I was traveling late last week, so did not have the time to really react to the big news that hit on Friday. Let's go with Inman News, which has a couple of juicy details:
MRED, the Chicagoland MLS with over 48,000 subscribers, said that it had reached a partnership with Compass International Holdings, which committed to providing its nationwide inventory of listings to MRED’s Private Listing Network (PLN) participants. That inventory includes Compass Private Exclusives and coming-soon listings.
The megabrokerage also said that it would subsidize part of the cost of joining MRED for the first 100,000 Compass agents who join MRED as full members, and provide a data feed of all of its listings to MRED.
“Giving homeowners choice in marketing their listings is the right thing to do,” Compass International Holdings CEO Robert Reffkin said in a statement. “We also want to support MLSs, like MRED, that value, support, and protect their customers, who are real estate agents, from retaliation by other MLSs and portals, and ensure that agents can fulfill their fiduciary duties to their home seller and home buyer clients.” [Emphasis added]
I'll get into why those are highlighted below in the analysis section.
While this deal in and of itself is a massive event, fact is that this deal will not be the last of its kind, but the first. Compass had been fighting for years not against Zillow, but against Team Zillow which includes other major brands, major MLSs (like NWMLS), and others. It seems that Compass is forming at team of its own, first with Redfin, and now with MRED and many more to be added. As I predicted, the battle between MRED and Zillow now must be fought. That battle will spread.
Much like a certain real war-not-a-war still ongoing, this can metastasize and spread or it can perhaps be contained... oh but who am I kidding? This won't be contained, not by the industry as it exists today. The way out would be for the MLS to embrace the Cooperative MLS concept I have outlined. I suspect that the industry will not embrace that until after the war and we all can see who won and who lost.
So fine, let's get ready for the bigger war to come, shall we? It'll be more comforting if we do it together.
