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The industry has spent the past month parsing the risks and benefits of upending the Clear Cooperation, a four-year-old National Association of Realtors policy that requires brokers to submit a listing to their multiple listing services within one business day of marketing a property to the public.
Zillow has become one of the fiercest proponents of Clear Cooperation, with senior leaders from across the company outlining the risks of repealing the rule, including undercutting consumer choice and information access and disadvantaging smaller brokerages who wouldn’t have the muscle to leverage private listing networks.
“If this rule goes away, every brokerage is going to be a pro-private listing network. And the agents who maybe now feel advantaged to work at a brokerage that has a private listing network will all of a sudden be disadvantaged, or just like every other agent when all this data becomes fragmented,” Zillow President Susan Daimler told Inman in October. “When you’re on the side of the consumer, you always win. Right? Agents who are on the side of the consumer [and] brokerages who are on the side of the consumer, those are the ones who ultimately win. Consumers know and understand that.”
Zillow Chief Industry Development Officer Errol Samuelson is also weighing in now. Samuelson said access to listing data is critical for all consumers in any market. Upholding and strengthening CCP and repealing NAR’s no-commingling rule, he said, helps to protect consumer choice by giving homebuyers and homesellers full, unencumbered access to listing data.
“The common thread between those two topics is transparency, and making sure that buyers and renters can see all of their housing options. That they’re not being restricted or gated in some way,” he said. “Since 2021, we’ve asked NAR on four separate occasions to consider revoking the no-commingling rule. There’s no need for it, and we think it reduces consumer transparency. Now, we’re seeing others out there who agree with us that it’s time for the rule to go.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Inman: A couple of weeks ago, I had the chance to speak with your colleague Susan Daimler about Clear Cooperation and Zillow’s stance on the issue. So, I’d love to start our conversation on the same topic. What’s your take on CC? Why do you think this debate has reemerged right now?
Samuelson: What this comes down to fundamentally is doing right by both sellers and buyers. There’s pretty clear evidence and lots of research that demonstrates that when sellers have the most exposure for their listings, they achieve the two main goals that sellers have, which is number one, get the best price. And number two, sell within their desired timeframe. When you restrict the audience and the competition for your listing, it’s harder to do those two things.
When you put a listing into a private network, sellers get hurt. Private networks, or “pocket listings,” are also bad for buyers. We’ve always believed in transparency at Zillow, and when listings sit behind a velvet rope in a private network, the only way that a buyer can get access to those listings is by being forced to work with the brokerages operating that network. It reduces that buyer’s choice. They may have an agent they’ve known for a long time, an agent they enjoy working with, who they click with and now they can’t work with that agent if they aren’t at the brokerage that operates the private network.
If you go back in time to the 2015 to 2019 time frame, which led to the impetus of the implementation of the Clear Cooperation policy, what you saw is in some markets, increasing numbers of listings were being held off-market, not just by one brokerage, but multiple brokerages. So now you’ve got the market broken up in a way that no one buyer can access all the listings because the listings are sitting in these different networks.
So [repealing CCP] is bad for sellers, bad for buyers, bad for competition, and quite frankly, also bad for fair housing because you create barriers for people to access all of their housing options.
Fair Housing aspect has been a major point of concern for those who support CCP. However, a common argument from opponents of CCP is that removing this rule isn’t going to impact the everyday buyer and seller, as it’s often luxury homesellers who want and need the privacy afforded by keeping their homes off the MLS. What would you say to that? What have past studies about private listing networks shown about the kinds of consumers who opt for this option?
First of all, I disagree with the privacy argument. Yes, there are some sellers who wish to keep their listing private. I disagree, though, because there are already mechanisms in place today to keep listing information private. So for example, MLSs have a tick box you can flag that let’s you say ‘no internet.’ As soon as you do that, that listing does not get sent to Zillow, Realtor.com or other sites on the internet.
Number two, you can suppress the address. The MLS enables you not to show the address if it’s a celebrity home or you’ve got other privacy concerns. You don’t have to show listing photos, like interior photos, you can literally show no photos, you can show a picture of a hedge. So the MLS today already supports mechanisms for privacy. We don’t need to remove Clear Cooperation to ensure that sellers can have privacy if they wish to have it.
Also, Clear Cooperation as it stands today does have the ability for a brokerage to keep the listing off the MLS completely and simply market it inside their brokerage. I’m not crazy about that option, but the option is there.
Beyond advocating for keeping CCP, Zillow has long pushed for the repeal of the National Association of Realtors’ No-commingling Rule. In your mind, how do these two viewpoints tie together? What’s the connecting thread?
The common thread between those two topics is transparency, and making sure that buyers and renters can see all of their housing options. That they’re not being restricted or gated in some way.
The No-commingling Rule has been around for more than 20 years and essentially says that if you’re displaying MLS listings on a website, you can’t show listings from other sources in the same search results. So imagine going to Google and you can get some of the search results, but if you want to see the rest of them, then you have to click on a different tab or go to a different page. It’s not the way that people search today.
Under that rule today, we can’t show, for example, an auction listing next to an MLS listing. If there’s a home builder who is building a new community, we can’t show those builders’ listings next to the MLS listings. And so what happens is a buyer may not be aware that they’re missing out, they’re not seeing those other listings in the main search results.
Since 2021, we’ve asked NAR on four separate occasions to consider revoking that rule. There’s no need for it, and we think it reduces consumer transparency. We’re seeing others out there who agree with us that it’s time for the rule to go.
When it comes to the pro-consumer point, there’s already been one major shift in the industry this year with buyer-broker commissions. Buyers and sellers are still working through that shift, and I wonder how they’d handle a change to CCP. Do you have a gauge of what consumers think about CCP and private listing networks? Are they even aware this debate is happening on their behalf? What do they need to know?
I don’t think [the everyday person] is aware of the CCP or the no-commingling rule, that’s very much inside real estate.
But I think if you ask [the everyday person], ‘Do you think you should be able to see all the listings that are on the market?’ I think they’d give you a resounding ‘yes.’ If you were to ask a seller ‘Would you like to make sure you get the highest sales price even though that means that your brokerage might only get half of the commission,’ I think they would also give you a resounding ‘yes.’
We’ve talked about how CCP impacts agents and consumers, but I’d love to touch on how its potential repeal could impact portals. I spoke with Susan about this a couple of weeks ago and she said Zillow is well-equipped to navigate an industry without CCP. But how would Zillow — and other portals — need to adjust their strategies if private listing networks became the name of the game? A big part of portals’ value proposition is providing a centralized spot for consumers to get listing information.
We are really well positioned. We have the category-leading brand. We have, by far, the largest consumer audience every month. We’re continuing to innovate on the consumer experience, for example with 3D home tours and floor plans. But we’re also innovating agent tools to help agents create a more seamless experience. So, we feel really good about where we sit.
It’s simply a matter of our core belief around transparency. Anytime, there’s something that can make it harder for a homebuyer to have transparency or for a seller to do price discovery, we don’t think that’s a good thing. So we’re going to continue speaking loudly on this topic because we believe that an open, transparent and equitable market is better for everyone.
We have a saying inside the company. It’s one of our core principles called ‘Turn on the lights.’ And it’s what Zillow was founded on — getting information into the hands of customers, consumers and agents.
Our time is winding down, so I’d like to end our conversation on a forward-looking note. It’s been very interesting reporting on portals this year and seeing the increased focus on innovating tools and platforms for listing agents. What do you think next year’s focus will be on? What might be the new battleground for you and your competitors?
That’s a great question. We’re at a point with technology and innovation that there’s a lot of opportunity ahead of us. We’ve been helping listing agents better showcase their properties and create a more compelling experience for buyers. We think that’s exciting and we’re seeing buyers responding to that —Showcase listings are saved more than 80 percent more frequently [than non-Showcase listings].
That product’s getting a great engagement, but a big focus for us at Zillow right now is going beyond what you might consider to be the portal of 10 or 15 years ago — this idea that I’m going to search for listing and then I’ll get search results. That’s important, but what we’re focusing on right now is digitizing the transaction. The real estate transaction today still is very complex. It’s got a lot of offline pieces. There’s a lot of paperwork.
Our focus right now is removing all of that friction from the moment you decide you’re going to get into the real estate market to the moment you get the keys to your new home. That’s where the real opportunity is and that’s what we’re really excited about with our Housing Super App. And that’s where we’re putting a bunch of our focus in 2025.