Zillow says MRED, Compass used MLS rules to pressure its listing standards

Zillow: Group boycott to protect private listing networks

In her opening, Zillow attorney Bonnie Lau framed the dispute as a classic antitrust case over access to an essential input. According to Lau’s arguments, Zillow says its business model depends on comprehensive, timely listings, especially brand-new listings that generate the most consumer engagement and lead volume. Errol Samuelson, Zillow’s chief industry development officer, testified that new listings are “the lifeblood” of Zillow’s platform.

According to exhibits shown during Samuelson’s testimony, on “day zero” when a listing first hits the market, it averages nearly 180 page views on Zillow. By day five, that falls to around 60 views per day and continues to decline. Serious buyers focus on the freshest inventory, and that is where Zillow generates the most agent connections and referral revenue.

Additionally, Samuelson testified that PLNs restrict seller exposure and reduce competition, deny buyers access to the full set of available homes, pull agents and consumers toward the largest brokerages that control off-market inventory, raising barriers for smaller firms and increase the number of agents or firms double-ending deals.

“We think they’re harmful for consumers. We think they’re harmful for sellers. They’re bad for buyers. We think they reduce competition in the real estate industry,” Samuelson said of PLNs.

Zillow’s listing access standards and Preview product

Samuelson also answered questions regarding Zillow’s listing access standards policy, which the firm debuted in April 2025, before rolling out the application of the policy nationwide in late June 2025.  The standards, applied on a listing-by-listing basis, are designed to discourage “selective or gated marketing” while preserving true seller privacy choices, Samuelson testified.

In his testimony, Samuelson said “truly private” listings — such as office exclusives, which he acknowledged are the “least transparent kind of listing,” for sellers with privacy concerns — remain permissible, but only if the seller signs a waiver acknowledging reduced exposure and the listing is not broadly promoted online behind a simple registration gate.

Samuelson stressed that the standards are tied to how a listing is marketed, not who the listing broker is. He also testified that if a seller fires the original agent and lists with a new agent, Zillow will display that property, even if it was previously in a PLN, because it does not want to “penalize the new agent” or the seller a second time.

Beyond the standards, Zillow launched Zillow Preview in March 2026 as a premarket tool that it says competes directly with PLNs but with full transparency. Samuelson described Preview as a “trailer for a movie”: Consumers cannot tour the home yet but can see that it is “coming soon” and register interest.

MRED and Compass: Zillow is trying to weaponize MLS data

In opening statements and testimony from their witnesses, who included Chris Haran, MRED’s chief technology officer and managing director, and Fran Broude, a Compass regional vice president, the defendants rejected Zillow’s framing and said the real issue is Zillow’s attempt to use MLS data to force a particular business model on competitors.

MRED’s counsel, Stephen Libowsky, argued that MRED’s “objective criteria” rule is a neutral, long-standing requirement designed to preserve data integrity and ensure that no MLS participant can use listing display as a “sword or shield” against competitors. That rule, he said, is grounded in the 2008 DOJ–NAR settlement, which required MLSs to give equal access to listings to prevent incumbents from blocking online entrants.

Under those principles, MLS participants can filter or sort listings on objective property characteristics — such as price, property type, location or features — but not based on the identity or marketing strategy of the listing broker or agent, Libowsky said. He told the court that MRED has enforced that non-discrimination framework for nearly two decades and across thousands of brokerages of all sizes.

Conversely, Libowsky characterized Zillow’s listing access standards as an attempt to “weaponize MLS data” to coerce sellers and agents away from competing marketing strategies, including Compass’s multi-phase marketing program. He said Zillow’s own documents admit that the standards are “designed to get sellers to switch brokers.”

Zillow, he argued, is free to pursue its preferred transparent, all-on-MLS-first model but cannot use MLS feeds — which are governed by neutral participation rules — to punish brokers that do not adopt that model. In his telling, MRED repeatedly warned Zillow, beginning when the standards were announced in 2025, that banning listings based on how they were previously marketed would violate MRED’s rules and the parties’ license agreement.

Instead of changing course, Libowsky said, Zillow “played hardball” and now seeks to label ordinary contract enforcement as an antitrust conspiracy.

Compass counsel Nate Eimer focused on three main themes

Those themes were: Absence of a conspiracy, the lack of antitrust injury and Zillow’s inability to show irreparable harm.

On conspiracy, Eimer argued that Compass acted unilaterally and lawfully when it complained to MRED and other MLSs about Zillow’s listing bans. Discovery, Eimer said, shows that Zillow’s enforcement was overwhelmingly directed at Compass. Of roughly 1,500 listings banned under the standards in the relevant period, he said, all but eight were Compass listings. 

Regarding antitrust injury, Eimer told the court that the antitrust laws protect competition and output — not a particular firm’s business strategy. Zillow’s alleged injury is its inability to reduce output by banning listings it disfavors. Unless a restraint reduces the number of homes available to consumers, he said, there is no antitrust problem. 

Finally, on irreparable harm, Compass emphasized that any harm to Zillow is “entirely self-inflicted” and compensable with monetary damages. Zillow has never enforced its standards in the MRED region, Eimer claimed, even though MRED has had a PLN since 2016. During that period, Zillow became the dominant portal without enforcing the standards in Chicagoland. If Zillow loses MRED’s feed now, he said, it can restore access “the moment it leaves the courtroom” by agreeing to display the affected listings.

In contrast, Zillow’s chief financial officer Jeremy Hoffman testified that the harm from losing MRED’s feed cannot be reduced to a number. 

“If we lose access to listings, highly likely we lose access to consumers, we lose advertisers,” he said. “Our brand promise is broken.”

MRED’s rule change, Compass outreach and the Realtor.com deal

Samuelson’s testimony also detailed what Zillow says is a factual chain showing coordination between Compass and MRED.

In October 2025, Compass CEO Robert Reffkin emailed at least eight MLSs urging them to terminate Zillow’s feeds if Zillow enforced its listing access standards in their markets. Samuelson said he personally spoke with one of those MLSs; that MLS told him it would not cut Zillow off, concluded Zillow’s standards were objective and “appreciated” Zillow’s stance on transparency.

Less than two weeks after Reffkin’s outreach, MRED notified Zillow it was revising its IDX/VOW display rules. In an email, MRED said it wanted to “supply this issue for you to ensure your Zillow listing transparency policy, if implemented in our markets, is compliant.” The changes, which took effect October 29, 2025, added language barring websites from refusing to display listings based on the identity of the listing agent or brokerage.

MRED’s position, Samuelson said, was that Zillow’s standards now violated those revised rules. Zillow disagreed, arguing that the standards are applied objectively to listings’ marketing practices, not to particular firms, and offered to modify the language further to clarify that no broker-specific factors would be used. According to Samuelson, MRED rejected those proposed compromises. Due to a lack of alternative MLS options in the Chicagoland market, Samuelson said Zillow chose not to enforce its standards in the MRED footprint to avoid losing its local IDX/VOW feeds. 

In contrast, MRED and Compass said that the October 2025 notices regarding MRED’s rules was just a clarification of its longstanding policy, which MRED claimed Zillow had requested. 

In his testimony, Haran said: “We believed that the original rule already said that. We were asked for a clarification, and we added that clarification.”

What’s at stake

The legal question facing Judge Tharp is whether MRED’s enforcement of its clarified objective criteria rule — in response to Compass complaints and against a dominant portal — is a legitimate application of a neutral policy, or an unlawful group boycott designed to suppress a rival’s product and preserve private listing networks.

In an emailed statement, an MRED spokesperson told HousingWire that the “lawsuit is just a breach of contract case, not an antitrust conspiracy.”

“MRED is enforcing a neutral rule designed to maintain data integrity between brokerages and preserve the viability of MLSs as valuable services in the real estate industry,” the spokesperson added. “Zillow’s purported harm is entirely self-inflicted and can be remedied immediately by simply complying with the same clear and longstanding license agreement terms that Zillow has complied with for years.”

As the hearing continues on Thursday, the court is expected to hear testimony from MRED CEO Rebecca Jensen and Compass CEO Robert Reffkin, as well as two expert witnesses, Lawrence Wu, the president of NERA Economic Consulting, and attorney Debra Aron, who is the vice president of Charles River Associates’ Competition Practice. The witnesses are expected to testify on the competitive impact of PLNs, the scope of MRED’s market power and the feasibility of alternatives like direct feeds.

This article was written by Brooklee Han and generated with the assistance of HousingWire Automation, then reviewed by a HousingWire editor before publication.