Open Real Estate founders: Platform is ‘for the best of the industry’ 

Several months ago, executives from AGNT Inc., HomeServices of America, Keller Williams and Real REMAX Group came together around a common cause: transparency for the American consumer.

After discussing changes that have swept the industry in recent years — particularly the growing use of private listings and PLNs — Leo Pareja, Chris Kelly, Chris Czarnecki and Tamir Poleg believed something should be done to ensure both homebuyers and sellers have the full picture when transacting in the residential real estate market.

"We found alignment rather quickly," Pareja told Real Estate News in an interview. "This came together very naturally based on what we think is best for the American consumer."

Pareja was referring to Open Real Estate, a new platform the executives have created a blueprint for in hopes that other industry players will help build it out. Unveiling the platform at this early stage was intentional, the founding partners said, because they're hoping its development can be a collaborative effort across brokerages, MLSs and portals.

Not a revenue play

At this point, Open Real Estate's founders said they aren't asking any of the platform's participants to pay a fee to join. Not all brokerages have the resources to invest in such a platform, the executives noted, and they have committed to funding the platform as a service to the industry.

"We're going to take it upon ourselves to make it happen for the best of the industry and as a gesture to everybody else," Poleg said.

A way to bring the industry together?

The various platforms and partnerships brokerages, portals and MLSs have created in recent months may be innovative, but they also risk fragmenting the industry, Kelly said. Open Real Estate's founders hope their platform will do the opposite.

"We [have seen] the fragmentation and maybe some of the opaqueness that has kind of been layered into some of the real estate industry over the last couple of years," Kelly said. "We believe that ultimately harms the consumer down the road. There might be short-term advantages for certain players, but long term, the consumer is the one that suffers from this and we continue to point to other parts of the world that already live — and it doesn't have to be a hypothetical — in that fragmented, fractured state of real estate content."

The executives said they wanted everyone in the industry to learn about the platform at the same time so all players would be on equal footing. Now that it's public, they hope to accelerate growth. An independent leadership team, still to be assembled, will run the platform, and the co-founders have already sent out requests for proposals from some of the industry's most established tech vendors to handle the tech side.

OpenRE's founders stressed that all brokerages, regardless of their size or stance on private listings, are welcome.

"It is meant in every way to be inclusive, and so we are open to the entire brokerage community that wants to join this thing," Czarnecki said. 

Private listings with clear rules

Participants will have the flexibility to enter data in OpenRE or directly in the MLS, the founders said. Brokerages will also be able to customize their own interfaces, as the founding companies plan to.

To address the ongoing controversy over how and when listings can be marketed, the platform will have very clear, structured rules for private listings. In a FAQ on Open Real Estate's website, the company lays out the "participant view" option for brokerages, which allows agents affiliated with participating brokerages to see a listing but does not permit any public marketing. 

When asked if the "participant view" essentially served as a private listing network — something ARELLO defines as "a range of residential real estate practices through which properties are marketed outside conventional multiple listing service (MLS) channels or circulated through restricted professional networks" — Pareja said the distinction with OpenRE's option is that "it's actually private."

"It doesn't go out to the public, it's not selectively available on an open URL to any consumer," Pareja said. "We're just saying, 'If it's private, it's private. If it's public, it's public.'"

Not a new concept, but this time leaders are committed

About 10 years ago, NAR and Realtors Property Resource partnered with Upstream LLC to develop a platform where agents could input listing information in one place before it was distributed to MLSs, vendors and marketing platforms, but the project never got off the ground due to limited adoption.

Then in May 2026, Cotality launched a similar platform seeking to bring the control of brokerage listing data back to brokerages at scale with Cotality Broker Listing Exchange. HomeServices of America and Keller Williams served as launch partners for both Cotality BLX and Upstream, and REMAX was also involved in the Upstream effort.

Now the same companies are driving what appears to be a similar initiative with Open Real Estate. How does OpenRE differ? 

Kelly said that while Upstream's "principle ideas" were very similar, "it might have been a little ahead of its time [in terms of] of technology and the speed at which it needed to move."

He added that the founding companies of Open Real Estate are committed to funding the capital necessary for the project and ensuring its completion in a timely fashion. And today, Kelly noted, the technology has caught up to the idea behind Upstream. 

"If you do a postmortem on [Upstream], what happened was, it just took too long, right?" Kelly said. "And time will kill all, even the best ideas."

Cotality BLX, Kelly explained, is meant to serve as an individual pathway for single brokerages, whereas Open Real Estate "is taking those same principles, but applying it for the industry and for all the participants that want to be a part of it … rather than doing it in these silos."

Over the next six months, the founders said they'll enlist a company to build out the tech, recruit the executive management team, conduct MLS listening sessions, gather feedback from all new participants and finalize governance. If all goes as expected, OpenRE will launch around the end of Q1 or beginning of Q2 2027.