03/30/2026
An IMPORTANT PSA from the real estate community to all consumers and homeowners:
A cooperative marketplace like the MLS works only when participants contribute to it in the same ways they benefit from it.
A false narrative is spreading in real estate: sellers benefit when their listings are not broadly exposed, that listing brokerages have a fiduciary duty to withhold facts from other brokers and their buyers, and that MLSs work against real estate professionals. This narrative is driven by a few large firms that want to market listings internally and selectively, before making them broadly available through the MLS. Their position would allow some firms to benefit from the marketplace that MLSs and other brokerages create without the same reciprocal contribution to that shared system The result is reduced competition, a fragmented marketplace, and a lack of transparency, which harms consumers and makes it harder for real estate professionals to serve their clients.
The MLS keeps the housing market open, transparent, and competitive. It serves both sides of the transaction. Buyers get a complete and reliable view of available homes. Sellers benefit from a market in which brokers compete in the open. Brokerages of all shapes and sizes, and their clients, get a fair opportunity to compete in a shared cooperative system with access to the same market information.
Complete, timely, and accurate listing information matters. Buyers and sellers rely on price history, days on market, and status changes to make informed decisions in one of the most important financial transactions of their lives. When a brokerage calls those facts “negative insights,” it denies brokers and consumers access to market facts. If those facts were not important to consumers, we would not have this debate. Indeed, the Department of Justice specifically referenced days on market and price changes as important information MLSs must make readily available to brokerages and their customers.1
The information the brokerages want hidden would not disappear. It would remain available to the largest firms. A brokerage that places a listing into “coming soon” status while asking the MLS not to track days on market or price changes still has that information. So do other large firms with the technology to track it. The result is that key information would remain available to a few large brokerages and the buyers they represent, but not to newer and smaller competitors and their clients. The MLS system, where all participants have ready access to complete market information, enables new and innovative market entrants increasing competition and giving consumers more choices.
Siloing and hiding information weaken competition between brokerages and moves the market away from an open, shared system toward a more fragmented one. If this direction persists, brokers and consumers will be required to constantly search countless venues to find available homes, and they will never be confident that they have complete view of the marketplace.
CMLS rejects that narrative. At the same time, CMLS does not dictate what any MLS’s local rules on submission, days on market, or price history should be. Those decisions should reflect local market conditions. But they should also reflect a basic principle: markets work best when information is broadly shared, rules are applied fairly, and brokers compete on service rather than control over access to information.
