Cooperation is a 2-way street, or it isn’t cooperation 

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All the air in the room is going into the battle over listings right now — who can hold them back, who has to share them, whose website shows them first. It is loud, expensive, and says almost nothing about the underlying question that decides the future of the MLS: Who gets access to MLS data, and what do they owe the marketplace in return?

The answer used to be obvious. It isn't anymore.

The erosion of MLS cooperation

The MLS was built on a simple structure. A broker joined as a "participant," an agent came in as a "subscriber," and everyone who touched the data was in the business of listing homes and representing buyers and sellers. If you were in, you were cooperating and contributing.

That world is gone. Not everyone who wants MLS data today intends to represent buyers and sellers. Some hold a broker's license the way you would keep a key — not to cooperate in transactions, but to unlock a data feed. They may then use that access to build consumer products on top of the data that cooperating agents create, with little flowing back to the marketplace that produced it. AI has only turned up the volume on that dynamic.

Meanwhile, the incentives to cooperate have gotten weaker. The NAR settlement decoupled compensation from the MLS, and with it went one of the core reasons cooperation paid off. Now we have a model that grants broad access to almost anyone holding a license, whether or not they contribute to either side of a transaction.

I don't believe in forcing cooperation. You shouldn't have to trap your customer to keep them — you should earn them by being the best place to do business. But that principle runs both directions: The MLS earns subscribers by providing real value, and participants earn access to data by contributing to the marketplace. 

Cooperation is a two-way street, or it is not cooperation.

How we redefined participation

For years, most MLSs had a single definition for "participant." At Unlock MLS, we have replaced that with a definition that acknowledges the distinctions between different types of participants and then sorts every brokerage by one question: How does it use MLS data? 

The answer to that question produces three groups:

A Base Service Brokerage uses the core tools we provide but does not receive a data feed of other brokerages' listings. This group is the bulk of our brokerages. The tools we offer and the network of cooperating brokerages are enough to meet their needs. 

A Direct Service Brokerage receives a data feed, but it must meet two conditions. First, it earns the majority of its revenue from directly representing buyers and sellers: showing homes, presenting offers, listing properties, being the procuring cause of a sale. Preparing a valuation or collecting a referral fee is not representation, because neither puts anything back into the system for other brokerages to use. 

Second, it uses that data only for recognized brokerage purposes like CMA products and back-office systems.

A Platform Brokerage is any firm that takes a data feed and does not meet both of those conditions, either because most of its revenue comes from something other than representation, or because it uses the data for something beyond those recognized purposes, like running a platform or powering a product they sell. These firms will now license the data commercially, on terms that reflect what they do with it, at a fee that covers the cost of administering that access and stands in for the contribution they are not making. 

Every brokerage pays something. What differs is whether the payment comes in dollars or data. 

Why this matters beyond one MLS

In Texas, where Unlock is based, none of this is abstract. We are a non-disclosure state — sold prices are not public record — so the MLS here is not just a listing service, but the authoritative record of what happened in the market. When that record leaves our system, we are obligated to monitor how it's used. Governing access is how we protect it.

This isn't a scheme to sell our data to the highest bidder, but I won't pretend there is no value at stake — there is, and plenty of it. If that value is going to be captured by someone, it should be captured for the brokers whose cooperation created it, not by whoever found the cleverest way to take it. 

The MLS has always been a cooperative. It works because people put something in and get the benefit of everything everyone else put in too. Modernizing who gets access, and on what terms, is not a departure from that bargain. It is how we make cooperation mean something again.

Emily Girard is the CEO of Unlock MLS and the Austin Board of Realtors, collectively serving nearly 20,000 real estate professionals across the 18-county Central Texas region. Host of the "Driving It Home" podcast, Emily speaks nationally to real estate organizations about MLS strategy and innovation, organizational change, housing equity and accessibility, and more.