On Monday, four of the largest brokerage companies in the country — Keller Williams, HomeServices of America, eXp’s parent AGNT and Real REMAX Group, roughly 300,000 agents between them —announced Open Real Estate, a shared listing database that would sit alongside the MLS. The first questions have been about execution, and they are fair. But the more useful question for anyone who runs an MLS is why these brokers felt they needed to build it.
Here is what ORE proposes. An agent enters a listing once, within one business day of signing the listing agreement. The seller chooses who sees it: a participant view for agents at member brokerages, or a market view that goes to MLSs, portals, appraisers and everyone else. We believe those marketing options are too limited, but we support the central idea that brokers keep ownership of their listings and share in whatever value the data generates.
ORE faces challenges.No MLS has committed to take its listings, though MARIS in St. Louis told its members this week that it supports the idea and “recognizes there is room for improvement.” The vendor won’t be chosen until early 2027, and broker-led single points of entry have stalled before. But whether ORE will work isn’t the point. The point is brokers want something better.
One MLS executive, in an article on RIS Media, said as much this week: “I don’t think that these companies would be doing what they’re doing if they were happy MLS customers. They want a better way than what they are presented with right now.”
Strip away the technology and ORE’s open letter reads less like a product plan than a list of things brokers believe their MLSs should already allow.
Why hasn’t the MLS built this?
Not for lack of ambition. MLSs have spent two years building new businesses on broker data. Stellar launched a consumer search site in September. NorthstarMLS and MARISinvested in REcore, an MLS-owned data company. More than 40 MLSs license data through REdistribute, andmore than 20 have joined SourceRE’s new connector, built to put MLS data inside AI tools.
Brokers’ rights to the same data have not kept pace. How brokers can use and display MLS listing data is governed by IDX policies and licensing agreements, negotiated one MLS at a time, roughly 400 times over. So when your MLS strikes deals to put your listings in front of AI companies while your own rights to use them haven’t changed, you eventually look for somewhere else to put them. Somewhere like ORE.
The same problem extends to how sellers market their homes. ORE offers sellers two distribution choices, but the industry needs more than two. MLS rules should recognize that a home can be publicly marketed without being distributed everywhere, and that sellers should have meaningful control over when and where their listings appear.
The bigger point is that brokers shouldn’t have to build an alternative network to get these changes. MLS executives can write, and their boards approve, better rules. Rules that create a single point of entry, which some MLSs already offer through technology partners. Rules that give sellers real options while protecting buyers. Rules that let the people who supply the industry’s data use it to serve their customers, wherever those customers now search.
Those rules still need to protect cooperation, accuracy, and fair access. But protecting the MLS’s value shouldn’t come at the expense of innovation.
Brokers aren’t asking MLSs to abandon what makes them valuable. They’re asking MLSs to evolve with the businesses that supply their listings.
ORE is a warning that some brokers are no longer willing to wait.
Joe Rath is head of industry relations at Rocket, which owns Redfin. His family has run a brokerage on Cleveland’s west side since 1972.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of HousingWire’s editorial department and its owners.
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