As a custom homebuilder, Dan Cooper was accustomed to creating properties that met the needs of his clients.
“I have owned a design and build company since 2004, and as I got immersed into that business and industry, I realized that our best niche was fulfilling the visions of buyers’ that couldn’t find what they were looking for in existing home inventory and that was a concept that always sat with me,” Cooper, the founder and CEO of buyer listing service technology company Gitcha, said.
It was the Great Recession, however, that really started Cooper thinking about finding better ways to know what buyers in a given market are looking for. As a builder navigating the market downturn, Cooper said he and his family were forced to sell their own house, but the property ended up sitting on the market for years.
“The genesis of all of this was as a seller competing with other similar properties at a similar price point. I would love to know what active buyers in the market are looking for, so I could market the strengths of my property and ensure it gets in front of them,” Cooper said. “I kept thinking it would be nice if I could just look through buyers and find a possible match for my home.”
Cooper said he truly began putting things in motion in 2020, when he decided to add a real estate brokerage operation to his design and homebuilding company, enabling his company to serve clients even if they don’t end up building them a home from scratch.
“I was sitting around the first round table we had with the agents and at the end of the meeting, my principal broker asked them all for client wants and needs and that really lit a fire under me,” Cooper, who operates as the owner of dC Real Estate but is not a licensed broker or agent, said. “I realized these conversations, or posts on social media were how agents were handling this and I felt like we really need to fill this gap.”
From brokers to MLSs
Cooper, along with the help of his son-in-law, launched Gitcha in their local market of Bend, Oregon in September 2023. At the time, Gitcha was working directly with agents and brokers, and Cooper said it was challenging to get other brokerages to sign on as they viewed it as a tech product from a competing brokerage, which prompted them to launch the product over 1,000 miles away in Phoenix, Arizona.
“We were going door-to-door talking to agents and brokerages, and we got to over 1,000 subscribers in Arizona, which was really promising,” Cooper said.
As Gitcha began to gain traction in 2024, Cooper said they were approached by large national brokerages who wanted access to the product.
“They all had a similar pursuit, which was that they wanted exclusivity so they could leverage Gitcha as this internal private listing network for them, and we struggled with that,” Cooper said. “On the one hand, we are a bootstrapped company and this would have been a big opportunity, but at the same time we didn’t build this for one national brokerage to use for their advantage, we wanted this to be a new standard practice for the industry.”
This is what prompted Cooper and his team at Gitcha to begin pursuing their current strategy of MLS partnerships. Currently, five MLSs have signed up for Gitcha’s Buyer Listing Service (BLS), which Cooper said is the result of hours of conversations with MLSs across the country, a process that began in early 2025.
“Our mantra is to be the buy-side of the MLS, and it has really worked out well,” Cooper said, adding that a few more MLS partners will be announced soon after they complete their contract review process. “What we’re really excited about is that every single MLS has a different motivation for using our product.”
Filling the gap
According to Cooper, Mainstreet Realtors, which is part of Chicagoland’s Midwest Real Estate Data (MRED), is looking to use it to help loosen up housing inventory in an incredibly inventory constrained environment.
“They believe that having this buyer listing service where sellers can see what active buyers are looking for will arm listing agents with ‘agent intelligence’ they can use to help get more prospective sellers off the fence and into the market,” Cooper said.
Cooper also highlightedHive MLS, which is hoping to use the BLS to help foster collaboration and agent connection.
While he is excited about these early partnership launches, Cooper acknowledged that it is challenging navigating the MLS environment and working to partner with what he hopes will be hundreds of MLSs nationwide.
“There are so many of them and each one has different ownership and governance structures determining how they make decisions, so it has been a process of learning how to connect with them,” he said.
The BLS and the MLS of the future
While the MLS was built and named for the fact that it served multiple brokers, Cooper sees no reason why this cannot evolve to also refer to the MLS being the home for multiple types of listings. The idea of adding a second side to the MLS, according to Cooper, could be incredibly impactful right now as brokerage firms like Compass International Holdings, pursue private listing network strategies, weakening the cooperative power of the MLS.
“We are getting away from the cooperation that has defined our industry for a very long time because some people are looking to grab market share. On top of this, we have a much more buyer-centric market than we’ve had in a long time and it is all converging at once,” Cooper said. “We feel this is the way forward to enable buyer choice because ‘seller choice’ really restricts opportunities for buyers, and we think this is the counter balance to that.”
Fostering cooperation and communication between listing and buyer’s brokers is central to Gitcha and Cooper’s mission.
“If we can bring innovation and a process to both sides of the transaction and bring the communication between buyers and sellers into the MLS, that is what is going to keep the MLS together,” Cooper said.
Through the National Association of Realtors’ (NAR) commission lawsuit settlement, compensation was removed from the MLS, which Cooper said seems to have led some brokerages to now think that one of the other pillars of the MLS, cooperation, just refers to the spirit of both sides looking to satisfy the needs of their customers.
“If that gets stripped away, what do we have left? We have to focus on cooperation in a different way and that is the only way the MLS will stay valid in the ongoing market evolution,” Cooper said.
