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Compass CEO Robert Reffkin on Monday predicted that the National Association of Realtors’ polarizing Clear Cooperation Policy will fall by the wayside this year.
Reffkin made the prediction in a post on Instagram, saying he believes that in 2025 the policy “as we know it ends, giving homeowners the choice on where and how to market their homes and empowering them to be able to list without the risk of days on market and public price drops.”
He also predicted that this year “the industry realizes that Clear Cooperation was forcing agents to cooperate with portal sites — companies that have no listings, no agents and no clients — which was not the founding intent behind MLS cooperation.”
Finally, Reffkin predicted that “to incentivize agents to give portal sites their listings as early as MLS ‘private agent only view,’ portal sites place the listing agent’s full contact information back on their listings and remove days on market and price drop history when asked.”
“This means that buyer inquiries go to the listing agent and the pathway is created for the entire industry to require portal sites to put the listing agent’s full contact information back on their listings,” he wrote.
NAR’s board of directors adopted the Clear Cooperation Policy in 2019. The rule requires Realtors to input their listings into their NAR-affiliated multiple listing service within a day once they begin marketing. At the time the rule was adopted, it was framed as a way to ensure equal access to the housing market and as a means of curtailing pocket listings.
However, the rule quickly faced criticism from well-known figures such as Gary Gold and Mauricio Umansky, who have said it limits homeseller choice, and pocket listings continued to thrive.
Beginning last year, Reffkin became one of the rule’s most outspoken critics. He has argued that the rule breaks both laws and ethics codes, and that it attaches “negative insights” — things like days on market and price drops — to listings that can hurt their performance on the market.
Compass has additionally said it will provide resources to MLSs that don’t enforce the rule. And the brokerage has been upfront about its goal of building a network of private listings.
However, while Reffkin and others have criticized the Clear Cooperation Policy, other leaders, such as eXp Realty CEO Leo Pareja and Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman, have expressed support for the rule, highlighting its polarizing position in the industry. As 2024 ended, Clear Cooperation consequently represented one of real estate’s biggest unresolved cliffhangers.
However, based on his Instagram post from Monday, Reffkin, for one, believes 2025 will bring a resolution to this particular story and a victory for critics of Clear Cooperation.
Update: This story was updated after publication with a longer quote from Reffkin’s post.
