While some industry leaders feel that the MLS is both “anti-consumer” and “anti-competitive,” punishing brokers who dare to do things differently by levying fines against rule breakers, others in the industry share a very different view on the MLS.
“The whole purpose of the MLS originally was to be an open marketplace where brokers could bring all of their clean data, making it easier for everyone to do business so the market wasn’t so fragmented,” said Boomer Foster, the founder of Paul Wesley Real Estate and the former president of Long & Foster. “For me, the business owner of a smaller company, the MLS helps level the playing field. If a brokerage with a significant market share tries to sell its listings off the MLS, it puts agents and buyers who are represented by other brokerages at a competitive disadvantage because they don’t get to see the totality of what is on the market.”
Leveling the playing field
Like Foster, Steven Koleno, the vice president of consumer empowerment of Spot Real Estate and the designated broker of beycome.com, also feels the MLS, as a source of timely, accurate and complete listing data, has been key to his ability to succeed as a broker. Koleno operates as a high volume listing broker, listing properties on the MLS for consumers looking to sell their home without the aid of a full service listing broker. In 2025, Koleno recorded 2,083 transaction sides totalling $701.97 million in sales volume according to RealTrends Verified data.
While Koleno does offer full service brokerage services, listing roughly 70 to 150a year as a full service broker, the majority of his impressive transaction side count comes from his work as an MLS-only broker.
“It’s not that I’m smarter or a better agent, but I sold 340 homes last month and the average agent at some of the large national firms was not even close,” Koleno said. “When those brokers say the MLS is anti-competitive, maybe it’s actually that they can’t compete with brokers like me because their average agent sells six sides a year.”
Koleno noted that data from the National Association of Realtors (NAR) shows that roughly 17% of all home sales are done through limited service or MLS-only listing brokers.
“The only way we can do the volume that we do is because the MLS works, and it is competitive,” Koleno said. “The MLS is how, not only guys like me, but small independent brokers compete.”
In addition to enabling the growth of his MLS-only business, Koleno also credits the MLS with allowing him to provide more choices for sellers who may not want to sell their home with a traditional real estate agent.
“I provide sellers with an option to sell their home through the most powerful platform out there, the MLS, for just $99,” Koleno said. “These brokers touting ‘seller choice’ are providing consumers with two options private and on the MLS and that isn’t true seller choice.”
Jessica Edgerton, the CEO of the Council of MLSs (CMLS), who recently joined the MLS trade group after several years serving as the chief legal officer of the Leading Real Estate Companies (LeadingRE) network, shares a similar view on how the MLS has enabled smaller, independent firms to compete and thrive.
“The reason I decided to join CMLS was because I felt so passionately about the MLS as one of the primary key drivers of a healthy, pro-consumer, pro-competition real estate ecosystem,” Edgerton said. “When I joined and what I feel even more strongly now, is that the MLS is one of the primary protections for the brokerage space of anti-competitive monopolizations. The MLS provides an incredible opportunity for small and mid-sized brokerages to maintain their independence and stand on equal footing with some of the national mega brokerages we are seeing emerge.”
The value of the MLS
In two companion white papers released in the fall of 2023, CMLS sought to quantify and explain the value of MLSs. One paper, The Value of the MLS: How Multiple Listing Services Benefit Consumers and Advance Real Estate Competition, was prepared for CMLS and dated October 2023. The white paper describes the MLS as the “bedrock foundation” of the residential real estate industry and makes several core arguments, noting the timeliness, accuracy, consistency and completeness of the MLSs’ listing data.
A second memorandum, Explaining the Economic Value of the MLS, was prepared by Edgeworth Economics in September 2023 at the request of CMLS and its counsel. The memorandum approaches MLSs from a competition and industrial organization perspective. It characterizes MLSs as cooperative information-sharing agreements among competing brokers that generate powerful “network effects.”
According to the memo, the more listings and participants an MLS has, the more valuable it becomes to both buyers and sellers. As buyers learn that an MLS is a reliable and complete source of homes for sale, they and their agents rely on it for search. Sellers in turn list on the MLS to reach this larger pool of buyers.
That dynamic, according to the memo, creates “thicker” markets where more buyers and sellers are able to find matches. The paper contends that restricting centralized MLS data-sharing would increase search costs, reduce listing exposure, weaken data quality and disadvantage smaller brokers, ultimately making the residential real estate market less efficient and competitive.
The paper also notes that competition authorities themselves have previously recognized MLS collaborations as potentially procompetitive, citing the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Department of Justice’s (DOJ) 2007 joint report on real estate brokerage.
Additionally, data from Doorify MLS shows that for roughly 94% of listings input into the MLS the buyer is represented by an agent at another brokerage.
“That’s an enormous number and that is the definition of the network effect,” Matt Fowler, the CEO of Doorify MLS, said.
Fowler also noted that a report Doorify MLS conducted with RealReports found that consumers who used a real estate professional that listed their home on the MLS received offers that were 20% more than those with comparable properties that were not sold through the MLS.
“We saw an average of a $90,000 lift for sellers that hired a professional that used the marketplace to sell their listing,” Fowler said.
In contrast to these studies, in mid-July 2026, Compass, one of the most vocal proponents of private listing networks, released its own report claiming that sellers’ whose properties began as a Compass Private Exclusive or a Compass Coming Soon sold their home for 4.6% more than sellers who immediately listed their property on the MLS and that the properties posted a 34% faster time to contract once they went active on the MLS.
The MLS and consumers
While Edgerton believes some consumers have very valid reasons for not wanting their listing broadly publicly marketed, she says that in the conversations surrounding private listings and the MLS, not enough consideration has been given to how withholding listings from the MLS could impact homebuyers and their agents.
“The MLS provides pro-competitive benefits to listing clients by giving them the ability to get the most eyes on their home and the best price on their most valuable asset, but it also ensures that buyers are able to engage in a very robust in holistic way with all of the inventory in a very tight marketplace,” Edgerton said. “It also allows consumers to engage with the brokerage and agent of their choice rather than being forced into engaging with a firm simply because that firm has a monopoly on inventory through off-MLS means.”
In Doorify MLS’s service area of North Carolina, Fowler said the listing data provided to brokers via the MLS allows their subscribers to compete with each other in a way that better serves consumers.
“We have a group of about 14,000 subscribers and most of them are small, independent offices and brokerages, some with only three agents, and the MLS allows them to compete on service quality and expertise rather than just access to data,” Fowler said. “We believe that innovation only happens when you focus on how you can better serve the consumer. Real estate professionals don’t have the best reputation, and it’s because we haven’t hyper focused on the pain points people have when they buy a house. We need to fix these things, not make it more convenient for us, but make it more transparent and accessible for them.”
As a broker, Foster said he welcomes competition as long as everyone is starting from the same location.
“If somebody is just that much more talented so they get more business, that is absolutely okay,” he said. “If you are doing it on the up and up, and you are just that much better then great — you are going to be the big winner. I’m perfectly ok with that, but where I find it challenging is when you aren’t doing it on the up and up.”
With industry players attempting to exert force on the MLSs to change their policies or loosen regulations around private or exclusive listings, it remains to be seen if brokers like Foster and Koleno will continue to reap the same level of competitive benefit they feel they currently receive through the MLS.