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Amid a contentious industry debate on private listings, Northwest Multiple Listing Service (NWMLS) President and CEO Justin Haag offered strong words of support for NAR’s Clear Cooperation Policy (CCP) and recent provisions to the rule. Now, a new website, called Washington Homeowner Rights, is soliciting NWMLS home sellers in Washington state for a potential class action lawsuit. Specifically, they are reaching out to home sellers who experienced a price drop or significant days on market.
First reported by Inman, a new website claims, “Washington State Homeowners Deserve the Same Freedom as Everyone Else,” and is soliciting homeowners who may have been “harmed” by policies of NWMLS. While it has not been confirmed by Compass that they are behind this website, both the Terms of Service and Privacy notice link directly back to Compass’s Terms of Service and Privacy notice.
The tit for tat between Compass CEO Robert Reffkin and NWMLS Justin Haag started with an Instagram post by Reffkin that specifically called out NWMLS and its Clear Cooperation Policy.
Haag, in communication with NWMLS employees, said that real estate brokerage firms in Washington state, as members of NWMLS, have agreed to share all property listings with the entire brokerage community and the public for more than 40 years.
“Recently, some brokerage firms have advocated for MLS rules that facilitate hiding property listings from consumers and lobbied the real estate industry to accommodate those exclusionary practices,” he stated. “Those efforts are not for the benefit of sellers or buyers, but are instead designed to benefit those brokerage firms by entrenching them as the gatekeepers of property listings. Northwest MLS has declined to adopt those misguided, exclusionary rules.
“Northwest MLS strongly believes that consumers should have access to all property listings and that sellers are entitled to the benefit of exposure of their property to the full marketplace. An open, fair, transparent, and comprehensive marketplace benefits all market participants, including sellers, buyers, brokers, and appraisers.”
Hagg feels that proponents of hiding listings “masquerade their self-dealing as offering ‘seller choice.’”
“They argue that sellers somehow benefit from not making their listing available to all potential buyers. They don’t,” he said.
Compass and its CEO Robert Reffkin have been outspoken opponents of CCP, urging MLSs and real estate professionals to resist its enforcement. Reffkin has also publicly criticized Windermere Real Estate, a Washington-based brokerage, for supporting Northwest MLS’s prohibition on office-exclusive listings, highlighting the issue in an Instagram post.
“You publicly stated: ‘We want you to know that Windermere stands strongly in support of what’s known within the real estate industry as Clear Cooperation,’” Reffkin wrote in a post aimed at Windermere CEO OB Jacobi.
“If that’s truly the case, will you commit Windermere’s six NWMLS board seats (no other brokerage has more than one) to vote in favor of adopting Clear Cooperation? Clear Cooperation mandates that MLSs allow office exclusives and 1 day of off-MLS public marketing, both options that NWMLS’s restrictive rules don’t provide.”
In his communication, Haag cited the benefits of CCP, including buyers and brokers having equal access to all property listings, making sellers’ listings available to all potential buyers, support for fair housing and buyers’ ability to work with the broker of their choice.
“Restricting the visibility of available homes to a select, exclusive group of buyers and brokers is fundamentally unfair and perpetuates inequities that have long plagued the housing system,” Haag stated. “Policies that further enable the proliferation of exclusionary practices, such as restricting access to listings, will lead to the dismantling of the real estate marketplace for the exclusive benefit of those brokerage firms that choose to exploit them. The discriminatory effect and disparate impact that results from restricting access to listings to an exclusive group of buyers and brokers is just that – discrimination.”
“NWMLS is committed to doing the right thing and continuing to promote and support the open, fair, transparent, and comprehensive marketplace that its members have advanced over the past four decades. There is no place for exclusionary practices in our marketplace.”
Under the National Association of Realtors’ new MLS Listing Options for Sellers policy announced last week, homeowners can choose to delay publicly marketing their property if they sign a required disclosure. The policy works alongside CCP, which mandates that brokers must enter a listing into the MLS within 24 hours of any public marketing.
This new option allows sellers to instruct agents to postpone listing exposure through Internet Data Exchange (IDX) and syndication for a set period. Each local MLS will determine the maximum allowable delay.
However, during this timeframe, the listing will still be accessible to other MLS participants through the platform.
