Back
Back
Perspective
Perspective
By
Matt Fowler
Right Goal, Wrong Vehicle
Right Goal, Wrong Vehicle
Open Real Estate and the Case for State MLS Federations
Open Real Estate and the Case for State MLS Federations
On Monday, four of the largest companies in residential real estate (AGNT, HomeServices of America, Keller Williams and Real REMAX Group) announced Open Real Estate, a national, broker-owned initiative for sharing listing data. Agents would enter a listing once. The platform would send it to MLSs, portals and other authorized recipients. It's free for any brokerage that wants to join, and it's aimed at a Q1 2027 launch.
I know many of the people behind it, and I respect them. Their worry is the right one. Private listing networks are pulling inventory out of the shared market, and the consumer loses when that happens. The founders want broad access, less double entry, and a fair share of the value their listings create. Every one of those goals is reasonable.
Where I part ways is the vehicle. We don't need a new national enterprise to get there. Most of what Open Real Estate wants to build already exists, inside the roughly 500 local MLSs that brokers already own, govern and fund. What's missing isn't control. It's the right vehicle to deliver it.
The controls already exist
The local MLS is the closest thing residential real estate has to a regulated exchange. I made that case at length in The MLS as Market Infrastructure, an article I wrote while at Doorify. HousingWire’s Craig Rowe interviewed me and others and wrote about it too in this article.
The short version: the MLS already does the things a trusted listing system has to do.
It gets listings in on time. Clear Cooperation requires submission within one business day of public marketing.
It keeps the record. Days on market, price changes and status history are preserved for appraisers, lenders and researchers.
It gives equal access. Every licensed professional sees the same inventory, whatever their brokerage.
It enforces. Since the 2024 commission settlement, MLSs have been the layer that polices a market-wide rule. They review listings, fine violators and fix the data every day.
Notably, Open Real Estate's own first rule mirrors Clear Cooperation. Members must submit a listing within one business day of signing the listing agreement. That's the MLS's core idea, rebuilt.
Building a second national system to re-create those controls means new governance, new staff, new rules and new enforcement. It also adds a new place for listings to diverge from the record. Upstream tried a version of this a decade ago, with many of the same companies, and it stalled. The industry doesn't need to pay for that experiment twice.
What's actually missing
The brokers behind Open Real Estate run national and multi-market businesses. For them, the problem with MLS data isn't trust. It's that the data comes in from about 500 organizations.
Each MLS uses its own variation of the RESO standards, its own field rules and its own license terms. A brokerage, portal or AI company that wants a clean picture of even one state has to integrate, normalize and negotiate with every MLS in it. The data is good. The product is hard to buy. That's a go-to-market problem, not a governance problem, and it's the one MLSs have been slowest to solve.
Open Real Estate solves it by rebuilding the pipes upstream, at the brokers. That works, but only by standing up a parallel organization that decides where listings go and who sees them. Its FAQ gives it full discretion over syndication, and it allows participant-only listings. Those are exactly the decisions MLSs already make in the open, under rules their members vote on.
A better vehicle: a federation in every state
Earlier this year I sketched an alternative in 50 Statewide MLS Federations. The MLSs in each state sign one agreement and co-own one normalized data product. It isn't a merger. Local rules, members, compliance, and identity all stay local. The federation does only what has to be done together.
Here's how that meets what the Open Real Estate founders are asking for:
Enter once, distribute everywhere. Brokerages with their own listing systems submit through the RESO Web API. Everyone else keeps using their MLS. Either way, the listing lands in one statewide dataset.
Broad, reliable access. One RESO-compliant feed per state, covering every active listing and every licensed professional. That's 50 integrations instead of 500.
A fair share of the value. The federation licenses the state product to portals, proptech and AI companies on terms set by its members. The revenue flows back to the MLSs and, by a published formula, to the brokers whose listings create it.
Transparency without a new rulebook. The federation inherits the protections MLSs already enforce: on-time submission, a complete record, equal access and disclosed rules for any limited-exposure listing.
Different pipes, one product
A federation doesn't need one national technology vendor, and it shouldn't have one. Each state's MLSs can choose the aggregation partner that fits their systems and contracts. That might be Cribio in one state, FBS's Spark platform in another, and Cotality's Trestle, or SourceRE in a third. It doesn't matter, as long as every state delivers the same product.
That product is a specification, not a platform:
Normalized. One RESO Data Dictionary vocabulary, with no local field dialects.
RESO-compliant. Delivered through the RESO Web API and certified, so Texas data and North Carolina data arrive in the same shape.
Rules-aware. Each listing carries its local display and use rules, and limited-exposure listings are honored without losing the record.
Live. Changes flow through in near real time, not in nightly dumps.
Complete. Every MLS listing in the state, not just the listings of participating brokerages.
Meet the spec and the vendor is interchangeable. That keeps competition among technology providers healthy, and it keeps each state free to change partners without changing the product its licensees buy.
We're also much closer to this than Open Real Estate acknowledges. Aggregators already combine many MLSs into normalized feeds every day. RESO certification is the norm, not the exception. National brokerages and their vendors already consume this data. The plumbing works. What's missing is the statewide agreement that turns those pipes into one licensed product, and that's an easier lift than a new national organization.
That's where Phantom Power comes in. We help MLSs design the agreement and normalize the data, connect them with the technology partners to run it, and give brokers confidence that the result is the clean, complete product they've been asking for.
An invitation
To the Open Real Estate founders: you've named a real problem and put real weight behind solving it. Before you build the staff and governance of a new national organization, consider building with the MLSs instead. A federated state feed gives you everything on your list: one point of entry, broad distribution and a share of the value. And the trust and enforcement come already built. We'd welcome the conversation.
To MLS leaders: Open Real Estate is a signal, not a threat. The largest brokers in the country just told us what they need from MLS data. If MLSs in a state can agree to deliver it together, the case for a parallel system goes away. If they can't, someone else will build it. Phantom Power is ready to help any group of MLSs start that conversation, from a first readiness review through a signed federation agreement.
The tools are ready, and the standards are mostly there. What's missing is a willingness to do together what none of us can do alone. That has always been the best idea in this business.
Matt Fowler is a Senior Management Consultant at Phantom Power.
On Monday, four of the largest companies in residential real estate (AGNT, HomeServices of America, Keller Williams and Real REMAX Group) announced Open Real Estate, a national, broker-owned initiative for sharing listing data. Agents would enter a listing once. The platform would send it to MLSs, portals and other authorized recipients. It's free for any brokerage that wants to join, and it's aimed at a Q1 2027 launch.
I know many of the people behind it, and I respect them. Their worry is the right one. Private listing networks are pulling inventory out of the shared market, and the consumer loses when that happens. The founders want broad access, less double entry, and a fair share of the value their listings create. Every one of those goals is reasonable.
Where I part ways is the vehicle. We don't need a new national enterprise to get there. Most of what Open Real Estate wants to build already exists, inside the roughly 500 local MLSs that brokers already own, govern and fund. What's missing isn't control. It's the right vehicle to deliver it.
The controls already exist
The local MLS is the closest thing residential real estate has to a regulated exchange. I made that case at length in The MLS as Market Infrastructure, an article I wrote while at Doorify. HousingWire’s Craig Rowe interviewed me and others and wrote about it too in this article.
The short version: the MLS already does the things a trusted listing system has to do.
It gets listings in on time. Clear Cooperation requires submission within one business day of public marketing.
It keeps the record. Days on market, price changes and status history are preserved for appraisers, lenders and researchers.
It gives equal access. Every licensed professional sees the same inventory, whatever their brokerage.
It enforces. Since the 2024 commission settlement, MLSs have been the layer that polices a market-wide rule. They review listings, fine violators and fix the data every day.
Notably, Open Real Estate's own first rule mirrors Clear Cooperation. Members must submit a listing within one business day of signing the listing agreement. That's the MLS's core idea, rebuilt.
Building a second national system to re-create those controls means new governance, new staff, new rules and new enforcement. It also adds a new place for listings to diverge from the record. Upstream tried a version of this a decade ago, with many of the same companies, and it stalled. The industry doesn't need to pay for that experiment twice.
What's actually missing
The brokers behind Open Real Estate run national and multi-market businesses. For them, the problem with MLS data isn't trust. It's that the data comes in from about 500 organizations.
Each MLS uses its own variation of the RESO standards, its own field rules and its own license terms. A brokerage, portal or AI company that wants a clean picture of even one state has to integrate, normalize and negotiate with every MLS in it. The data is good. The product is hard to buy. That's a go-to-market problem, not a governance problem, and it's the one MLSs have been slowest to solve.
Open Real Estate solves it by rebuilding the pipes upstream, at the brokers. That works, but only by standing up a parallel organization that decides where listings go and who sees them. Its FAQ gives it full discretion over syndication, and it allows participant-only listings. Those are exactly the decisions MLSs already make in the open, under rules their members vote on.
A better vehicle: a federation in every state
Earlier this year I sketched an alternative in 50 Statewide MLS Federations. The MLSs in each state sign one agreement and co-own one normalized data product. It isn't a merger. Local rules, members, compliance, and identity all stay local. The federation does only what has to be done together.
Here's how that meets what the Open Real Estate founders are asking for:
Enter once, distribute everywhere. Brokerages with their own listing systems submit through the RESO Web API. Everyone else keeps using their MLS. Either way, the listing lands in one statewide dataset.
Broad, reliable access. One RESO-compliant feed per state, covering every active listing and every licensed professional. That's 50 integrations instead of 500.
A fair share of the value. The federation licenses the state product to portals, proptech and AI companies on terms set by its members. The revenue flows back to the MLSs and, by a published formula, to the brokers whose listings create it.
Transparency without a new rulebook. The federation inherits the protections MLSs already enforce: on-time submission, a complete record, equal access and disclosed rules for any limited-exposure listing.
Different pipes, one product
A federation doesn't need one national technology vendor, and it shouldn't have one. Each state's MLSs can choose the aggregation partner that fits their systems and contracts. That might be Cribio in one state, FBS's Spark platform in another, and Cotality's Trestle, or SourceRE in a third. It doesn't matter, as long as every state delivers the same product.
That product is a specification, not a platform:
Normalized. One RESO Data Dictionary vocabulary, with no local field dialects.
RESO-compliant. Delivered through the RESO Web API and certified, so Texas data and North Carolina data arrive in the same shape.
Rules-aware. Each listing carries its local display and use rules, and limited-exposure listings are honored without losing the record.
Live. Changes flow through in near real time, not in nightly dumps.
Complete. Every MLS listing in the state, not just the listings of participating brokerages.
Meet the spec and the vendor is interchangeable. That keeps competition among technology providers healthy, and it keeps each state free to change partners without changing the product its licensees buy.
We're also much closer to this than Open Real Estate acknowledges. Aggregators already combine many MLSs into normalized feeds every day. RESO certification is the norm, not the exception. National brokerages and their vendors already consume this data. The plumbing works. What's missing is the statewide agreement that turns those pipes into one licensed product, and that's an easier lift than a new national organization.
That's where Phantom Power comes in. We help MLSs design the agreement and normalize the data, connect them with the technology partners to run it, and give brokers confidence that the result is the clean, complete product they've been asking for.
An invitation
To the Open Real Estate founders: you've named a real problem and put real weight behind solving it. Before you build the staff and governance of a new national organization, consider building with the MLSs instead. A federated state feed gives you everything on your list: one point of entry, broad distribution and a share of the value. And the trust and enforcement come already built. We'd welcome the conversation.
To MLS leaders: Open Real Estate is a signal, not a threat. The largest brokers in the country just told us what they need from MLS data. If MLSs in a state can agree to deliver it together, the case for a parallel system goes away. If they can't, someone else will build it. Phantom Power is ready to help any group of MLSs start that conversation, from a first readiness review through a signed federation agreement.
The tools are ready, and the standards are mostly there. What's missing is a willingness to do together what none of us can do alone. That has always been the best idea in this business.
Matt Fowler is a Senior Management Consultant at Phantom Power.
