Four state legislatures have now written into law what the Sitzer-Burnett settlement forbids MLS participants to do: show a home to a buyer who has not signed a written agreement. Alabama, Mississippi, Wyoming and Oklahoma did not wait for the courts or for NAR. They legislated. A fifth, West Virginia, pushed a bill through its House before it stalled in the Senate.
It's happening in your market today. An agent copies a listing, a handful of comps and a client's notes into a consumer chatbot to draft a pricing summary or a listing pitch. No license covers that use, no audit trail records it, and nobody at the MLS knows it happened. Consumers are doing the same thing. Cotality's newly released second edition of Empowering the Real Estate Industry with AI Solutions opens with a homebuyer who uploaded an inspection report into a free AI chatbot. The chatbot produced an alarming list of defects, several of which weren't in the report at all. The buyer's agent then spent two hours separating real findings from machine-made fiction.
Who gets paid when banks, insurers, and government-sponsored enterprises use listing data? That is the question every MLS leader should be asking right now, and REdistribute just gave a clearer answer.
Worried about your Association's value proposition? Many REALTORS® don't understand everything their Association does for them and frankly, many don’t care. There IS one benefit every real estate professional can appreciate: Knowing their Association is actively working to keep them safe. Imagine if every REALTOR® knew their Association was helping them avoid dangerous situations, providing tools to protect them when something goes wrong, and teaching practical ways to keep their clients and families safe, too. That's an Association value proposition that's personal, tangible, and hard to ignore.
For 50 years, the cooperative kept listing data inside a black box. The internet opened the door. AI walked through it. Here is the roadmap back to control.
Today, many REALTOR® associations and MLSs are getting serious about merging. They've had some productive conversations, recognize the potential benefits of coming together, and believe they could build a stronger organization by joining forces.
Congratulations to Kendra Murray on her appointment as the new Chief Executive Officer of the Greater Albuquerque Association of REALTORS® (GAAR) and Southwest Multiple Listing Service (SWMLS)! I have had the pleasure of working with Kendra in several of her previous leadership positions, and I could not be happier to see her take on this exciting new opportunity.
Nobody disputes that the raw facts of a transaction are not copyrightable. A house exists at an address. It sold for a price on a date. Those are facts, and facts belong to everyone. But an MLS listing is not a pile of facts. It is a curated work. An agent writes a property description that frames the home, chooses which features to emphasize, and crafts language designed to attract buyers. A photographer composes shots, selects angles, edits for light. The MLS compiles all of this into an organized database with fields, taxonomies, and search structures that took decades to build. That is editorial labor, the same kind of labor the court protected in Westlaw's headnotes.
I love seeing two of my favorite MLSs find new ways to work together across state lines! Les Sulgrove, who leads NoCoast MLS in Iowa, is one of the most passionate and committed MLS leaders in our industry. He is always looking for ways to deliver more value to the brokers and agents he serves.
There was one major takeaway. Sticking to historical thinking, avoiding conversations with competitive MLSs while your brokers are asking for you to simplify their businesses is not appropriate anymore.
Association Dues and MLS subscriptions will never fund the MLS you need to operate. MLSs and boards that keep treating non-dues revenue as a side hustle are leaving money on the table. The associations and MLSs winning this decade aren't the ones chasing the next shiny vendor deal. They're the ones building disciplined, recurring non-dues revenue programs that make membership more valuable without stepping on the one thing that keeps brokers writing checks to the MLS: their own product differentiation.
For years, some have argued that allowing a private status within an MLS creates an environment where listing agents can hold properties close and capture both sides of the transaction. If that were happening systematically in MRED’s marketplace, we would expect to see higher double-ending rates in PLN Status.
