About three weeks ago, when Compass and Rocket-Redfin announced a soon-to-be-public partnership, I made some predictions.
One: Everyone was trying to do something similar. Second: Smart players will stick with Zillow over Redfin. Third: The winning framework is devastatingly simple. “Why hide your listing on the No. 3 portal when you can broadcast it more widely on the No. 1 portal?”
Earlier this week, Zillow announced Zillow Preview, a partnership with Keller Williams, REMAX, HomeServices of America, United Real Estate, and Side. This will allow agents to pre-market upcoming properties directly on Zillow and Trulia before they are submitted to the MLS.
And, like all previous announcements, the press release is full of language about seller choice, consumer empowerment, and broad market exposure. KW’s Gary Keller said sellers deserve “the opportunity to reach the widest range of potential buyers.” Zillow’s CEO said this will “help agents get listings to market faster.”
Apparently everyone wins.
So I’m 3-3 on forecasting, but the industry is 0-3 on transparency.
But while the announcement was predictable, its impact is far more troubling than these companies would like to admit. And I think it’s time for Zillow, Compass, KW, and Rocket to stop dressing this up in pro-consumer language. That ship has set sail.
What we’re seeing is a raw, raw fight to list inventory. Altruism has always been just a costume.
“Open Market” is for me, not you
Stop pretending you don’t understand what’s going on. “Open market” is not the rule here. It’s a positioning strategy.
For Compass, that means: It takes away syndication to Redfin, days on market, price history, and estimated home valuations (two things Compass CEO Robert Refkin called “value killers”) and calls it “seller empowerment.”
For Zillow, that means: Offer listings before they go to the MLS, earn priority and broker branding, and listing agents receive a portion of Zillow’s revenue associated with the transaction.
The difference between what Zillow Preview and Compass are doing with Redfin isn’t philosophical. It’s not structural. It’s not about consumer access or market transparency. It’s the logo on the portal and which company receives the reward.
Zillow needed a business answer to Compass-Redfin. And this is it.
Zillow banned this and then built it
In June 2025, Compass sued Zillow for antitrust violations over what some industry insiders called the “Zillow ban,” a policy that required residential listings sold to consumers to be listed on Zillow within 24 hours.
Zillow’s position was clear.
“Zillow believes everyone deserves equal access to the same real estate information at the same time,” the company said at the time. They called Compass’ pre-MLS marketing strategy “stashing listings in private vaults to the detriment of consumers and small businesses.”
Zillow, the company that sued to stop its pre-MLS marketing because it harmed consumers, has just developed its own pre-MLS marketing product.
Zillow is currently using the same strategy, just dressing it up differently.
When Compass dominated the pre-market window, it was a consumer crisis. Zillow controls it through “priority placement” and “real-time listing insights.”
It is not a seller empowerment. It’s a toll road, and that toll is being paid by buyers who don’t even know they’re in the game yet. Buyers who are not connected to the right intermediary network, the right portal partnerships, and the right pre-market ecosystem will find out about the listing when the trading period has already ended.
And if the buyer is collateral damage in all of this, there is one institution that is no longer even collateral, it’s just been completely bypassed.
MLS.
There was one job left in MLS. Now that’s gone
For a long time, MLS served everyone and that was important.
Sellers received maximum exposure, with listings flowing across all portals, all IDX feeds, and all syndication partners the moment they went in. Because the MLS was the central hub of distribution, buyers could see it all.
MLS was more than just a database. This was the gateway to the entire ecosystem, protecting everyone in the process.
Until now.
Listings from 9 of the top 15 franchise brands in the country, the #1 and #2 brokerage firms by sales, the #1 franchises by agency, transactional, and total volume all currently operate on a workflow where listings are sent to the portal before being sent to the MLS.
Errol Samuelson, Zillow’s chief industry development officer, put it bluntly: Preview listings exist “prior to joining the MLS” and are provided through the broker’s data feed or direct agent entry.
And it’s an existential question for every MLS in the country.
MLS’s last truly unassailable value proposition wasn’t technology. It wasn’t data quality. It wasn’t an innovation.
This is a required input. Agents had to register their listings. One of those requirements, the one remaining non-negotiable, was a load-bearing wall for the entire MLS value structure. The data is now complete. That’s what made MLS a source of truth. This helps maintain a level playing field for both buyers and sellers.
That wall has just developed a very serious crack.
For years, critics (including myself) have accused MLSs of failing to manage broker data, not innovating, and not solving real business problems. MLS, whatever its shortcomings, could always ignore that because it controlled the input. They were a necessary approach. You can complain all you want about MLS, but you still should have used it in the first place.
That shrug is what brought them here.
The broker stopped waiting.
They didn’t start with boycotts, lawsuits, or even manifestos. They just did something MLS hasn’t been able to do for over 20 years.
They signed deals with Zillow and Redfin and began providing listings upstream to MLS.
The tragedy is not that MLS is in disarray. Given decades of inaction, chaos was inevitable. Tragedy replaced it.
There is no better, more transparent market. It is not a system that serves buyers and sellers more equitably. It’s the industry’s most complex set of bilateral deals, with each company optimizing it for its own economic circumstances and moving consumers a little farther from the center of the transaction.
MLS has failed to innovate. But innovation isn’t what fills that void. It’s integration. And they are completely different.
And most importantly, remember that consumers aren’t asking for any of this. Ordinary people just want to buy a house.
Phrases like “seller choice” and “broad exposure” are marketing copy written for a broker’s recruiting deck, not a family sitting at the kitchen table wondering if they can afford to move.
Amit Kulkarni is the co-founder of Alloy Advisors. Connect with him on LinkedIn.
