Over half of all listings in Chicago vanished from Zillow on Wednesday morning as the portal and the region’s multiple listing service went to war over pre-marketed listings.

MRED, the newly national MLS based in Chicago, said that it had cut Zillow’s feed of listings in the region over a dispute related to pre-marketed listings early Wednesday morning.

“This morning, MRED suspended Zillow’s access to that listing data and asked them to remove listings from their websites that Zillow no longer has a license to display,” MRED said in a statement. “Continued display of MRED’s listing data is in violation of Zillow’s license agreement and federal copyright law.” 

At the time, there were nearly 5,000 active listings in the city of Chicago. Shortly after, listings began disappearing in batches of hundreds at a time, falling to a low point of 699 active listings as of around noon Central Time, a drop of 86 percent of its active listings.

Many of the listings that remained were from eXp Realty and NextHome, two companies that struck listing feed agreements with Zillow last year. Other listings were from EXIT Realty and for sale by owner.

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About an hour later, Zillow had 2,070 active listings in Chicago, or about 42 percent of the listings it had before its feed was cut.

Brokerage listing feed agreements have historically been a backup plan for Zillow to ensure that it has a source of listings in case its direct listing feed with an MLS is disrupted, as it was in Chicago.

EXIT Realty didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about whether it had signed a listing feed agreement with Zillow.

Zillow has been encouraging brokerages to sign their own listing agreements, including with a website called BeOnZillow.

However, Compass International Holdings, which represents approximately a third of the listings in Chicago, terminated its listing agreement with Zillow earlier this month.

MRED and Zillow disagreed on which one was actually violating the agreements that are in place to facilitate the distribution of active listings out of Chicago.

Zillow said that MRED’s license agreement allows it to block listings that started in a private listing network before being distributed widely via the MLS and portals like Zillow and Redfin.

In a statement, Zillow acknowledged that it was losing its supply of listings in Chicago.

“Chicagoland home buyers and sellers this morning have far worse access to the housing market than they had yesterday, because their local MLS decided one megabrokerage’s profits mattered more than their ability to achieve the American Dream,” a spokesperson for the company said in a statement.

Zillow sued MRED and Compass in a federal antitrust lawsuit last week, alleging that the two parties were working together to cut Zillow’s access to listings in Chicagoland.

The company asked the court to stop MRED from cutting its access to listings, which it said would cause “irreparable harm” to the company.

“Absent an injunction, Zillow will be forced to jettison its pro-transparency practices and aid competitors against its will, or else lose the essential listings necessary to compete, all of which would degrade Zillow’s services and irreparably harm Zillow’s platform, business, goodwill, and reputation,” the company said in a court filing earlier this week.

This is a breaking news story and will be updated.

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I sat with buyers recently who were fully qualified, actively searching and receiving listings every day. Thirty minutes into the conversation, they were not asking about pricing, neighborhoods or negotiation. They wanted to know whether another agent might have access to homes they were not seeing.

That conversation is becoming common.

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The buyers walking into our offices are not entering a centralized market. They are moving through listing apps, social media, AI-generated recommendations, private Facebook groups, open house conversations, agent texts and stories from friends who “heard about a house before it hit the market.”

Phrases like private inventory, off-market opportunities and exclusive access quietly reframe the search as an access competition instead of a decision process.

The result is a buyer who walks in already feeling behind. Before the tour. Before the offer. Before clarity.

We are still operating as if our primary value is access: access to homes, data, private inventory or the deal before the public sees it. Access still matters. But access is no longer where buyers feel stuck.

What they feel stuck on is interpretation.

Sit with buyers long enough, and the pattern is hard to miss. Most are not asking, “Is this the right home for my life?” They are asking, “What am I missing?” The first question creates discernment. The second creates reactivity. Reactive buyers chase, hesitate, second-guess, withdraw and exhaust themselves before they ever sign anything.

That anxiety is not a personality issue. It is the environment.

Information is not understanding

Here is where agents go wrong. We respond to that anxiety by doubling down on the thing buyers think they need. More listings. Faster alerts. Off-market leads. Urgency framing. We feed the access narrative because it makes us feel useful and because buyers are asking for it.

But feeding the access narrative makes buyers worse, not better.

It reinforces the idea that clarity comes from seeing more. It does not. A buyer can look at 20 homes online and still not understand which one supports the life they are building. A buyer can hear about 10 off-market opportunities and still not know which tradeoffs actually matter. A buyer can tour every weekend for two months and still remain unclear about timing, financial comfort, future flexibility or long-term fit.

Information is not understanding. Most buyers right now are drowning in information and starved for interpretation.

That is the gap. The industry is moving there whether agents recognize it yet or not.

The agents creating real value now slow conversations down instead of speeding them up. They ask questions before sending links. They explain, with calm authority, what the noise actually means and what to discount.

Four questions do most of the work:

• What problem are you actually trying to solve with this move?
• What are you comparing this decision against?
• Are you reacting to the property itself or to the fear that you may not see another one like it?
• Would this home still feel compelling if it were fully available to everyone tomorrow?

Those are not soft questions. They are the questions that prevent the regret call six months after closing.

Urgency has a way of disguising itself as certainty. When a buyer feels they might lose a home, that feeling reads internally as conviction. It is not conviction. It is acceleration. Part of the role now is recognizing the difference on behalf of someone who cannot, and being willing to say so out loud.

The agent role has already shifted

This can feel uncomfortable in an industry that often rewards momentum and speed. Slowing a buyer down can feel, in the moment, like risking the deal. In reality, it often creates stronger clients and healthier decisions.

The buyer who feels rushed into a decision rarely sends their friend to you. The buyer who feels oriented does.

The clients most damaged by the access-competition framing are often the thoughtful buyers making long-term, life-aligned decisions: relocators, downsizers, upsizers, buyers timing a purchase to a larger life transition. Their decisions deserve the most interpretation and are often receiving the least. Many are being handed listings when what they actually need is orientation.

If you want to know whether you are operating in the new role or the old, look at the first 30 minutes of your buyer conversations. If you are showing buyers what you can access, you are still competing on the old axis. If you are helping them understand what they are actually deciding, you have already moved.

The brokerages and agents who figure this out will not look like the ones that dominated the last decade. They will look more like advisors and less like distributors. They will sound more like counsel and less like sales. They will be measured less by speed of response and more by quality of decision.

The buyer sitting across from you does not need another listing alert. They need someone who can explain what’s signal, what’s noise and why.

That is the work now.

And as access becomes increasingly commoditized, interpretation may become the part of the role that grows more valuable instead of less.

Chicago’s multiple listing service confirmed on Monday that Zillow would go dark in the region by Wednesday morning if it continued to enforce its policy around pre-marketed listings.

MRED said for the first time publicly that it would cut the property listing data feeds to Zillow’s platforms, including Zillow and Trulia. 

The threat, which was alluded to in Zillow’s lawsuit filing against MRED and Compass International Holdings last week, comes in response to Zillow’s blocking of listings that originate in private listing networks.

“The rules of this MLS exist to protect every participating broker and every consumer who relies on a complete and accurate picture of the market,” MRED CEO Rebecca Jensen said in a statement. “Those rules apply equally to every participant, regardless of the size of their audience or the reach of their platform. MRED enforces its rules consistently and fairly, and hopes that Zillow returns to operating consistent with its longstanding agreements with MRED.”

It’s hard to say exactly what percentage of listings Zillow stands to lose if it doesn’t back down, though it is likely at least a third and likely much higher. A Zillow representative declined to provide that figure. Zillow wrote in its complaint last week that MRED controls around 98 percent of listings in the region.

Compass moved earlier this month to terminate its listing feed to Zillow for all of its brands, Zillow said in its complaint. The agents under that megabrokerage umbrella are responsible for over one-third of the listings in the MRED market.

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The impending blackout would represent a dramatic escalation in the battle between Zillow, MRED and Compass.

“The choice to comply with MRED’s reasonable IDX and VOW rules — and avoid feed interruption — is Zillow’s to make,” MRED wrote. “MRED hopes that Zillow makes the right choice, for the sake of all of MRED’s brokers, agents, sellers, buyers and the rest of the MLS marketplace that relies on an orderly system of cooperation.”

In a filing made earlier on Monday, Zillow asked the judge in its federal lawsuit to stop MRED from acting on its threat.

The company said that MRED and Compass had forced it to make “an impossible decision” that would harm Zillow and consumers. In a new statement sent after MRED’s public threat to cut its feed, Zillow said that MRED was overstepping its bounds on behalf of Compass. 

“If MRED follows through, Chicago sellers will lose access to millions of buyers, Chicago buyers can no longer see all available homes, and thousands of independent agents will lose leads,” a Zillow spokesperson said in a statement. “All to protect one brokerage’s hidden listing scheme in markets MRED has never served.”

MLS expansion wave

MRED is among a group of at least four large MLSs that have expanded nationwide and changed their rules to prohibit any of their members from blocking listings based on a brokerage.

Now that its reach is nationwide, MRED rules effectively seek to prevent Zillow from banning a listing that was publicly marketed while in a private status in markets far beyond Chicago.

Realtracs in Nashville, The MLS CLAW in Los Angeles and BrightMLS in the mid-Atlantic have also made rule changes and nationwide expansions in recent weeks. Each of the four MLSs also secured listing feeds from Compass as part of their expansions.

In its complaint, Zillow alleged that MRED threatened to cut its MLS data feed over its ban on listings that were in Florida, Georgia and California.

“MRED will not suspend Zillow’s data feed if it brings its websites into compliance,” MRED wrote.

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