MRED Cuts Off Zillow Access, Dropping Thousands of Chicago Listings

Zillow abruptly lost access to thousands of property listings in the Chicago area after Midwest Real Estate Data, or MRED, cut off Zillow’s access to its regional home-listing database serving Chicago and its surrounding areas at midnight Central Time.

“On Wednesday, Zillow abruptly lost access to thousands of property listings in the Chicago area after filing a lawsuit accusing a private listing network owner of colluding with the nation’s largest brokerage to harm consumers by hiding homes”

Ars Technica

In Chicago, the number of listings on Zillow fell from nearly 5,000 on Tuesday to about 1,700 by Wednesday afternoon, while other listing sites like Redfin and Realtor.com showed about 5,000 to 8,000 listings in Chicago.

Ars Technica

The disruption was tied to the legal fight over MRED’s private listing network, where homes for sale are shared among real estate professionals before appearing on public home-search websites.

Zillow said the cutoff left “Chicagoland home buyers and sellers this morning have far worse access to the housing market than they had yesterday,” because the local MLS decided “one megabrokerage’s profits mattered more than their ability to achieve the American Dream.”

The fight centers on Zillow’s rule that a home listing marketed to any consumers must be published on Zillow within one day, or the listing would be banned, which Zillow said was designed to protect transparency and encourage a competitive market.

MRED said it would suspend its feed of listing data to Zillow unless Zillow corrected a violation of its license agreements and MRED’s rules, which involved the refusal to display nine listings.

Chicago Sun-Times

Zillow’s lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, accused MRED and Compass of violating federal antitrust law by conspiring to hide home listings from potential buyers.

Compass argued that its partnership with MRED gives homeowners more choices and created a more competitive marketplace, with a Compass spokesperson saying, “Zillow is punishing agents for merely following their clients’ lawful instructions on how they want their homes marketed.”

Zillow’s complaint described MRED and Compass as “powerful players in the real estate industry” that conspired to create “barriers to information that harm or threaten harm to sellers, buyers, and competitors by hiding real estate listings behind a velvet rope in a Private Listing Network (PLNs).”

“Potential buyers browsing Zillow or Trulia for homes in the Chicago area have likely noticed significantly fewer listings”

Chicago Sun-Times

The same dispute was framed by Zillow as an effort to engineer “deals where its agents represent both sides of the transaction,” while Ars Technica reported that Zillow alleged Compass sought to anticompetitively benefit from dominance by hiding listings from anyone not working with a Compass agent in a PLN.

MRED said it would keep its home listings feed cut off as long as Zillow continues to ban home listings that were first privately marketed, and Rebecca Jensen, the CEO of MRED, said, “Those rules apply equally to every participant, regardless of the size of their audience or the reach of their platform.”

For consumers and sellers, the immediate consequence described by CNN was that “Any new listings as of Wednesday morning will not appear on Zillow,” and “any adjustments to listings will not be updated,” according to a Compass spokesperson.