As Inman reported, Google’s home search experiment is back. At least three MLSs are feeding listings into the pilot through HouseCanary: CRMLS, San Diego MLS and My State MLS. EXp Realty is pushing all its listings and NextHome’s into the pilot through HouseCanary’s ComeHome platform.
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HouseCanary is a data company that became a licensed brokerage in all 50 states so it could pull MLS data through IDX feeds, the same way Zillow had to become a licensed brokerage to do what it does.
The listings are fed to HouseCanary, and then HouseCanary feeds them into Google Search. Google itself isn’t licensed as a broker anywhere. To accomplish this, Google didn’t have to ask anyone or negotiate with the National Association of Realtors. They went to a partner who had already done the work of becoming a broker on paper and plugged into the feeds.
HouseCanary, Zillow, Compass, Redfin: all licensed brokerages
The state brokerage license was designed to regulate transactional conduct, not data access.
But MLSs made every other path to that data impossibly hard.
Paper-broker IDX exists because operators couldn’t get listing data any other way — the MLSs themselves forced the workaround into existence. The brokerage license became a national data-access credential because the MLSs left no alternative.
A clear definition of who counts as a broker would have prevented this
NAR’s Participation Rule says brokers have to be “actively endeavoring” in brokerage to access an MLS. In 25 years, NAR has never defined what “actively endeavoring” means. No minimum transactions. No minimum agent count. No primary-business test. No revenue threshold. The phrase has lived in the rulebook as a placeholder for a standard nobody ever wrote.
The window to write it was open from 2008 to 2020
The 2008 DOJ consent decree had just settled, the terms of how MLSs had to treat online brokers were established, and the major tech players hadn’t yet figured out the brokerage-as-data-pass pattern.
A real definition written in any of those years would have given the MLSs actual authority to distinguish operating brokerages from tech companies using a license as a wedge. NAR didn’t write one.
The DOJ might have pushed back. We’ll never know, because nobody at NAR tested it
In September 2020, Zillow became a licensed brokerage in all 50 states. By January 2021, Zillow had switched its entire listing pipeline to IDX feeds. The DOJ stated this plainly in its 2024 statement of interest in the REX case: Zillow had to become a licensed brokerage to access IDX.
By then, the pattern was set. Any attempt now to tighten the standard would look exactly like the exclusionary conduct that lost NAR the 2008 case. The DOJ would notice the same week. NAR knows this — in June 2025, they rescinded their No-Commingling Rule under DOJ pressure rather than defend it in court.
The gate sits open. Anyone who pays the licensing fees and signs the MLS member agreement walks through
Google walking through that gate is a different category of event than Zillow walking through it. Google Search and Gemini are one product integration away from being the same product.
Whereas Compass, Zillow, Redfin and CoStar all use AI inside their products, Google builds the AI.
AI Overviews are already eating click-through traffic in publishing and e-commerce. Real estate is next. Consumers who used to click through to Zillow or Realtor.com to get an answer get it inside Google instead, from a $2 trillion company that runs roughly 90 percent of U.S. search.
The industry didn’t just sleep on the rules. It slept on delivering value to consumers
That’s the opening Rocket, Compass, Zillow, CoStar, News Corp and Google are moving through right now. The resources they’re bringing:
- Rocket Companies: $6.9 billion in 2025 adjusted revenue. Owns Redfin (50 million monthly visitors, 2,200 agents), plus Mr. Cooper’s servicing portfolio
- Compass: $7 billion in 2025 revenue. Closed @properties-Christie’s ($444 million) early 2025; Anywhere Real Estate ($1.6 billion) 2026
- Zillow: $2.6 billion in 2025 revenue and first full-year profit in company history
- CoStar/Homes.com: Lost $850 million on Homes.com in 2025; plans another $550 million loss in 2026
- News Corp/Move/Realtor.com: $552 million in 2025 revenue, supported by News Corp’s $10 billion parent
- Google: $2 trillion market cap. Approximately 90 percent of U.S. search. Building Gemini
- NAR: $360.8 million in 2024 revenue, 84 percent of it from member dues
The institution that wrote the rules of residential real estate operates on roughly the budget of a mid-sized hospital, against opponents whose annual losses dwarf its annual income.
NAR’s announced 2026 strategic response is a consumer advertising campaign with the premise that consumers think Realtors “just open doors” — a perception 25 years of unenforced MLS rules helped create.
NAR called the Realtor brand at launch “the most trusted real estate brand among consumers.” Four decades of Gallup polling on the honesty and ethics of real estate agents tell a different story — their standing in the most recent poll was statistically near a 40-year low.
No independent consumer research puts the Realtor brand on top.
But the fundamental issue here isn’t just that NAR is treating a structural problem as a perception problem; it’s that it’s treating a “problem” that doesn’t exist.
Consumers aren’t waiting for clarity on whether Realtors do more than open doors.
The real fight isn’t with consumers at all. It’s about who controls listing data and who writes the rules of how transactions get done.
None of that gets fixed with a 30-second spot
This is what stewardship failure looks like at industry scale. Picking the wrong fight in 2003. Losing it in 2008. Letting the participation rule sit undefined and unenforced for two and a half decades.
Charging members hundreds of dollars a year for a credential that became available to any tech company willing to pay state licensing fees. Now talking about Realtors as the “gold standard” while the real standards get written by Compass, Rocket, Zillow, CoStar, News Corp and Google.
There’s a fair argument that the economics of the brokerage business — splintered, low-margin, locally controlled — make national rule-setting impossibly hard for any trade association. It has merit.
It also doesn’t excuse 25 years of specific NAR decisions that closed doors they didn’t have to close.
The seat is empty either way, and the rules get written by whoever shows up with capital, distribution and a product roadmap.
The takeaway for everyone not on that list isn’t that NAR will fix this. It’s that NAR can’t.
Brokerages, MLSs, state associations and individual operators have a choice: Be part of writing the rules of what comes next or wait for a national body that isn’t coming back.
Waiting is a choice. It’s just not a winning one
But what’s happening in real estate isn’t unique to real estate.
The Atlantic ran a piece recently about things that used to exist for the public’s benefit being handed over to corporate greed. An excerpt:
“In America, little remains of what used to be called the public commons — the essential parts of life organized for mutual benefit rather than profit extraction. Hospitals, nursing homes, and insurance companies were once mostly nonprofit, run by local boards. No more. Education, from preschool to college, is being colonized by for-profit owners. Even utilities such as electricity and water, once treated as public goods, are being taken over by profit-obsessed investment firms.”
Residential real estate is on that list now.
The MLS was the closest thing the industry had to a commons — shared infrastructure that made the market function for everyone in it. It’s being absorbed by a handful of public companies and one $2 trillion AI company, and what comes out the other side gets optimized for shareholder returns, not for the people buying and selling homes.
The people writing the rules right now don’t need to ask anyone’s permission. They will keep writing them. The only thing that changes the outcome is whether the rest of the industry decides to write some, too.
Amit Kulkarni is co-founder of Alloy Advisors, and currently serves as Interim CEO at Homes for Heroes. Connect with him on LinkedIn.
