Should America’s agents own their own MLS and home search portal?

I’ve been in this business for 50 years. My father was in it for 50 before me. And in all that time, I cannot think of a single moment when the people who actually do the work in American real estate had less say over how that work gets shared, marketed and monetized than they do right now.

We take the listings. We walk the homes. We sit at the kitchen tables. We negotiate the deals. And then, somewhere between the listing agreement and the closing table, we hand the keys to our business over to companies that have never sold a house in their lives. It’s time for an agent-owned national MLS or portal.

Maybe it’s time we stopped

I want to float an idea. It may make some powerful industry leaders uncomfortable, and that’s alright. The agents who take the listings should own the platform where those listings are shared with each other and presented to the public. Not a vendor. Not a portal. Not a tech company in Seattle. Us.

Let me be clear about something first. I have enormous respect for the MLS model. The local MLSs were built by hardworking people, and the underlying idea, agents pooling their listings so every agent and their buyer has a fair shot at every home, is one of the most beautiful cooperative ideas any American industry has ever produced. That part isn’t broken.

What’s broken is that the cooperative tool we built for ourselves has been layered, year after year, with rules we no longer set, fees we no longer control, and mandates we never voted on. And the public-facing side of our work has quietly been carried off by third parties that built billion-dollar audiences on the back of our listings and now sell that audience right back to us.

That isn’t a conspiracy. It’s just what happens when professionals stop paying attention.

Let’s pay attention

Picture this with me. One national MLS. Every listing in America in one place. Owned by the agents who take those listings. Every member an owner. Every owner a shareholder. The shareholders elect a board. The board hires the people who run it. If you’re a member, you get to use it and you get a vote in how it’s run. The cost? No more than what we already pay the MLSs and the portals that earn billions from our work.

Inside this platform, every agent in America sees every listing by every agent in America. Any city, any price point, shared within one business day of signing. From that first day forward, no agent in this country is in the dark about what’s for sale, who has it and how to reach the listing agent directly. We DM each other inside the platform, send referrals, agree on referral fees, and close the loop without ever leaving the system. AI runs underneath all of it.

Then comes the second piece. The piece that changes the industry forever.

A public-facing site, fed by us, the agents who represent the sellers and know the homes. Our listings all presented together on one website, with accurate data straight from the listing agent. No buyer inquiry diverted to a stranger who paid for leads that month. No “offer guides.” No games. Just every home in America, presented honestly, with the listing agent’s name on the door.

We all agree to share listings

All of us agree to share listings with each other inside our MLS. But each of us decides when, or whether, our listings go on the public-facing site. Immediately, in a few weeks, or never. You would have complete marketing freedom. Promote your listings anywhere you choose, whenever you choose, however you choose. The public site is yours to use, not a mandate to follow. But ask yourself why you wouldn’t use the site you own, the one place every buyer in America comes to find a home because that’s where the listings are.

Now let’s talk numbers, because visions without arithmetic are just daydreams. Between 5 and 6 million homes are listed for sale in this country every year. A modest upload fee of $100 per listing generates roughly half a billion dollars a year. Every year. To operate the platform, upgrade the technology and market the site to every homebuyer in America. Approved vendor advertising grows the number from there.

The buildout is funded by outside venture capital, with a clear agreement that the industry buys the investors out at a fair profit once revenues come in. The investors get a strong return. The agents get the platform back. Everyone wins. I already know a firm likely to fund it, provided enough of us commit in advance to using it.

What happens to the existing home search portals?

That’s their business to figure out. If they had served us well, if they hadn’t tried to dictate how we market homes, hadn’t used our listings to harvest buyers and sell them back to us, hadn’t filed lawsuits arguing we should be forced to use them, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. But they did. And we are.

What happens to the existing MLSs? That part matters to me, because the people who run them are not the villains in this story. They are colleagues. Many are friends. The vision is to offer to buy them, fairly and at full value, so the entities and individuals who own them today walk away whole, with a real return on the years and dollars they invested.

This isn’t about taking anything from anyone. It’s about an industry quietly assuming stewardship of a model it should have owned all along, because we are the ones who power it. We consolidate the MLSs we acquire into one national MLS we own, and we retain as many of their employees and managers as we can. The MLS model lives on. The MLS people keep their jobs. What changes is who answers to whom.

Mark Twain said the two most important days of a person’s life are the day they are born and the day they figure out why. I think a great many of us are about to figure out why we’re really here.

Every great shift in American industry was led by the people inside it who stopped waiting for permission.

The railroads. The airlines. The auto makers. The internet companies. None of them asked the middlemen who fed off them whether change was permitted. They simply changed, and the world changed with them.

That’s where we are. That’s what this moment is.

We are the industry. We are the ones who take the listings, walk the homes, sit at the kitchen tables, and put families into houses they love. The portals are a middleman we invited in thirty years ago and forgot to ever ask to leave. The rules we never voted on are rules we are free to outgrow. Marketing freedom is not a privilege a vendor grants us. It is ours by right.

One MLS. One affiliated home search portal. One group of owners. Every agent in America. Built by us, for us, and for the buyers and sellers we serve.

It really is that simple. And it really is up to us.

A note: The views in this article are mine alone, offered as a 50-year industry veteran. They do not represent the positions of any company I work with or any organization I am associated with. If this idea draws fire, that fire belongs to me.

Greg Hague is a 50-year real estate veteran and attorney. He is the founder of 72SOLD, named one of America’s 250 fastest-growing privately held businesses by Inc. 5000, and was recently appointed Director of Home Sales Strategy for the Compass International Holdings family of real estate brands.

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

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