Cotality this week announced the Broker Listing Exchange (BLX). HomeServices of America and Keller Williams signed on as the first customers. This product gives brokers control over listing entry and distribution before the data reaches the MLS.
This is the largest piece of industry infrastructure shipped in the last decade.
About 18 months ago, an executive at the nation’s largest MLS told me in a private conversation that what Kotality had just shipped was “absolutely impossible.” This person saw it. Tried version of it. I concluded that this is not possible.
This quote stuck with me because that assessment was completely wrong. Just as MLS leadership has been wrong about everything that matters for the past 15 years, it’s been wrong in a tired and predictable way.
Remember upstream?
Even if we have the same idea or different ages. Sponsored by the National Association of Realtors. Participation in major securities companies. real money. Years of runway. It was shelved and everyone in the industry agreed that governance ruined it. There are too many people involved. There are too many competing interests.
That story is half true. The other half is that the people running it can’t ship the product and the governance conversation has strayed from that fundamental issue.
BLX is the 2026 version of the tie.
Others are better at MLS than MLS
communality. Compass and Redfin. Zillow Brokerage Partner. Independent vendor. Even if you’re a startup with 8 engineers and a Series A.
The only reason this didn’t come to light sooner is that MLS politics continued to crowd out everyone else, including exclusive vendor agreements, competing insider broker boards, and the entire NAR adjacency structure.
Those days are over. Walls came down, people who were banned came in and quickly shipped what MLS couldn’t.
BLX offers what brokers have been begging for in their MLS since I started in this business. That means providing us with all your data so we can understand how to monetize it. This is the most basic request to a vendor that holds data from a customer.
MLS couldn’t do that. It doesn’t.
Cotality did just that, with two of the country’s largest brokerage organizations signing up on day one. It’s clear that the value prop is what they wanted all along, so there was nothing to negotiate.
More seriously, brokers stopped asking questions.
Compass, Redfin, Zillow, and now Cotality — different strategies, same conclusion. They will get away with it because they simply don’t trust the MLS industry to ship what brokers actually need.
So, if the diagnosis is true, what is the path forward?
To realize the strategic path, two fundamental issues must be addressed
1. Leadership
The boards that select MLS leaders are most often optimized for industry political fit rather than operational ability. The CEOs they hire reflect that. The senior team that the CEO builds reflects that. The cultures of these organizations are time-consuming, consensus-driven, allergic to risk, and respectful of NAR, but they reflect that.
With strategic planning, nothing can go wrong. It revolves around people.
If you’re an MLS executive reading this, perhaps the most important decision you’ll make next year will be hiring your next CEO.
Please take the plunge and adopt it.
We’re looking for operators who have shipped consumer products at scale, run B2B data businesses, or built and sold companies that customers actually want. Please pay it. Soak up the chaos that true leadership brings.
The alternative is to adopt another version of what you already have and watch your business erode as planned.
2. Ownership
MLS needs to break away from Realtor Association ownership and politics. Most MLSs are owned by or tied to an association, and that ownership structure is why leadership is the way it is, with a board of directors elected for political fit, a culture built around association priorities, and all decisions determined by stakeholder consensus. Even the best CEOs hired into that structure still succumb to it.
The ownership question and the leadership question are the same question wearing two hats.
Once you have both answers, your strategic options really become a reality. The two are available at any scale and represent managed adaptation. Third, what keeps the MLS industry a viable industry?
Option 1: Become a regulator and stop pretending you’re not. Remove from the MLS functions that only the MLS can legally perform. Compliance reporting. Fair Housing Audit. Cooperative compensation history recording system. Enforcement of RESO standards. Reduce membership fees by 60-70% to reflect the actual value delivered. In any case, this is pretty much the direction the industry is headed. The choice is whether MLS walks there intentionally or gets dragged there for a decade or more.
Path 2: Build the data and AI infrastructure layer. REdistribute is the initial version of the data license. AI agents processing housing data need verified provenance, signed records, and integrity guarantees. Someone is going to build both. The next 18 to 24 months will ensure that MLS owns this surface area. After that, it will be owned by someone else.
The path to sustaining the MLS industry as an industry: Aggressive integration
This is the correct answer, and it requires all that and more. New leadership, new ownership, and a willingness to relinquish local control on a national scale. The first two passes keep individual MLSs alive in a reduced form. Consolidation keeps categories relevant.
Over 500 MLS structures were built for countries that no longer exist. Most of these MLSs are too small to fund real engineering, too small to attract serious operational talent, and too small to compete with nationally built vendors and intermediaries.
Consolidating into a small number of national and super-regional MLSs creates an organization with the budget, engineering capacity, and political weight to do the other two things. That means operating as an efficient regulated entity and insisting on a layer of data and AI validation before anyone else does (which “someone else” is already doing).
With current leadership and current ownership, nothing like this will happen
A voluntary merger would require MLS executives to vote to eliminate themselves and their organization in favor of a larger organization that would likely no longer operate. The people currently sitting in those seats, with rare exceptions, will not do that. They will find a reason. They spent 15 years finding the reason. The result will be the same.
That’s why leadership and ownership are paramount. Once these are fixed, integration will be possible. Skip these and you’ll be a footnote in the MLS industry as we know it.
The MLS industry is not doomed, but it is in a period of decision. And the decision is who will run it.
There is a version of the next decade where MLS will still be important. That means it will be run by an operator that can grow MLS, reduce its numbers, and build at the scale necessary to compete with the players that have outperformed MLS over the past decade. The longer the industry takes to choose, the smaller the versions that survive.
The next “impossible” is what someone who isn’t waiting for MLS to join is investigating right now.
The only real question is whether the people running this industry are going to be a part of what comes next, or whether they’re going to spend the next decade explaining why what’s being made now doesn’t really matter.
