Yesterday afternoon I got an email from Compass CEO Robert Reffkin saying that today he has “the most important meeting of the year,” because he and almost 100 brokerage leaders, representing 200,000 real estate agents are calling on NAR to end Clear Cooperation. 🥳
For anyone not familiar, Clear Cooperation is the policy that NAR created in 2019 that prevents us from mass marketing and showing “coming soon” listings. Essentially, if we want to mass market our listings, we MUST put them in MLS within 1 day.
If you’ve entered the industry since 2019, you may not realize that this rule dramatically changed how many of us advised our sellers and devalued our role as buyer’s agents.
Before CC went into effect, our team “tested the market” prior to putting most of our listings in the MLS publicly, thereby ensuring we were perfectly positioned before we started accruing days on the market. CC stands in total contrast to our fiduciary responsibility to put our sellers’ best interests first.
Before CC, there were so many more ways and opportunities for us to find off-market properties for our buyer clients, properties they’d only have access to if they worked with an agent with a great network. Essentially, we were told it “leveled the playing field,” but really it was about CONTROL…of our data. Of course the MLSs want us to put homes in the system immediately…so they can sell our data to aggregators like Zillow who then sell our leads back to us. 🤯
Interestingly, the DOJ is on the side of the agents and in fact, asked NAR to extend the required time an agent must put a listing in MLS from 1 day to 60 days, which NAR declined. Today is the first of 4 meetings with NAR’s Emerging Issues Committee, where CC will be put to a vote….an uphill battle considering 60% of the voting members are MLS and association leaders with a vested interest in keeping CC in place.
I’m thrilled to see that some incredible leaders are taking the initiative to advocate for bringing value back to the agent by letting us advise and represent our clients according to whatever strategy we believe is best. I’d love to know your thoughts. Click here and tell me if you’d like to see Clear Cooperation overturned!
