Bright’s new rules aim to provide ‘more options,’ ‘more control’ 

Bright MLS is revamping its listing options for homesellers and their agents, the nation's largest multiple listing service announced Thursday.

Bright MLS Chief AI and Product Officer Rajeev Sajja said that while the updates may appear to merely expand pre-marketing options and seller privacy controls, they are also intended to prepare the Mid-Atlantic MLS and its subscribers for the AI era.

"Every rule that reduces friction in how a listing gets entered, updated, and marketed is also a rule that keeps the source of truth current," Sajja said in a letter to subscribers. "And a data source that's current, verified, and directly tied to the broker of record is exactly what an AI engine needs to call first."

The new rules are expected to take effect within about a month.

Building on 'Brokers FIRST'

Bright subscribers already had a handful of options for entering Active, Coming Soon and Office Exclusive listings into the MLS.

Under the updated rules, there are four broad listing statuses — Registered, Office Exclusive, Coming Soon and Active — with multiple options for how listings are marketed within each. 

"[Subscribers] get more options with the policy changes that are coming up, more control about how their listings are displayed on consumer websites, including new seller privacy tools about price and photo suppression," Sajja told Real Estate News. 

That increased flexibility aligns with the "Brokers FIRST" approach Bright and its CEO, Brian Donnellan, introduced in May — a move that coincided with the MLS's listings partnership with Compass.

A look at the new status options

Registered: These are listings that are not yet being marketed. They must be submitted to the MLS within two days of a signed listing agreement but are not distributed by Bright at all within the MLS or outside of it.

Office Exclusives: These listings are not shared by Bright within the MLS for cooperation or to anyone except the listing broker. If an agent later chooses to distribute an Office Exclusive to the internet, the listing will not be excluded from display based on the individual agent or brokerage representing it (though specific portals may exclude it due to their own listing criteria).

Coming Soons: These listings will have marketing flexibility, although they may never include showings. They may be shared for cooperation in the MLS with the choice to either opt in or withhold from internet distribution.

As with Office Exclusives, if an agent at first excludes a Coming Soon listing from the internet and later changes course, the listing will not be penalized based on the subscriber or their brokerage affiliation. Those listings will also not be excluded from display based on how or where they were previously marketed — as long as they were entered as a Coming Soon or Active for cooperation within the MLS at the same time their earlier marketing was initiated.

Active: These listings are shared in the MLS for cooperation once a listing is available for showings and can either be designated as "Internet No" if the listing is not yet ready for publishing to consumer sites or "Internet Yes" if it is. An active listing can change to "Internet Yes" without any exclusion from display based on the subscriber, their brokerage affiliation or how the listing was previously marketed — if it was entered simultaneously as Coming Soon or Active.

Brokers maintain marketing flexibility

For each status option, brokers may advertise listings anywhere, Sajja said — as long as the listing is registered within the MLS within 48 hours of signing a contract with a seller. Brokers are also free to call Coming Soon listings whatever they want — "private," "exclusive," "coming soon," etc. — in their marketing outside of the MLS.

Once the new rules take effect, brokers will have the capability to instruct sites to withhold price, address, select photos, days on market and price history.

"I don't think it's our role to say, 'You need to call it this in your marketing,'" Sajja said. "But we need to enable them to do what they need to do with the right statuses." 

Adapting for AI

In addition to providing flexibility for brokers, the new rules aim to preserve Bright MLS as a trusted data source as AI use spreads, Sajja said.

A few months ago, Bright noticed that major AI companies were scraping photos from its listings without permission. The companies quietly stopped after the MLS's legal team made some noise — but the incident opened their eyes to the rapidly shifting AI landscape. 

Meanwhile, Sajja conducted a recent test in which each of three major LLMs reported a different list-to-sale price ratio for his ZIP code. If those LLMs had had access to Bright's data, he noted, their answers would be the same.

"The genie is out of the bottle because those things are scraping the web and giving answers as they see fit," Sajja said.