New data shows that active-duty service members and veterans take very different paths to homeownership.
Military-connected households have claimed a steady slice of the housing market for a decade, but active-duty service members and veterans arrive at homeownership by strikingly different routes.
That’s according to the 2025 National Association of Realtors Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, which revealed that military-connected buyers represented 19 percent of all home purchasers in 2025. The data — published as the country marks Military Appreciation Month and shortly before Memorial Day — shows the two groups diverge in age, motivation, financing and how far they’re willing to move to buy.
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Active-duty buyers were younger (median age 38), more likely to be purchasing amid a job-related relocation (32 percent), and bought farther from home than any other group, with 41 percent moving more than 500 miles. Most (56 percent) purchased in suburban areas. Their median home spanned 2,000 square feet with four bedrooms, one more than the overall market median. More than six in 10 (61 percent) had children under 18 at home.
Veterans presented a different profile. At a median age of 64, they were overwhelmingly repeat buyers (88 percent) and more likely to cite proximity to friends and family, rather than job relocation, as their primary motivation (19 percent). Only 19 percent had children under 18 at home.
VA financing underpinned both groups. Sixty-nine percent of active-duty buyers and 55 percent of veterans used a VA loan in 2025. More than one-third of active-duty buyers (36 percent) and more than one-quarter of veterans (28 percent) purchased with no down payment, a benefit tracing back to the 1944 Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, which created the VA home loan program.
NAR also noted generational gaps in veteran representation. Silent Generation buyers (ages 80–100) reported the highest veteran share at 43 percent, followed by older boomers (ages 71–79) at 28 percent, figures that likely reflect the draft era. Among younger millennials (ages 27–35), the veteran share dropped to 7 percent.
It’s been only a few months since the Compass-Anywhere merger closed, but the new Compass International Holdings is throwing its weight around with Zillow and MLSs, and other big brokerages have raced to meet this moment of consolidation.
What do agents and leaders across brokerage types think about the shifting landscape?
To help the industry understand where things are headed next, Inman once again invites you to take real estate’s most ambitious monthly survey: the Inman Intel Index.
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Intel is asking a range of questions intended to help the industry track revenue prospects for the summer, commission trends and other pressing matters.
Click through to add your insights to the industry’s knowledge base, and check back for analysis of the results in the weeks to come.
Thank you,
Team Inman
]]>Windermere’s Principal Economist Jeff Tucker looks at how political and financial upheaval are shaping the real estate market.
The first number to know this month: $108. That is the current price of a barrel of oil as of May 19, and it is still dramatically elevated from its price range below $60 before the U.S. launched a war on Iran this year.
In fact, despite several tantalizing hints of the end of the hostilities tying up the Strait of Hormuz, prices have been over $85 a barrel pretty consistently for over two months now. As long as the flow of oil is constricted, those price pressures will stay elevated.
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The second number to know this month: 3.8 percent. That is the year-over-year change in the Consumer Price Index, representing a sharp acceleration of inflation from the 2.4 percent pace as recently as February. It reflects the higher costs of energy rippling through supply chains, and now inevitably raising prices for consumer products and services.
Moreover, the producer price index also just jumped sharply to a 6 percent year-over-year gain, well above the consensus forecast, which is a good indicator of even more pain coming for consumers.
10-year Treasury bonds and more than 1M active listings
Higher inflation also tends to feed into the interest rates on bonds, and this spring has been no exception: now the 10-year Treasury bond is yielding around 4.6 percent after dipping just under 4 percent on the eve of the Iran war.
And we know higher Treasury yields usually mean: higher mortgage rates. After some volatility and false starts downward last month, mortgage rates have surged up even further in mid-May, approaching 6.75 percent, according to Mortgage News Daily. That will help to dampen homebuyer demand in the spring buying season, which is in full swing.
Speaking of the housing market, we saw just over 1 million active listings at the end of April — about 60,000 more than this time in 2020, and 40,000 more than this time last year.
That year-over-year growth rate of just under 5 percent helps continue a trend of decelerating inventory growth, as the market looks more and more balanced this year — with neither a glut of home listings building up nor a frenzied shortage condition, at least on average across the country.
Pending home sales were also basically flat from this time last year, but if mortgage rates stay above 6.5 percent, I expect the months of May and June will look weaker than the same time last year. Once again, that means the forecast depends on whether durable peace can take hold and whether oil begins to flow again in the Middle East.
Agent retention has very little to do with commission splits. Brokers want to believe it’s about money, and yes, money matters, but truthfully, agents leave because they feel invisible. They need to feel like they belong — to feel seen, heard and cared about.
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I recently sat down with Kathy Viard and Peter Morris, co-owners of Signature Premier Properties on Long Island, New York, on my podcast Real Estate Unscripted. They’ve built an independent brokerage from scratch into a company of over 1,800 agents across 23 offices, with no franchise and no formal business plan. What they shared was the clearest real-world proof I’ve seen of everything I’ve taught for years.
Culture has to be something you do, not something you declare
Culture isn’t a mission statement; it’s the sum of your daily decisions. How you show up, how often and whether your people can feel it. It’s the shared beliefs, values, attitudes and behaviors that define a company.
Kathy and Peter live this. Every Wednesday night, they take a group of agents out for “date night.” No agenda, no pitch — just two hours of real conversation over cocktails and appetizers. “If you don’t get together with them,” Peter told me, “the next thing you know, you’re losing them.”
It’s not a retention tactic; it’s connection. Never confuse talking about culture with practicing it.
Your agents need to know you care before the crisis hits
Don’t wait for a hard moment to show your people they matter. It may be too late then. The investment in your team needs to happen in the ordinary moments, the check-ins, handwritten notes, etc., so that when things get hard, trust is already there.
Kathy and Peter found this out firsthand when the National Association of Realtors settlement hit, and Signature took a financial blow. Before they could even address it internally, their agents were reaching out, asking how they could help. They suggested canceling the holiday party. They offered to give up the annual trip, one of the company’s most beloved traditions.
“There are simply no words,” Kathy told me, “for how wonderful our agents were to us at our lowest.”
That response didn’t come from a commission split. It came from years of showing up at every moment, big and small, that said “you matter” to their agents.
Money can outbid you, but culture can’t be bought
Here’s one of the hardest truths I share with independent brokers: If you’re trying to compete on dollars, you’ll lose. There will always be a better-funded company willing to write a bigger check. This is where the strength of your company culture becomes your greatest asset. What’s important to many agents isn’t the money, it’s the sense of family and belonging they get from being with a brokerage that genuinely cares about them.
When Compass arrived on Long Island and started signing top producers, Signature lost some agents — even some people who were close personal friends of Kathy and Peter. For a moment, they even considered selling.
“It was a weak moment,” Peter told me honestly. “We were vulnerable and devastated.” But they didn’t match the checks. Didn’t restructure their splits in a panic. They leaned harder into the thing no outside brand could replicate, who they were to their people. They recruited aggressively, brought in strong teams and never took a step back in volume.
Many agents who stayed turned down serious money to do it. “Not everybody went to the highest bidders,” Kathy said, and she made sure those agents knew their loyalty was seen and appreciated.
Transparency: one of the most underused retention tools
I’ve seen brokers who believe that protecting their agents from bad news is a form of leadership. They call it acting from a position of strength. In my experience, what erodes agent trust faster than bad news is feeling “managed” and not respected enough to be told the truth.
Kathy and Peter communicate with their agents openly and regularly in what Peter calls a “State of the Union” when the company is navigating something difficult. Their updates don’t spin or deflect. “We share the good, the bad, the ugly. We communicate with them, and they love that,” Kathy shared.
When you’re honest, you’re not showing weakness. You’re showing respect. Respected agents don’t look for the exit.
Shared purpose binds people to something bigger than a paycheck
People want to be part of something that means something. They want to engage with a company that has aspirations larger than just the bottom line. They can get a paycheck anywhere. But, a brokerage that gives agents a purpose — that’s a different conversation entirely.
Kathy and Peter have built that through consistent community involvement. Veterans’ fundraisers. Autism awareness walks. Easter basket drives. A push-up challenge that raised $130,000 and ended with 2,500 people on a golf course. These aren’t marketing stunts. They’re shared experiences that bond a company together.
That sense of meaning is retention. Not because it shows up on a recruiting brochure, but because once an agent has stood next to a colleague assembling Easter baskets for kids who wouldn’t otherwise have one, they remember it. And they remember who made it happen.
The bottom line
How many brokers are out there working so hard on the wrong problems? They’re obsessing over splits, scrambling to match tech platforms, chasing the next shiny recruiting tool, all in the hopes of finding that magical thing that will make their agents stay.
Kathy and Peter built one of the most agent-loyal independent brokerages I’ve ever encountered, not by outspending the competition, but by out-caring them. As Kathy put it: “Sell with your heart, not your wallet, and you’ll have success.”
That’s the whole playbook, right there. Not just for agents — for every broker who wants to build something worth staying for.
]]>As Inman reported, Google’s home search experiment is back. At least three MLSs are feeding listings into the pilot through HouseCanary: CRMLS, San Diego MLS and My State MLS. EXp Realty is pushing all its listings and NextHome’s into the pilot through HouseCanary’s ComeHome platform.
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HouseCanary is a data company that became a licensed brokerage in all 50 states so it could pull MLS data through IDX feeds, the same way Zillow had to become a licensed brokerage to do what it does.
The listings are fed to HouseCanary, and then HouseCanary feeds them into Google Search. Google itself isn’t licensed as a broker anywhere. To accomplish this, Google didn’t have to ask anyone or negotiate with the National Association of Realtors. They went to a partner who had already done the work of becoming a broker on paper and plugged into the feeds.
HouseCanary, Zillow, Compass, Redfin: all licensed brokerages
The state brokerage license was designed to regulate transactional conduct, not data access.
But MLSs made every other path to that data impossibly hard.
Paper-broker IDX exists because operators couldn’t get listing data any other way — the MLSs themselves forced the workaround into existence. The brokerage license became a national data-access credential because the MLSs left no alternative.
A clear definition of who counts as a broker would have prevented this
NAR’s Participation Rule says brokers have to be “actively endeavoring” in brokerage to access an MLS. In 25 years, NAR has never defined what “actively endeavoring” means. No minimum transactions. No minimum agent count. No primary-business test. No revenue threshold. The phrase has lived in the rulebook as a placeholder for a standard nobody ever wrote.
The window to write it was open from 2008 to 2020
The 2008 DOJ consent decree had just settled, the terms of how MLSs had to treat online brokers were established, and the major tech players hadn’t yet figured out the brokerage-as-data-pass pattern.
A real definition written in any of those years would have given the MLSs actual authority to distinguish operating brokerages from tech companies using a license as a wedge. NAR didn’t write one.
The DOJ might have pushed back. We’ll never know, because nobody at NAR tested it
In September 2020, Zillow became a licensed brokerage in all 50 states. By January 2021, Zillow had switched its entire listing pipeline to IDX feeds. The DOJ stated this plainly in its 2024 statement of interest in the REX case: Zillow had to become a licensed brokerage to access IDX.
By then, the pattern was set. Any attempt now to tighten the standard would look exactly like the exclusionary conduct that lost NAR the 2008 case. The DOJ would notice the same week. NAR knows this — in June 2025, they rescinded their No-Commingling Rule under DOJ pressure rather than defend it in court.
The gate sits open. Anyone who pays the licensing fees and signs the MLS member agreement walks through
Google walking through that gate is a different category of event than Zillow walking through it. Google Search and Gemini are one product integration away from being the same product.
Whereas Compass, Zillow, Redfin and CoStar all use AI inside their products, Google builds the AI.
AI Overviews are already eating click-through traffic in publishing and e-commerce. Real estate is next. Consumers who used to click through to Zillow or Realtor.com to get an answer get it inside Google instead, from a $2 trillion company that runs roughly 90 percent of U.S. search.
The industry didn’t just sleep on the rules. It slept on delivering value to consumers
That’s the opening Rocket, Compass, Zillow, CoStar, News Corp and Google are moving through right now. The resources they’re bringing:
- Rocket Companies: $6.9 billion in 2025 adjusted revenue. Owns Redfin (50 million monthly visitors, 2,200 agents), plus Mr. Cooper’s servicing portfolio
- Compass: $7 billion in 2025 revenue. Closed @properties-Christie’s ($444 million) early 2025; Anywhere Real Estate ($1.6 billion) 2026
- Zillow: $2.6 billion in 2025 revenue and first full-year profit in company history
- CoStar/Homes.com: Lost $850 million on Homes.com in 2025; plans another $550 million loss in 2026
- News Corp/Move/Realtor.com: $552 million in 2025 revenue, supported by News Corp’s $10 billion parent
- Google: $2 trillion market cap. Approximately 90 percent of U.S. search. Building Gemini
- NAR: $360.8 million in 2024 revenue, 84 percent of it from member dues
The institution that wrote the rules of residential real estate operates on roughly the budget of a mid-sized hospital, against opponents whose annual losses dwarf its annual income.
NAR’s announced 2026 strategic response is a consumer advertising campaign with the premise that consumers think Realtors “just open doors” — a perception 25 years of unenforced MLS rules helped create.
NAR called the Realtor brand at launch “the most trusted real estate brand among consumers.” Four decades of Gallup polling on the honesty and ethics of real estate agents tell a different story — their standing in the most recent poll was statistically near a 40-year low.
No independent consumer research puts the Realtor brand on top.
But the fundamental issue here isn’t just that NAR is treating a structural problem as a perception problem; it’s that it’s treating a “problem” that doesn’t exist.
Consumers aren’t waiting for clarity on whether Realtors do more than open doors.
The real fight isn’t with consumers at all. It’s about who controls listing data and who writes the rules of how transactions get done.
None of that gets fixed with a 30-second spot
This is what stewardship failure looks like at industry scale. Picking the wrong fight in 2003. Losing it in 2008. Letting the participation rule sit undefined and unenforced for two and a half decades.
Charging members hundreds of dollars a year for a credential that became available to any tech company willing to pay state licensing fees. Now talking about Realtors as the “gold standard” while the real standards get written by Compass, Rocket, Zillow, CoStar, News Corp and Google.
There’s a fair argument that the economics of the brokerage business — splintered, low-margin, locally controlled — make national rule-setting impossibly hard for any trade association. It has merit.
It also doesn’t excuse 25 years of specific NAR decisions that closed doors they didn’t have to close.
The seat is empty either way, and the rules get written by whoever shows up with capital, distribution and a product roadmap.
The takeaway for everyone not on that list isn’t that NAR will fix this. It’s that NAR can’t.
Brokerages, MLSs, state associations and individual operators have a choice: Be part of writing the rules of what comes next or wait for a national body that isn’t coming back.
Waiting is a choice. It’s just not a winning one
But what’s happening in real estate isn’t unique to real estate.
The Atlantic ran a piece recently about things that used to exist for the public’s benefit being handed over to corporate greed. An excerpt:
“In America, little remains of what used to be called the public commons — the essential parts of life organized for mutual benefit rather than profit extraction. Hospitals, nursing homes, and insurance companies were once mostly nonprofit, run by local boards. No more. Education, from preschool to college, is being colonized by for-profit owners. Even utilities such as electricity and water, once treated as public goods, are being taken over by profit-obsessed investment firms.”
Residential real estate is on that list now.
The MLS was the closest thing the industry had to a commons — shared infrastructure that made the market function for everyone in it. It’s being absorbed by a handful of public companies and one $2 trillion AI company, and what comes out the other side gets optimized for shareholder returns, not for the people buying and selling homes.
The people writing the rules right now don’t need to ask anyone’s permission. They will keep writing them. The only thing that changes the outcome is whether the rest of the industry decides to write some, too.
]]>Drill down into your real estate market and compare it to hundreds of others with Inman Market View’s interactive maps and charts.
After the U.S. housing market experienced years of rapid growth in active home listings, its inventory levels appear at first glance to have reached a stable plateau.
But a closer look reveals that this plateau in the national inventory numbers is hiding a tug-of-war between markets on extreme ends of the inventory spectrum.
This phenomenon becomes clear when examining listing data from Realtor.com through the lens of Inman Market View’s interactive tools, available to all Inman subscribers. And in some places, the extremes are only continuing to accelerate.
- The number of active listings remained 14 percent below pre-pandemic levels for the three months ending in April — roughly the same level of inventory as the previous June.
While housing inventory has settled into a level a bit below what was considered normal in the years leading up to the pandemic, we can see there’s wide variation by region.
The map below demonstrates just how much inventory was warped and stretched by the initial pandemic shock, the resulting boom in demand for homes, and the resulting crash in transactions and rebalancing in inventory that followed.
Click into one of the 500 local markets in the tool above, or search for an option in the drop-down menu for an even more detailed look at the data. Select different metrics and time-period comparisons for a fuller picture.
In more recent months, new momentum in some of America’s largest housing markets suggests some markets may be converging with the national picture — while others find themselves further out on a limb.
Fork in the road
Real estate agents and brokerages in dozens of major markets are still seeing substantial shifts in their inventory.
In some Florida markets, a glut of inventory that had built up over the course of multiple years is now either being absorbed or withdrawn from the market.
- Active-listing levels in Southwest Florida — specifically the metro area that encompasses Cape Coral and Fort Myers — saw inventory levels fall from 45 percent above pre-pandemic levels a year ago to 24 percent above that same baseline in the three-month period ending in April.
- The same pattern can be observed in several other large Florida markets ranging from Miami to Jacksonville.
(Compare your market’s path to others by selecting it in the drop-down menu above. You can also toggle between different metrics and comparison views.)
Perhaps more extreme is the rapid growth in active listings in some of the nation’s largest, most active tech hubs.
- Inventory in the greater Seattle area, already 32 percent above pre-pandemic levels this time last year, has since ballooned to 81 percent above the norm.
And Seattle’s not alone.
What all of these tech destinations — and others like Austin — have in common is a recent increase in new listings, along with a sudden reduction in properties leaving the market due to either a pending sale or a delisting, an analysis of Realtor.com data suggests.
These diverging trends appear to be largely canceling each other out in the national numbers. But they serve as a good reminder that American real estate remains a local game.
It also remains split between the haves and have-nots.
A market split by class
As home prices stagnate and the stock market continues its climb to new highs, Americans holding significant financial assets are in an increasingly better position to buy a home than those whose wealth is largely tied to their primary residence.
And we see the clear fingerprint of this in Miami.
One way we can estimate demand for homes is by looking at the number of properties that left the market in the last three months — most due to a pending sale, and a smaller number due to delisting — and dividing them by the number of active listings for sale at a given point in time.
We can see that the parts of this region where demand is unusually high are in the “blue” ZIP codes along the Miami waterfront.
These are also the places where the price for a typical unit is highest, as seen in the map below. And in lower-priced areas, demand for a typical listing is lower than it was in a pre-pandemic Miami.
You can explore your own market by selecting it in the dropdown menu above, and toggling between different metrics and time-period comparisons.
Revive has upgraded its AI platform to help agents move seller conversations beyond automated valuations, bundling comp intelligence, home condition analysis and renovation estimates into one listing tool.
Automated valuation models have a well-documented ceiling. They price a home based on what it is today, not what it could be after a targeted refresh. And agents who rely on them in listing conversations often find themselves defending a number rather than building a strategy.
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Revive, the Irvine, California-based home value optimization company, is betting that gap is where its AI platform lives. On Wednesday, the company announced a significant upgrade to Revive AI, its platform for helping agents show sellers how condition and strategic improvements can move the needle on resale value.
The update bundles valuation intelligence, local market data, home condition analysis, financial modeling and investment scenarios into a single tool. It also adds recent sales data to its comp recommendations, which the company says makes its renovation and valuation analysis more reliable.
“Agents don’t need another estimate of what a home is worth today. They need home value intelligence that helps show clients what it could be worth,” said Dalip Jaggi, co-founder and COO of Revive.
What the agent gets
The upgraded platform’s Smart Value Comparison feature pulls in automated estimates from multiple sources and helps agents explain where those estimates may diverge from the home’s actual potential. It is a useful move in seller meetings where Zillow’s Zestimate frequently enters the room uninvited.
Dalip Jaggi
Expanded Local Market Insights pulls neighborhood trend data and buyer-expectation benchmarks into a single view, while an Improved Home Condition Analysis gives agents a room-by-room read on a property’s current state, with recommendations tied to resale outcomes.
Renovation Estimates let agents and homeowners weigh whether targeted repairs, a broader refresh or no updates at all make sense given how the home stacks up against neighborhood condition comps.
Two additions targeting seller and investor clients round out the release. A Home Financial Overview lets homeowners input their mortgage details to model current equity, estimated value, and potential upside with and without renovations. And Revive’s Flip360 program now includes Investment Scenarios — return modeling for investor clients — though those projections flow through the agent rather than directly to consumers.
Jaggi said the company has spent more than a year on weekly agent feedback sessions to shape the product. The result, he argues, is a tool built around how agents actually run listing appointments rather than how product teams imagine they do.
Address these three topics with your real estate clients to properly set expectations and keep deals moving forward smoothly, coach Verl Workman advises.
The deal looked solid on paper: The buyers were qualified, the sellers were motivated, and the inspection was scheduled. Everyone expected a smooth path to closing.
And then it fell apart.
Over the years, I’ve noticed that most transactions don’t fall apart because of one major issue. They fall apart because of a few conversations that either never happened or happened too late.
Here’s a scenario I’ve seen play out more times than I can count.
The situation
A young couple finds a home they love. The price feels fair, they’re pre-approved, and the seller accepts their offer quickly.
Everything looks perfect. Then the inspection report arrives.
There’s nothing unusual: an aging roof, an HVAC system near the end of its life, and a few minor electrical issues. Normal homeownership realities.
But the buyers panic. They ask for major concessions. The sellers feel blindsided and offended. Tensions rise, the tone changes, and within days, the deal is dead.
Most people point to the inspection as the problem. It wasn’t.
The real issue was three conversations that never took place early enough:
Conversation 1: The reality of home condition
Before the offer was ever written, the buyers should have understood one simple truth: No resale home is perfect.
In my experience, I’ve found that buyers who expect a flawless inspection almost always struggle emotionally when reality shows up.
What I’ve seen is that agents who handle this well don’t wait for the inspection to educate the buyer. They’ve already set expectations around what inspections typically reveal, and what’s normal versus what actually matters.
It’s usually a simple conversation:
“Most homes will need some repairs. Let’s talk now about what you’d be comfortable handling versus what would actually concern you.”
That one discussion often turns shock into understanding later.
Conversation 2: The cost tolerance
The second missed moment was financial clarity.
The buyers hadn’t defined what level of unexpected expense would feel manageable. So when numbers appeared on the inspection summary, every repair felt overwhelming.
The agents who stay ahead of this tend to walk through those numbers early:
“If repairs total $5,000 … how does that feel? What about $10,000? At what point does it change your decision?”
When those ranges are clear early, repair requests become rational conversations instead of emotional reactions. Without that clarity, every dollar feels like a threat.
Conversation 3: The negotiation reality
The sellers also had unspoken expectations. They assumed the home would sell close to as-is. They believed the agreed price already reflected the condition. No one had explored what level of concession they were truly prepared to make.
The agents who avoid this situation usually ask a simple question upfront:
“If inspection items come up, what are you open to addressing — and what are you firm on?”
That conversation protects everyone. When sellers are mentally prepared for negotiation, requests don’t feel like personal attacks.
Nothing in this transaction was unusual. What killed it wasn’t the roof, the HVAC or the electrical panel. It was surprise. Surprise creates fear, fear creates resistance, and resistance kills momentum. When expectations aren’t clearly aligned early, normal parts of the process feel like crises.
What I’ve learned is that closings are won or lost long before contracts are signed.
The agents who consistently close more deals aren’t the ones who avoid problems. They’re the ones who remove the element of surprise.
Once expectations are clear, most of what shows up during a transaction stops feeling like a problem and starts feeling expected. Once expectations are clear, most issues stop feeling like problems. They simply become part of the journey.
Most failed deals aren’t about the market or the property. They’re about conversations that should have happened earlier.
When agents lead with clarity instead of reacting to surprises, the entire transaction changes. Because deals rarely fall apart from what’s discovered. They fall apart from what no one prepared for.
Cotality announced Broker Listing Exchange (BLX) this week. HomeServices of America and Keller Williams signed up as the first customers. The product gives brokerages control of listing entry and distribution before the data ever touches an MLS.
It’s the biggest piece of industry infrastructure to ship in a decade.
About 18 months ago, an executive at one of the largest MLSs in the country told me, in a private conversation, that what Cotality just shipped was “simply impossible.” This person had looked at it. Tried versions of it. Concluded it couldn’t be done.
That quote has stayed with me because the assessment was just wrong. Wrong in the same tired, predictable way MLS leadership has been wrong about everything that matters for the past 15 years.
Remember Upstream?
Same idea, different decade. National Association of Realtors backing. Major brokerage participation. Real money. Years of runway. It got shelved and everyone in the industry agreed that governance killed it. Too many stakeholders. Too many competing interests.
That story is half true. The other half is that the people running it couldn’t ship product, and the governance narrative distracted from that fundamental issue.
BLX is the 2026 version of the same point.
Everybody else is better at MLS stuff than MLSs are
Cotality. Compass and Redfin. Zillow’s brokerage partners. The independent vendors. Even startups with eight engineers and a Series A.
The only reason this wasn’t obvious sooner is that MLS politics — exclusive vendor contracts, competing insider-broker boards, the entire NAR adjacency structure — kept everyone else locked out.
Those days are over. The walls came down, the people who were kept out walked in, and they shipped the thing the MLSs couldn’t — fast.
BLX delivers something brokers have been begging MLSs for since I started in this business: Give me all my data so I can figure out how to monetize it. It is the most basic possible request from a customer to a vendor that holds their data.
MLSs couldn’t do it. Wouldn’t do it.
Well, Cotality just did it, and two of the largest brokerage organizations in the country signed up on Day 1 because the value prop is so obviously what they’ve wanted all along that there was nothing to negotiate.
The deeper point is that brokers stopped asking
Compass, Redfin, Zillow, now Cotality — different strategies, same conclusion. Zero faith that the MLS industry will ever ship the things brokers actually need, so they’ll route around it.
So if the diagnosis is real, what’s the path forward?
2 fundamental issues have to be addressed before any strategic path is viable
1. Leadership
The boards that select MLS leadership have, for the most part, optimized for industry political fit instead of operating capability. The CEOs they hire reflect that. The senior teams those CEOs build reflect that. The culture of those organizations — slow, consensus-driven, allergic to risk, deferential to NAR — reflects that.
None of that turns around with a strategic plan. It turns around with people.
If you’re on an MLS board reading this, the most important decision you’ll make in the next year is probably your next CEO hire.
Hire boldly, please.
Recruit operators who’ve shipped consumer products at scale, run B2B data businesses, or built and sold companies that customers actually wanted. Pay for that. Absorb the disruption real leadership brings.
The alternative is hiring another version of what you already have and watching the erosion of the business continue on schedule.
2. Ownership
The MLS has to divorce itself from Realtor association ownership and politics. Most MLSs are owned by or tethered to associations, and that ownership structure is why the leadership looks the way it does — boards selected for political fit, cultures built around association priorities, every decision routed through stakeholder consensus. A great CEO hired into that structure still loses to the structure.
The ownership question and the leadership question are the same question wearing two hats.
Once both are answered, the strategic options actually become real. Two are available at any scale and represent managed adaptation. The third is what keeps the MLS industry a viable industry.
Path 1: become a regulatory utility and stop pretending otherwise. Strip the MLS back to the functions only an MLS can legally perform. Compliance reporting. Fair housing audits. System of record for cooperative compensation history. RESO standards enforcement. Cut dues 60 to 70 percent to reflect actual value delivered. This is roughly where the industry is heading anyway. The choice is whether MLSs walk there intentionally or get dragged there over a decade.
Path 2: build the data and AI infrastructure layer. REdistribute is the early version of data licensing. AI agents transacting on housing data need verified provenance, signed records and integrity guarantees. Someone is going to build both. The window for MLSs to credibly own this surface area is the next 18 to 24 months. After that, somebody else owns it.
The path that keeps the MLS industry an industry: consolidate aggressively
This is the right answer, and it requires everything above it — new leadership, new ownership and the willingness to give up local control for national scale. The first two paths keep individual MLSs alive in a reduced form. Consolidation is what keeps the category relevant.
The 500-plus MLS structure was built for a country that doesn’t exist anymore. Most of those MLSs are too small to fund real engineering, too small to attract serious operating talent, too small to compete with vendors and brokerages built at national scale.
Consolidating into a smallish number of national and super-regional MLSs creates entities with the budget, the engineering capacity and the political weight to do the other two things — to run as efficient regulatory utilities, and to claim the data and AI verification layer before someone else does (that “somebody else” is already doing it).
None of this happens with current leadership or current ownership
Voluntary consolidation requires MLS executives to vote themselves and their organizations out of existence in favor of a larger entity they probably won’t run. The people currently in those seats are, with rare exceptions, not going to do that. They’ll find reasons. They’ve spent 15 years finding reasons. The outcome will be the same.
Which is why leadership and ownership come first. Fix those, and consolidation becomes possible. Skip them, and the MLS industry as we know it becomes a footnote.
The MLS industry isn’t doomed, but it is at a decision point — and the decision is who runs it.
There’s a version of the next decade where MLSs still matter: larger, fewer and run by operators who can build at the scale required to compete with the players that have spent the last decade out-executing them. The longer the industry waits to choose, the smaller the surviving version gets.
The next “impossible” thing is being scoped right now by someone who isn’t waiting for an MLS to weigh in.
The only real question is whether the people running this industry are going to be part of what comes next, or whether they’re going to spend the next 10 years explaining why what just got built doesn’t really matter.
]]>Builder confidence rose in May, but 14 straight months of sales incentives signal that affordability pressure has shifted from buyers to builders’ bottom lines.
Homebuilder confidence in the market for newly built single-family homes posted a three-point gain in May, reaching 37 on the NAHB/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index. It is still well below the 50 threshold that separates good conditions from poor ones. The last time it was above 50 was in April 2024, when the number reached 51.
TAKE THE INMAN INTEL INDEX SURVEY
The slight move upward came alongside a familiar set of headwinds: mortgage rates remain elevated, gas prices are climbing and economic uncertainty tied to the war in Iran is weighing on buyer demand. But the figure getting the most attention from analysts this month isn’t the headline index; it’s the incentives.
From tactic to line item
For the 14th consecutive month, at least 60 percent of builders reported using sales incentives to move homes, according to the Index. That streak has quietly reframed what “builder concessions” mean in today’s market.
“Fourteen consecutive months of incentives mean they are not a tactical response to a soft quarter,” Maor Greenberg, co-founder and CEO of Spacial, told Inman. “They are now a permanent line item in the cost of selling a house.”
The share of builders cutting prices actually fell in May, down to 32 percent from 36 percent in April, but the average price reduction ticked up, from 5 percent to 6 percent. Builders who are cutting are cutting deeper, even as fewer of them reach for that tool first.
“The numbers consistently tell the story that affordability pressure has not gone away,” Greenberg added. “It used to be a problem on the household side, suppressing demand. Now, it’s a problem on the supply side, compressing margins. The incentives are the number to watch. When the market improves, this number will be the first to disappear.”
Not worse isn’t the same as better
All three HMI components rose in May, which NAHB attributed in part to buyers who had been sitting on the sidelines deciding to move in the spring. The index gauging current sales conditions rose three points to 40; the index for future sales rose three points to 45; and traffic of prospective buyers posted a three-point gain to 25, still deeply negative territory.
“The HMI has been below 50 for most of the last three years,” Greenberg said. “The three-point uptick doesn’t really mean anything. It tells us that conditions aren’t worse than before, but it doesn’t mean that conditions have improved.”
NAHB Chief Economist Robert Dietz echoed the caution. “Recent increases for long-term interest rates will continue to hold back homebuyer demand,” Dietz said. He pointed to some regional bright spots, particularly parts of the Midwest, but characterized the overall market as facing “significant affordability challenges.”
Midwest holds, West slides
The regional breakdown reinforces that split. Looking at three-month moving averages, the Midwest gained one point to 43, and the Northeast rose one point to 42. Both regions are above the South, which held flat at 35, and well above the West, which fell a point to 28.
Greenberg tied the West’s persistent underperformance to forces outside the housing market itself. “On the West Coast, there is more sensitivity to tech-sector employment and migration patterns,” he said. “The numbers on the West Coast accurately mirror the state of the tech sector, and for the past few years, the West has been volatile and is still in an uncertain period.”
The problems Congress can’t solve
NAHB Chairman Bill Owens, a homebuilder and remodeler from Worthington, Ohio, pointed to pending legislation as a potential source of relief. He noted that ongoing efforts in the House to modify the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act “could increase the nation’s housing supply and help ease builder concerns.”
On the cost side, builders are navigating pressures that won’t resolve quickly, regardless of what Congress does. Lot costs, labor availability and permitting timelines are all running long, and Greenberg argues that those constraints are fundamentally different from materials inflation, which at least tends to be cyclical.
“Land entitlement takes years. Five years is typical,” he said. “Labor is even more locked in. Trades depend on immigrant workers, and immigration policies have been unfavorable for the last few years. Permits are taking longer. All of these add up.”
The NAHB / Wells Fargo HMI is derived from a monthly survey the association has conducted for more than 40 years. It gauges builders’ perceptions of current single-family home sales and their sales expectations for the next six months, scoring each component on a seasonally adjusted scale, with 50 as the dividing line between expansion and contraction.