Why is real estate giving away its most valuable asset? 

Thinking big about residential real estate success requires a big-picture perspective. Industry Decoded features industry experts who can enrich your understanding of issues affecting the industry as a whole.

The views expressed in this column are solely those of the author.

For the past two years, the real estate industry has been locked in a hyper-visible war over consumer search, portal dominance, and lead-generation costs. We debate display rules as though our entire future depends on who controls the front end.

We are fighting the wrong war.

While we exhaust our energy battling over lead acquisition, a quiet, multibillion-dollar extraction is happening on the backend: Almost every brokerage firm in America is giving away its data for free.

The risks of contractual silence

Every listing taken by an agent has two distinct jobs:

Consumer marketing: The photos, public remarks, and price points designed to market the property and secure a buyer. Brokers must retain complete authority over consumer display.

Institutional data: The structured backend data that feeds Automated Valuation Models (AVMs), desktop appraisals, mortgage risk engines and Large Language Models (LLMs).

 Right now, third-party aggregators and tech platforms are using active listing data for free — data that could fuel an institutional market worth more than $1 billion a year. At the same time, the brokers and MLSs who create the data receive no compensation at all. 

How did this happen? Through contractual silence. Legacy listing data agreements prohibit derivative works but often aren't enforced. And most agreements signed prior to 2023 didn't account for artificial intelligence, AVM inputs and institutional risk modeling. In modern tech licensing, contractual silence acts as permission. By doing nothing, the industry granted third-party platforms a free pass to train their models on broker data.

Fragmented data breaks the underlying mortgage market

Contractual silence doesn't just result in lost revenue.  It impacts the financial institutions that use listing data to provide timely and accurate services.

Brokerages deploy a number of listing strategies to best serve their sellers and differentiate their value. However, when backend listing data remains fragmented or isolated, institutional lenders, underwriters and secondary market investors struggle to maintain accurate valuation signals. 

These institutions rely heavily on real-time active inventory, price changes and days on market (DOM) to determine how much capital to lend. With the mortgage industry targeting 90% desktop appraisals, missing active inventory leads to AVM miscalculations, delayed appraisals, restricted capital and slowed mortgage approvals. 

Conversely, clean, unified backend data fuels faster appraisals and accurate AVMs, yielding faster closings for agents and lower closing costs for consumers.

The solution: An aggregated feed at national scale 

The path forward requires separating consumer marketing control from backend institutional governance. By joining an MLS-owned data network, local markets gain national clout without giving up local control. A unified, direct feed forces institutional buyers and AI platforms to properly license clean data under broker-friendly terms.

Stop letting third parties profit off your listings for free. By adopting clear, usage-based licensing agreements, MLSs and brokers can finally set the terms, protect their intellectual property, and turn listing data into a recurring dividend.

Dionna Hall is co-CEO of Miami Realtors + RWorld and BeachesMLS, serving 94,000+ members across South Florida, leading the nation's largest local Realtor association and third-largest MLS. She also serves as a board member of REdistribute and MLS Align, and served as CMLS chair in 2024.