Is a new portal model coming for our listing inventory?

I’d like to share a New York expression because it’s very appropriate for this situation. “Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, I should slap myself in the head.”

I am watching colleagues I respect, smart people in this industry, telling agents to get on board with the new Google listing pilot. Set up your pages. Top of mobile search. Free exposure. Do not miss out.

Think before you do, as this may be portal 1.0 all over again.

What’s happening on Google right now

Mike DelPrete flagged on May 17 that the HouseCanary and Google listing pilot is back after going dark earlier this year. It is now live in eight markets: Chicago, Miami, Cleveland, Austin, the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, San Diego, and New York. Listings flow in from three MLSs and show up at the top of Google mobile search with a “Request a tour” button for buyers.

Here is the part my colleagues and the MLSs are missing. HouseCanary, which owns ComeHome, is not a tech vendor. On its own LinkedIn page, it calls itself an “AI-powered national real estate brokerage” and a “50-state brokerage.” It is licensed as a brokerage in Kansas, New Mexico and South Carolina, and operates as ComeHome in most other states. It also runs a separate business selling property data to, in its own words, “ten of the top buyers of residential loans on Wall Street, six of the top mortgage lenders and seven of the top single-family housing REIT operators.”

So, your listing flows through a competitor brokerage’s website, into the data warehouse of a company that sells to Wall Street, and out onto Google.

Is this the Zillow playbook all over again?

Remember Zillow’s business model progression:

Phase 1. “We are going to help you get more eyes on your listings. Free placement.” Agents signed up. Brokers fed listings. Free traffic looked great.

Phase 2. “We are where buyers start. Most consumers begin their search with us.” Once Zillow became the default starting point, leverage moved.

Phase 3. “You want the leads on the listings you brought us? Pay us. You want priority placement? Pay us more. You want your name on your listings? Pay us.”

We built Zillow’s empire by feeding it our listings. Then Zillow rented them back to us.

HouseCanary is in Phase 1 right now. Same opening pitch. Same friendly tone. “Get on Google. Top of mobile. Do not miss out.” Sound familiar?

If this scales to Phase 2 and 3, the monetization may shift. Do you think Google and HouseCanary will keep the “Request a Tour” button free forever. Once Google becomes the default starting point, the monetization phase may begin, whether through ad bidding, pay-per-lead models or data pipelines feeding Wall Street.

4 things agents may give up when they opt in

If you put your listings into this pipeline, here is what you may trade away.

You put the buyer journey inside a competitor’s website. HouseCanary says the pilot includes listing-agent attribution and click-to-contact. That sounds great in the pitch. But the consumer’s entire experience, the photos, the property details, the tour request, is happening inside ComeHome, a platform operated by a company that HousingWire’s own reporting noted displays results that are “not supplied or sponsored by listing agents or brokers.”

The buyer’s next click is not on your website. It is not on your MLS display. It is inside a brokerage platform you do not control. Today, it routes to you. In the future, it may routes wherever ComeHome decides. There is nothing in the public terms that prevents the model from changing, and if you have been in this industry long enough, you know it will. This is the Zillow Premier Agent lesson. The lead routing is friendly until it is not.

You feed a competitor brokerage with your inventory. HouseCanary is not just a tech vendor. It is a licensed brokerage operating in all 50 states, according to its website’s footer brokerage disclosures. When you put your listing on ComeHome, you are handing a competing brokerage a marketing asset it uses to win consumers in your market. It does not matter that the pitch is free exposure. You are building someone else’s platform with your listings.

You hand your data to a company that sells to Wall Street. ComeHome’s privacy policy says it collects inferences about consumers based on their search history, browsing history and favorite properties. HouseCanary’s own website [homepage client section] says it serves four out of five of the top buyers of residential whole loans on Wall Street, six of the top 10 single-family rental REIT operators and the biggest mortgage lenders in the country. Both of those facts are public.

Here is the question nobody has answered: What is the relationship between the consumer behavior data ComeHome collects from your listings and the institutional data products HouseCanary sells? Because right now, the Wall Street funds competing for the same homes your buyers want are paying HouseCanary for data. And you are feeding the platform that generates it?

You hand them the leverage to possibly charge you later. Right now, the pitch is free exposure on Google. But if consumers start their home search on Google through ComeHome, the leverage shifts. Nothing stops HouseCanary, three years from now, from charging for placement or routing leads to preferred agents. That is the gap other portals exploited.

The scale pressure sitting behind all if it

MyStateMLS.com is one of the sources feeding the Google pilot. It is a private, for-profit company running on agent subscription fees.

A massive national brokerage like Compass commands tens of thousands of top-producing agents. What happens if it pushes a slice of its agent base to subscribe to an alternative platform like MyStateMLS?

The brokerage doesn’t need to buy the platform. It just needs to become the customer the platform cannot afford to lose. Once you reach that leverage, you can demand favors: display preferences, integrations with private listing tools, quiet accommodations. This is the Walmart problem. Walmart didn’t buy its suppliers; it became too big for them to say “no.”

When the Google pilot pulls listings out one end and massive brokerages exert economic pressure on alternative platforms at the other end, the local cooperative MLS gets squeezed in the middle.

The roadmap: How the industry must respond

The pilot is back, and the industry cannot afford to treat this as another tech test. If we do not draw a hard line, we are choosing to repeat the portal era. Three groups must take immediate, coordinated action:

For MLS Leadership: Build a National Federation

The instinct in this moment is to push for a national MLS. I have written elsewhere about why that is not the answer. A national MLS hands the same control problem to whoever runs the system.

What we need is a national federation. Think independent states coordinating under a federal framework, or independent banks coordinating through a shared clearinghouse. Each local and regional MLS stays independent and locally governed, with its own membership, fees and rules above a shared floor.

The federation coordinates what needs consistency: minimum standards for private listing disclosure, baseline IDX rules, restrictions on third-party brokerage-owned portals using listing data as advertising inventory, and joint negotiating power against Google, Zillow, HouseCanary, and Compass-scale brokerages that pressure MLSs one at a time.

The benefits are what the industry does not have right now. Collective bargaining power no single MLS can match. A shared floor that prevents any MLS from being squeezed into accommodations. Distributed governance that makes it harder for a single brokerage to capture the rules through ownership, subscription pressure, or back-channel access. Local control preserved, with a national voice where local control alone is not enough.

That is a federation. Not consolidation. A network of independent MLSs strong enough to act together when the moment requires it.

Darryl Davis, CSP, has spoken to, trained, and coached more than 600,000 real estate professionals around the globe. He is a bestselling author for McGraw-Hill Publishing, and his book, How to Become a Power Agent in Real Estate, tops Amazon’s charts for most sold book to real estate agents.

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]