On July 22, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Administrative State, Regulatory Reform, and Antitrust sent letters to Compass and to Midwest Real Estate Data. Both letters ask for a briefing on private listing networks and on the data partnership the two companies announced in April. The subcommittee wants those briefings scheduled by 10 a.m. on August 5.

That is the news. Here is the part worth sitting with.

The subcommittee is asking a fair question. It wants to understand what happens to competition, and to buyers, when a real share of the homes for sale in a market are visible to some agents and invisible to everybody else. That is a reasonable thing for a lawmaker to wonder about.

It is also a question this industry has been asked, in one form or another, since 2020. We had every chance to answer it ourselves. We did not. And now the answer is going to get written by people who do not sit in our meetings.

Nobody gets to call this partisan

Look at the last seven months. In December, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ron Wyden wrote to the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission asking them to closely scrutinize the Compass acquisition of Anywhere. In May, Zillow took Compass and MRED to federal court in Chicago.

On July 1, a coalition of eight consumer, housing, and civil rights groups led by the Consumer Federation of America asked the FTC and DOJ to open an investigation. Three weeks after that, the House letters went out.

The December letter came from two Democratic senators. The July letter was signed by a Republican subcommittee chairman.

So let us put one idea to bed right now. There is no political shelter here. Nobody is riding this out until the other party takes the gavel. When people who agree on almost nothing start asking the same question about your industry, the question is not the problem.

We wrote a rule and left a door in it

Here is what stings. We saw this coming and we half fixed it.

The Clear Cooperation Policy was the right instinct. If you market a home publicly, put it in the MLS so every buyer’s agent can see it. Simple. Defensible. Easy to explain to a homeowner at a kitchen table.

Then we left the edges undefined. Coming Soon stayed. Office exclusives stayed. And nobody wrote clean rules about how long a listing could sit in either one, or whether a buyer working with an outside agent could get through the door while it did. Bright MLS looked at its own market and found that 47% of office exclusives moved through Coming Soon status.

Put a ‘No Parking’ sign on the block, then add “Except For Loading” underneath it. Now look out the window. Everybody on that street is loading.

That is not a scandal. That is what happens when you write a rule with a door in it and then decline to say how wide the door is. People walk through doors. That is what doors are for.

Every MLS did the sensible thing. Together it added up to nothing.

The second failure is harder to point at, because no single decision looks wrong.

Over the past year, MLSs have negotiated with the largest brokerage in the country one at a time. Every one of those conversations was rational from where that MLS was sitting. You have members to keep. You have listing volume to protect. You have a board asking why the MLS down the road cut a deal and you did not.

But an industry where every MLS negotiates alone against a single national counterparty is not an industry with a standard. It is a patchwork. And a patchwork is exactly what invites somebody with subpoena power to come define the terms for you.

To be fair, people did try. In May, CMLS and NAR both wrote to the Justice Department and the FTC, responding to a request for public comment on how competitors are allowed to work together. Both made the case that the MLS system is good for competition. Both were right. But making the case for the system is not the same as fixing the rule inside it, and the rule inside it is what everybody is fighting about.

What an outside rule looks like

Here is the practical problem with letting Washington settle this, and it is not a knock on Congress.

A rule written in Washington has to work in Manhattan and in Muncie on the same morning. It has to work in a market with 90,000 agents and a market with 900. Federal rules are blunt because they have to be. That is not a flaw in the people writing them. It is the nature of the instrument.

A rule written by MLSs can be tailored. It can account for a home that genuinely is not ready to show. It can account for a seller with a real privacy need. It can tell the difference between a two-week Coming Soon window and a listing that quietly sells inside one brokerage and never sees daylight. We can draw those lines with a scalpel. Legislation draws them with an axe, and then everybody lives with the cut for 20 years.

The window that is still open

None of this is over. The subcommittee asked for a briefing, not a bill. That is a meaningful difference and it is the whole opportunity.

Three things would change the conversation, and none of them require anyone’s permission.

One standard, defined the same way everywhere. That does not mean one national MLS. A single national system would hand the keys to whoever has the most agents, and local control is the thing worth protecting here. It means a standard every MLS can adopt for itself. What counts as public marketing. How long a listing may sit pre-market. Whether a buyer working with an outside agent can get in the door during that window. Written plainly, enforced the same in every market, with real consequences for ignoring it.

Disclosure the seller actually sees. Before a homeowner signs anything with a private or pre-market phase, they should see both columns. The benefits are real: more privacy, one point of contact. The trade offs are real too, like a lower price. A seller who sees both sides and still chooses a private start has made a choice. A seller who only sees one side got a pitch.

MLSs should be setting the standards together as one voice. This is the piece nobody has tried, and it is the one that matters most. Right now, a national brokerage sits down with nearly 500 MLSs separately, and every one of those conversations starts from zero. If the MLSs built the standard together first, and each one adopted and enforced it at home, there would be very little left to negotiate. Nobody gives up local control to do that. They just have to agree on the rule before the meeting instead of during it. That is not a fantasy. It is a meeting somebody has to call. That is not a wish list. It is a to-do list, and the deadline on it is being set by somebody else now.

We spent years arguing about whether private listings are good for sellers. That argument was never going to end in a conference room, and it is not ending in one now. It is moving to a hearing room. The only question left is whether we walk in with a standard of our own, or wait to be handed one.

Darryl Davis, CSP, is a real estate speaker, coach, and bestselling McGraw-Hill author who has trained more than 600,000 agents over 40 years in the business. His research on private listings was cited in the House Judiciary Subcommittee’s July 22, 2026 letter to Compass. He is based in Wading River, NY. www.DarrylSpeaks.com

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of HousingWire’s editorial department and its owners.

To contact the editor responsible for this piece: [email protected]

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