As the battle over rules for private listings, portal access, and multiple listing services intensifies, one industry insider is urging MLSs to reconsider one of the industry’s central assumptions: that submitting a listing to an MLS should automatically send it onto the public internet.
Victor Land, founder and managing partner of consulting firm WAV Group, argues in a new white paper that MLSs should maintain mandatory cooperative filings while treating public showings through IDX, syndicates and other consumer-facing channels as separate decisions controlled by sellers and brokers.
Lund characterizes this process as a “public IPO” technique, comparing the launch of a public listing on the public internet to a company going private and going public after a period of preparation.
“The MLS becomes a pre-publication cooperative in which brokers prepare, position, and trade,” Lund wrote in the paper. “A public showing will be an intentional event made through the MLS when Seller deems the time to be appropriate and is not an automatic result of a submission to the MLS.”
The discussion comes as industry conflicts over private listings, Clear Cooperation, Zillow’s portal access and Compass’ private exclusive strategy reach a fever pitch, and as MLSs across the country, including MRED and Realtracks, move to expand upcoming and private listing options.
In a conversation with Inman, Lund said the paper was not sponsored, commissioned or produced by Compass or any other outside party. He said Compass is not currently a customer of WAV Group. Lund acknowledged that some of the language in the paper overlapped with Compass’s own messages about seller selection and “private but not private” listings, but rejected the idea that it was defending private, exclusive products for intermediaries only.
“I hate private exclusives. I’m not interested in private exclusives. What I’m actually advocating is that all listings should be moved to MLS immediately,” Rand told Inman.
“Listed IPO” model
Lund’s main distinction is between listings that are completely withheld from the MLS and listings that have been submitted to the MLS but have not yet been published through an IDX, syndicate, or portal. In his paper, he argues that listings can be published within the MLS cooperative and made available to participating agents and their buyers, without being widely distributed on the open Internet.
“Private doesn’t mean hiding,” Rand says. “They’re hiding them from IDX and from the public eye. They’re not hiding them from anyone who works with real estate agents who are on the MLS.”
In his paper, he argues that for years the industry has treated MLS as a pipeline to the public rather than as a professional market in its own right. Under the “publicly traded IPO” model, the MLS will continue to be the place where listings are filed, standardized, shared, and traded among professionals. Public marketing may occur later if the seller and broker decide that broader exposure would help the sale.
Lund said Clear Collaboration blurred the line by forcing brokers to publish their listings before they were ready for the market.
“Real estate has always worked this way. It’s just never been forced to be this way,” Rand said.
He argued that some MLSs have responded to Clear Collaboration with overly punitive enforcement regimes, such as imposing large fines if agents begin selling properties before they are fully ready for listing.
“Some MLSs have strict rules that they have adopted and policies and actions that they have actually adopted after clear cooperation,” Rand said. “They were lining their own pockets through enforcement.”
Lund cited Marin County and parts of the San Francisco Bay Area as examples of markets where sellers often complete inspections, evaluate repairs and prepare disclosures before listing. This sequence, he argued, could create a mismatch between the MLS clock and the moment a home is actually ready for widespread consumer marketing.
“In that market area, when you get a property, the first thing you do is call the home inspector,” Rand said. “Then they inspect the home, and then you talk to the seller and decide whether to fix it or make concessions to the seller and disclose. And then you put the listing on the market.”
But Lund also said the same rules may not make sense everywhere. He said he believes the private listing discussion is largely irrelevant in some markets because brokers rarely take advantage of such status.
“If you live in South Carolina, why would you worry about that?” Lund said. “But they have to worry about having their broker provide the listing to the MLS.”
This tension indicates whether MLSs should rewrite their rules around practices that are important in some luxury and high-priced markets but less common in others.
MLS at a crossroads
The white paper not only defends the upcoming listing, but also serves as a warning to MLSs.
Lund argues that MLSs risk losing their central role if they continue to treat public distribution as a default consequence of MLS submissions. In the paper’s conclusion, he wrote that the first MLSs to move will be the ones broker participants partner with, while those waiting are at risk of being “acquired, combined, or replaced.”
In other words, “MLS is more than just a vehicle for pushing listings to public websites,” Rand told Inman.
His view is that MLSs should define themselves around mandatory filings, cooperation, data quality, and compliance, rather than around marketing decisions, which he believes belong to brokers and sellers.
“MLS has nothing to do with marketing,” Land said. “IDX is a communication of permission that allows another broker to publish your listing.”
This view could have a significant impact on the balance of power between MLSs, brokerages, and portals. As MLSs become primarily collaborative application and compliance layers, large brokerages may have more room to build their own listing infrastructure, direct feeds, or broker-managed distribution systems.
The industry is already moving in that direction. Zillow is pushing for direct feed relationships with brokerages amid disputes over MLS access and display rules, while HomeServices of America and others are partnering with Cotality to work on BLX, a brokerage-managed listing exchange.
Lund said corporate brokerages are increasingly being forced to create contingency plans because inconsistent MLS policies can disrupt operations across markets.
“Corporate-level brokerages need to have contingency plans in place because they cannot afford to be exposed to the erratic winds of a board of directors making outlandish policies that affect their ability to service the market,” Rand said.
However, he also said that these systems do not necessarily mean abandoning MLS. Rather, he argued, brokerages may need more control over their listing data before pushing it into MLS systems and public channels.
“If I’m a broker trying to manage compliance, I want to curate that listing in my system, run the compliance in my system, and push it to the MLS,” Lund said.
Portal contention and broker control
The paper also focuses on referral models through portals, arguing that a “publicly traded IPO” framework helps avoid conflicts of interest built into referral rewards and downstream data monetization.
Lund said Zillow is running an effective communications campaign around the private listing battle, but argued that the company’s business model depends on the listing being made available to the public quickly.
“Because Zillow is a broker, we have access to all the listings on our private listing network today,” Rand said. “They just can’t show it on their website and they’re upset about it.”
He added that Zillow agents and broker participants will still have access to listings in the MLS, even if the listings are not published on Zillow.com.
“There is nothing preventing real estate agents on Zillow from logging into the MLS, capturing data through broker back-office feeds, and working with MLS buyers and sellers who may be interested in upcoming listings,” Rand said. “Oh, but we don’t actually have real estate agents.”
For critics, however, this distinction may not resolve broader concerns that limiting public display reduces transparency for consumers and may benefit large brokerages with deeper agent networks, stronger internal platforms, and greater control over listed distribution.
Lund’s answer is that the MLS should remain the required place where property information is submitted and shared with the brokerage community. However, the broker, not the MLS, must control how the listing is marketed.
“That’s a broker’s job,” Rand says. “MLS should provide those services. For example, you have the data. If I want to go to Timbuktu, send it there. That’s why we have listing syndicates, and that’s why we have IDX.”
In that sense, Lund’s paper offers a pro-MLS argument with a narrower definition of what an MLS should be, arguing that the MLS needs to separate its collaborative functions from the public display systems that define the home-search experience for consumers.
“Brokers can do whatever they want with the listing,” Rand said. “But if you’re going to syndicate data, you’d better read the terms of service.”
Email AJ LaTrace
