A national MLS could change our industry — and not in a good way

After more than 40 years in this industry — coaching agents, sitting in living rooms, watching markets shift and policies come and go — I have learned that the most important questions are rarely the loudest ones. They are the ones nobody is quite comfortable asking out loud.

I want to raise one of those questions today. I raise it with genuine respect for those who see it differently and with full awareness that reasonable people can disagree. But I also raise it because the agents I have spent my career serving deserve someone willing to say the quiet part clearly — before the window to say it closes.

There is a conversation gaining momentum in our industry about whether MLSs should have to compete for agents — whether a national MLS or a network of expanding regional ones could force local systems to serve agents better. I understand the appeal. Competition has produced better outcomes in many industries, and there are legitimate frustrations with how some MLSs operate.

But the more I sit with this idea, the more a quiet concern grows in me. And I feel an obligation to share it, even if I am in the minority.

My concern is not about competition as a principle. My concern is about what MLS competition specifically would produce — and who would benefit most from it.

The MLS is not like other businesses

When we talk about competition producing better outcomes, we are usually talking about service businesses — where two companies offer similar products and the better one wins. That model works because the two competing products are essentially interchangeable. You can switch from one to the other and still get what you came for.

The MLS is different in a fundamental way. Its value does not come from the quality of its service. It comes from its comprehensiveness.

The MLS is worth something precisely because every listing is in it. Every agent submits there. Every cooperating broker can see everything. The moment you have two MLSs in the same market, neither one is complete. And an incomplete MLS is not a better MLS. It is a diminished one.

I think about it this way. Imagine if a city decided its roads should compete with each other. One road is free, maintained by the city, goes everywhere. A second road is private, better paved and takes you to the most desirable neighborhoods faster. The private road might be nicer. But the moment people start choosing roads, the city road loses funding, loses maintenance and eventually loses the destinations that made it valuable. The people who cannot afford the private road are left with what remains.

That may sound like a stretch. But I think it is worth sitting with before we decide competition is the answer.

Who benefits when MLSs compete?

Here is the question I keep coming back to: If MLSs had to compete for agents, which MLSs would win?

The answer, I think, is the ones with the most agents already committed to them. In a competition for market share, the organization that arrives with the largest agent network has the most leverage over what the winning MLS looks like. Its preferences shape the rules. Its priorities shape the policies. Its tolerance — or intolerance — for certain restrictions determines what restrictions survive.

I am not suggesting that would be intentional. I am suggesting it would be structural. Large organizations shape the institutions they dominate because their scale makes it inevitable. Right now, the largest residential real estate organization in the country has 340,000 agents following the acquisition of Anywhere Real Estate earlier this year. That is not a criticism of any company. It is simply a fact about the math of what MLS competition would look like on the ground.

Competition between equals tends to produce better outcomes for consumers. Competition between non-equals tends to produce outcomes for whoever is largest. The question worth asking is which one we are actually describing?

The guardrails we take for granted

Local MLSs are governed by local broker committees, local associations and people who know their specific markets. That governance is distributed across hundreds of organizations.

No single brokerage — no matter how large — can dominate all of them simultaneously. A brokerage with 2,000 agents in Phoenix has real influence at the local level there. It does not have the same influence over how MLSs operate in Boston or Atlanta or Seattle.

That distribution of governance is not glamorous. It is not efficient. It produces inconsistency and, sometimes, rules that do not serve their markets well. I understand the frustration with that.

But I also think that distributed governance is one of the most important structural protections agents and consumers have right now — and most people in our industry do not realize it because they have never seen it threatened at this scale before.

If MLS competition consolidates governance toward the largest players, those guardrails erode quietly — market by market, rule by rule — until the cooperative system every independent agent built their business on is simply gone. Not taken. Competed away.

What I would ask instead

The frustrations driving this conversation are real. There are MLSs that have been slow to serve their members, rules that feel arbitrary and policies that did not produce what they promised. Those deserve to be addressed.

But I think the answer to a flawed institution is reform, not replacement. And I think NAR has both the authority and the responsibility to lead that reform — by strengthening the national standards that all MLSs must meet, by requiring meaningful seller disclosure before any listing goes private and by building governance structures that prevent any single organization’s size from translating into disproportionate policy influence.

Those are harder conversations than “let MLSs compete.” They require NAR to make decisions that will frustrate powerful people. But they preserve the thing that made this industry worth building — a cooperative marketplace where an agent with ten listings and an agent with ten thousand listings can both serve their clients on equal footing.

Maybe I am wrong about all of this. Maybe MLS competition would produce exactly the consumer-friendly, agent-serving marketplace its proponents describe. I hope someone smarter than me will make that case, and I will read it carefully.

But in the meantime, I feel a responsibility to name what I see — because the agents I have spent my career serving deserve someone willing to ask the uncomfortable question before the answer becomes permanent.

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