-search process. If an agreement cannot be reached, buyers could potentially miss a significant number of listings, and sellers could lose exposure to a large segment of the marketplace.”
For McCann, the issue isn’t whether brokers have the right to control their data; it’s whether widespread use of that control creates unintended consequences for the market.
“I believe there will continue to be a strong need for thoughtful regulation and enforcement that helps maintain fairness, transparency and equal opportunity within the marketplace,” she said. “Growth and innovation are important, but so is protecting the integrity of how homes are marketed and how consumers are served.”
Anthony Lamacchia, broker/owner and CEO of Lamacchia Realty, which operates across seven states, took a sharper view—and aimed it squarely at Compass. He recently said publicly that he would sue both an MLS and Compass if a competitor influenced an MLS to cut off the Zillow feed, though he was careful to frame that as a response to a hypothetical.
“I am not looking to get into a lawsuit with Compass or (Compass Founder and CEO) Robert (Reffkin), and I want to be clear about that—but I was asked a ‘what if,’” Lamacchia says. “I’m not going to let a competitor get involved with the MLS and get them to somehow negatively affect our business and negatively affect our sellers. That’s key. I’m not going to allow that, and if that happened, I would say it’s interference with our business, and I’m sure we’d come up with other counts, and we would sue.”
Lamacchia says he had no doubt about what drove the MRED shutoff. “There’s no question they made the deal with MRED in late April. Three weeks later, the feed gets shut off,” he says. “On the MRED story, I do know—Compass was pulling the strings. I’m sure of that.”
He drew a contrast with the Realtracs situation.
“In the Realtracs situation, I’m not sure. I doubt it. Maybe they had their own dispute with Zillow, and if that happens in the normal course of business, fine,” he says. “But if Compass was dictating to our MLS, I would have a real problem with that.”
For Lamacchia, the broader danger of brokers or platforms restricting portal access comes back to the seller.
“I think Compass is just Robert striving to gain more control, which I don’t necessarily blame him for, but I think he’s overdoing it a bit on these topics,” he says. “We all want more control, we all want more market share. But you also don’t want to hurt the clients while you’re at it—and some of his overdoing it, in my opinion, is hurting the clients.”
He tied that directly to listing exposure.
“If a seller doesn’t have access to everybody, and a buyer doesn’t have access to all the properties, it’s hurting the client,” he says. “If you’re a seller and you can’t get your property maximum exposure because a Zillow feed got shut off over a pissing contest between Compass and Zillow—that’s ridiculous.”
Some MLSs have a counteroffer
While brokers and platforms fight over data control, at least a couple MLSs are trying to turn the turmoil into an opportunity to address broker needs, without upending the current structure.
On June 3, the St. Louis-based Mid America Regional Information System, or MARIS, announced it would waive application fees for new subscribers through June 30 and waive subscription fees through Nov. 30—an offer open to any agent in the country. Similarly, Canopy MLS in the Carolinas expanded its platform, while explicitly saying that it did not aspire to be a national MLS.
Executives at Bright MLS, the nation’s largest which also recently offered memberships nationwide, told RISMedia recently they did not see the MLS as a “national platform” and offered a nuanced perspective on the path to consolidation, while arguing they have the ability to operate at a national scale.
Cameron Paine, MARIS’s president and CEO, tells RISMedia that the offer grew out of broker demand rather than any single event. He described it as a response to brokers who wanted to join without taking on a duplicate expense.
Asked whether the MRED episode prompted the move, Paine is careful not to tie it too closely.
“I would say it has more to do with what our brokers are asking for,” he says. “That situation may be driving it, but that’s not what’s driving our decision. We’re just trying to be responsive to what our brokers are asking for.”
As an MLS executive watching the Compass-Zillow-MRED fight unfold, Paine says his own reaction was surprise—and a degree of respect. “I admire that MRED and Zillow both have taken firm stances, which happen to be opposite from each other,” he says. “It means they feel strongly about something.”
But he described the MLS’s own role as comparatively simple.
“The MARIS position is that the role of the MLS is to provide the marketplace to our brokers for timely, accurate, comprehensive and transparent data,” he says. “Providing a stable marketplace for our brokers, in our opinion, seems to be the No. 1 priority. For brokers who feel like they don’t have a home for their listings that is stable, MARIS is trying to offer them that option.”
“There’s no such thing as a national MLS”
If the consolidation story has a skeptic, it’s Paine—who challenges the very notion of the term “national MLS.”
“The desire to be able to provide brokers with a national dataset makes total sense. I have zero problem with that,” he says. “That is my goal, as much as it is MRED’s or Realtracs’ or anyone else’s.”
But, he argued, no MLS is actually equipped to be national.
“To the best of my knowledge, MRED, Realtracs—MARIS too—are not set up currently to accept data from all over the country,” Paine says. “To do that, I’d have to be paying for public records data on a national scale. I’d have to have every town, city, ZIP and school zone for the entire nation, which MARIS does not have, and my speculation is that very few MLSs, if any, do.”
The result, he says, is a gap between marketing and reality. “It sounds great to say ‘we’re a national MLS’ or ‘we’ll take listings from anywhere,’ but the reality is very different in terms of what they can actually accept,” he says. “It feels more like a marketing play to me than reality.”
He went further, taking aim at the term itself. “I just want to push back on the whole name of the national MLS. There is no such thing,” Paine says. “To be a national MLS, you have to have all the data, and no MLS has all the data.”
An MLS claiming the label, he argued, would more accurately call itself a marketing platform, and “isn’t doing anything different than what they were doing yesterday, because they don’t have the data.”
By his own logic, MARIS’s nationwide offer carries the same caveat.
The promotion technically reaches any agent in the country, Paine acknowledged, “but we’re not fooling ourselves into believing there’d be a strong reason for a Realtor in Maine or Seattle to put their listings in the MARIS MLS.” It is not, he says, a contiguous marketplace.
An alternative approach: shared infrastructure
Not everyone believes the answer is brokers building their own systems or national MLSs controlling data access.
Dan Troup, CEO of the Broker Public Portal (BPP)—a technology company owned by industry members, including brokers and MLSs—described a different model: consolidation paired with shared governance.
“I think the industry is moving toward more structured openness, not a free-for-all,” Troup says. “There is strong demand for data to move more easily across markets, products and consumer experiences…But that does not mean less management. In fact, I think the future is more open and more permissioned.”
Troup’s argument is that shared infrastructure—owned collectively rather than by a single company—can enable consolidation without concentration of power. The diversity of ownership matters, he says.
“Realtracs and MRED are examples of the broader and intentionally diverse ownership structure behind (Broker Public Portal). BPP is not a privately controlled portal or a vendor trying to sit above the industry. It is an LLC owned by a wide group of brokerages and MLSs, and that diversity is part of the design: no single company or platform can simply acquire BPP and redirect it away from its original purpose,” he says.
For Troup, the challenge isn’t consolidation itself—it’s consolidation without accountability. He sees the future as more data interoperability but with clear rules about attribution, security and broker supervision.
“The old model was that every company had to replicate data market by market and rebuild the same infrastructure over and over again. That slows innovation,” he says. “The future is shared infrastructure that lets MLSs and brokers bring products to market faster while providing brokers with options over how their data is used.”
This perspective sits between Hanna’s vision of broker-controlled data and McCann’s concerns about fragmentation. But it assumes MLSs and platforms will remain neutral—an assumption that recent events, particularly the Zillow conflict, have challenged.
Where the industry is headed
Neither Hanna nor McCann expect one national MLS to emerge; instead, both anticipate continued consolidation around a handful of major platforms.
For Hanna, that’s the natural evolution.
“I think there should be local MLSs, maybe there should be one per state or something regionally,” he says. “But the MLS executives have to think of it as an infrastructure, as a support between one broker to another—not trying to monetize our data, not trying to play the game in for a portal, or trying to have rules and regulations.”
McCann sees the consolidation as inevitable, but emphasized the need for continued focus on transparency as it consolidates.
“From a technology and operational standpoint, it makes sense that the MLS landscape may continue moving toward broader, more connected national systems that allow for greater efficiency, data sharing and consistency across markets,” she says. “That said, I also believe there are important conversations happening around transparency and fair market exposure.”
Lamacchia, too, sees consolidation as inevitable—and not limited to the MLSs.
“There’ll be more consolidation—with MLSs, Realtor associations, brokerages. It’s going to continue,” he says. “There’s not enough sales. That’s squeezing everybody’s margins, so people have to consolidate.”
For now, though, he doesn’t see a reason to move his own firm onto a national platform.
“At this time, I wouldn’t see the reason to—but who knows. I know the business is evolving, and I always keep an open mind,” he says, allowing that across seven states a single system “would make it easier.”
Still, he was skeptical it would change much for consumers. “Nationally, people get to see the properties anyway.”
The tension between operational efficiency and market transparency—between brokers’ desire to control their data and consumers’ need for access—will likely define how the MLS landscape evolves over the coming years.
As Hanna put it: “It’s time for the industry to listen to the brokerage firms—not the boards or the associations or the MLS or an advertiser—but actually listen to the people that create the ecosystem that we all benefit from.”
But McCann’s concerns about transparency and market access—and Paine’s challenge as to whether a “national” MLS could even exist—show there isn’t consensus among brokers about what consolidation should look like.
