By admin1
As the fight over private listings, portal access and multiple listing service rules intensifies, one industry insider is urging MLSs to rethink one of the industry’s central assumptions: that submitting a listing to the MLS should automatically send it onto the public internet.
In a new white paper, Victor Lund, founder and managing partner of consulting firm WAV Group, argues that MLSs should preserve mandatory submission to the cooperative, while treating public display through IDX, syndication and other consumer-facing channels as a separate decision controlled by the seller and brokerage.
Lund frames that process as the “Listing IPO” method, comparing the launch of a listing on the public internet to a company going public after a period of private preparation.
“The MLS becomes the pre-public cooperative where brokers prepare, position and transact,” Lund writes in the paper. “Public display becomes a deliberate event through the MLS when the seller chooses that the timing is right, not an automatic consequence of submission to the MLS.”
The argument arrives as industry conflict over private listings, Clear Cooperation, Zillow’s portal access and Compass’ private exclusive strategy has hit a fever pitch — and as MLSs across the country, including MRED and Realtracs, have moved to expand coming-soon and private listing options.
During a conversation with Inman, Lund said the paper was not sponsored, commissioned or shaped by Compass or any other outside party. He said Compass is not currently a WAV Group client. Lund acknowledged that some of the language in the paper overlaps with Compass’ own messaging around seller choice and listings that are “private but not hidden,” but rejected the idea that he is defending brokerage-only private exclusives.
“I hate private exclusives. I’m not into private exclusives. What I’m actually arguing for is all listings should immediately go into the MLS,” Lund told Inman.
A ‘Listing IPO’ model
Lund’s central distinction is between listings that are withheld from the MLS entirely and listings that are submitted to the MLS but not yet displayed publicly through IDX, syndication or portals. In the paper, he argues that a listing can be inside the MLS cooperative, available to participating agents and their buyers, without being broadly distributed across the open internet.
“Private does not mean hidden,” Lund said. “They’re hiding them from IDX, from public display. They’re not hiding them from anybody working with a real estate agent participating in the MLS.”
In the paper, he argues that the industry has spent years treating the MLS as a pipeline to public display rather than as a professional marketplace in its own right. Under the “Listing IPO” model, the MLS would remain the place where listings are submitted, standardized, shared and transacted among professionals. Public marketing would come later, if and when the seller and brokerage decide broader exposure serves the sale.
Lund said Clear Cooperation blurred that line by forcing listings toward public exposure before brokers had finished preparing them for market.
“Real estate has always worked this way. It just was never enforced this way,” Lund said.
He argued that some MLSs responded to Clear Cooperation with overly punitive enforcement systems, including large fines when brokers began marketing a property before the listing was fully ready for public launch.
“Some MLSs have these draconian rules that they adopted, and policies and behaviors, really, that they adopted after Clear Cooperation,” Lund said. “They were enriching themselves with enforcement.”
Lund pointed to Marin County and parts of the San Francisco Bay Area as examples of markets where sellers often complete inspections, evaluate repairs and prepare disclosures before a listing is publicly launched. That sequence, he argued, can create a mismatch between the MLS clock and the moment a home is actually ready for broad consumer marketing.
“In that market area, when you get a listing, the first thing you do is call the home inspector,” Lund said. “Then they inspect the home, and then you sit down with the seller, and you determine whether or not you’re going to fix it or provide seller concessions and disclosures. Then you take the listing to market.”
But Lund also said the same rules may not make sense everywhere. In some markets, he said, brokers see the private listing debate as largely irrelevant because they rarely use those statuses.
“If you’re in South Carolina, why are you worried about that stuff?” Lund said. “But they do need to worry about getting brokers to contribute listings to the MLS.”
That tension points to whether MLSs should rewrite their rules around practices that may be critical in some luxury or high-cost markets, but much less common elsewhere.
MLSs at a crossroads
The white paper is not just a defense of coming-soon listings, but also serves as a warning to MLSs.
Lund argues that MLSs risk losing their central role if they continue to treat public distribution as the default outcome of MLS submission. In the paper’s closing section, he writes that MLSs that move first will be the ones broker participants align with, while those that wait risk being “acquired, federated or replaced.”
In other words, “the MLS isn’t just a vehicle to push listings out to public websites,” Lund said to Inman.
His view is that MLSs should define themselves around mandatory submission, cooperation, data quality and compliance — not around marketing decisions that he believes belong to brokers and sellers.
“The MLS has no business in marketing,” Lund said. “Now, IDX is a conveyance of permission that allows another broker to publish your listing.”
That view could have major implications for the balance of power among MLSs, brokerages and portals. If MLSs become primarily cooperative submission and compliance layers, large brokerages may have more room to build their own listing infrastructure, direct feeds or brokerage-controlled distribution systems.
The industry is already moving in that direction. Zillow has pushed brokerages toward direct-feed relationships amid disputes over MLS access and display rules, while HomeServices of America and others are working with Cotality on BLX, a brokerage-controlled listing exchange.
Lund said enterprise brokerages are increasingly forced to develop contingency plans because inconsistent MLS policies can disrupt their operations across markets.
“Enterprise-level brokerages have to create contingency planning because they can’t be subjected to the erratic wind shifts of boards of directors that are creating wacky policies that impact their ability to deliver their services in the marketplace,” Lund said.
But he also said those systems do not necessarily mean abandoning the MLS. Instead, he argued, brokerages may need more control over their own listing data before pushing it into MLS systems and public channels.
“If I’m a broker trying to manage compliance, I want to curate that listing in my own system, run compliance in my own system, and then push it to the MLS,” Lund said.
Portal conflict and broker control
The paper also takes aim at portal-mediated referral models, arguing that the “Listing IPO” framework helps avoid conflicts of interest embedded in referral compensation and downstream data monetization.
Lund said Zillow is running an effective communications campaign around the private listing fight, but he argued that the company’s business model depends on listings moving quickly into public display.
“Zillow has access to every listing that’s in the private listing network today, because they’re a broker,” Lund said. “They just can’t display it on their website, and they’re mad about it.”
He added that Zillow agents or broker participants can still access listings inside the MLS, even if those listings are not available for public display on Zillow.com.
“There’s nothing that prevents Zillow real estate agents from logging into the MLS, or getting the data through the broker back-office feed, or working with buyers and sellers in the MLS who may be interested in listings that are coming soon,” Lund said. “Oh, except, they don’t actually have real estate agents.”
For critics, however, that distinction may not resolve the broader concern that limiting public display could reduce transparency for consumers and create advantages for large brokerages with deeper agent networks, stronger internal platforms and more control over listing distribution.
Lund’s answer is that the MLS should remain the mandatory place where listings are submitted and shared with the brokerage community. But the broker, not the MLS, should control how the listing is marketed.
“That’s the broker’s job,” Lund said. “The MLS should supply those services. Like, you have the data. If I wanted to go to Timbuktu, send it there. That’s why we have listing syndication, and we have IDX.”
In that sense, Lund’s paper offers a pro-MLS argument with a narrower definition of what MLSs should be — arguing that MLSs need to separate their cooperative function from the public-display systems that have come to define the consumer-facing home search experience.
“The broker can do whatever they want with their listing,” Lund said. “But if you’re syndicating your data, you better read the terms of use.”
