TheRealtyAlliance

10/01/2026

The Keyes Company is celebrating 100 years of service to its community.
https://www.keyes.com/

09/30/2026

https://fnfunplugged.buzzsprout.com/1291967/episodes/19718329-craig-cheatham-weighs-in-on-the-debate

09/29/2026

Inman News: Do Realtors care about legislation as much as NAR seems to think they do?
Craig Cheatham: Brokers highly value the monitoring of legal, regulatory and legislative developments along with any advocacy work on key issues. Leaders from my firms are experts in the connection between policy and its impact at the neighborhood level. Our company owners are more than willing to fund and otherwise support the day-to-day investments required to maintain a broad, grassroots network, the staff of experienced analysts and advocates and even the PACs that grant our industry the access needed to weigh in heavily against bad proposals and to press for good initiatives. If we have had a frustration, it has been our perception that NAR’s advocacy arm could have been more proactive and aggressive at key points. Our message has been, ‘Pull the lever!’ and put advocacy resources into full motion when needed. As an example, when an existential threat arrived in the form of the Sitzer complaint back in 2019, the association had Congress asking how it could help. This would have been a great opportunity to give Congress the opportunity to work on solutions, but NAR in effect declined the offers, putting its faith in its case and legal strategy instead. With the strength of NAR’s advocacy arm, its members might expect the organization to have sprung into action to secure clarity, safe harbors and legal protection on the time-honored real estate practices in question. Instead, the association and the industry, especially large brokerages, lost huge sums of money and gained little clarity, if not more confusion. Brokers are thrilled to see straightforward, bipartisan legislation they support pass, but with a powerhouse advocacy program, they expect to get ahead of issues and get more challenging proposals enacted.

https://www.inman.com/2023/11/16/nar-wont-use-lobbying-chops-for-legislative-fix-to-commission-suits/

09/25/2026

TRA President and CEO Craig Cheatham set to kick off the Real Estate Standards Organization (RESO) meeting coming up ...

09/10/2026

HousingWire: What do you see as brokers' biggest pain point when it comes to their local MLS?
Craig Cheatham: No single pain point applies between brokers and their MLSs because there are close to 500 MLSs in the United States, and our firms operate in most of them. Their experiences can be dramatically different from one MLS to another. Some MLSs are extraordinarily responsive business partners; others create significant friction for the same brokerage trying to accomplish essentially the same thing.
A common category of sources of irritation is responsiveness, particularly when a brokerage is trying to obtain data it believes it is entitled to use. We've had situations where a brokerage makes what it believes is a fairly straightforward request and waits weeks for an answer, has difficulty getting someone to respond, or ultimately learns the MLS can't accommodate the request. I don't think that's usually because somebody at the MLS woke up intending to make the broker's life difficult. Sometimes it's simply a staffing or resource issue. Sometimes the MLS has the data but doesn't yet have a license agreement that contemplates the particular business use the broker is requesting, and getting the legal documents updated becomes the bottleneck. And sometimes the MLS simply doesn't have the technical capability to deliver the data in the way a modern brokerage needs to process it. I've told MLS audiences this is especially frustrating because a broker shouldn't have to fight to obtain data it is legitimately entitled to use and certainly shouldn't find itself at a data or technology disadvantage to an outside vendor or portal. The best MLSs have figured out how to get brokers to "yes" quickly, or at least explain quickly and clearly why the answer has to be “no” for now.
The second grouping of frustration relates to cases where today's brokerage data use needs don’t fit into yesterday's data architecture. We still tend to begin with the question, "Is this IDX? Is it VOW? Is it a back-office feed?" and then try to squeeze the brokerage's project into one of those legacy boxes. Increasingly, those boxes don't fit. A modern brokerage may want to use the same underlying MLS data in a consumer website, mobile app, client portal, CMA, internal data warehouse, analytics platform, automated listing alert or AI-assisted tool. Those are different uses of the data, but that doesn't mean they necessarily require entirely different feeds, contracts and technical architectures.
That's why the technology leaders in our firms increasingly talk about moving from regulating data delivery to governing data use. Instead of saying, "Here are the three or four kinds of feeds we've historically offered; tell us which one your new idea fits into," We'd like the conversation to become, "What data are you entitled to use, for what legitimate purpose, with what capabilities and responsibilities, and how do we get it to you most efficiently?" The MLS should be the infrastructure that makes brokerage innovation easier, not the obstacle the brokerage has to engineer around.
HW: Would they be open to centralized data input that provides local control but national exposure?
CC: Brokers long have had a single point of entry for listing information on their wish list for many years. A brokerage might enter and maintain a listing in its own technology platform, for example, and standardized, bi-directional APIs could deliver that information to the appropriate MLS and then to whatever additional destinations the seller and brokerage have authorized. That could eliminate an enormous amount of duplicate entry, improve data accuracy and create a much clearer record of where information originated and where it is authorized to go.
That system would not require eliminating local MLSs or nationalizing MLS governance. Local markets have legitimate differences, and local control can remain valuable. In fact, our brokerage leaders grieve the dilution of their local voice whenever one of their MLSs merges into another. What we need is a common national technical and semantic foundation underneath that local control. A brokerage shouldn't have to redesign its technology simply because it crossed an MLS boundary. RESO gives us much of the technical foundation necessary to make that possible, but NAR has work to do in enforcing its RESO certification mandates in many non-compliant MLSs first.
My members never have subscribed to the belief that the more places listing data appears, the better. And I don't think every seller necessarily wants every listing distributed everywhere once they are informed about the risks and downsides. The better objective is national capability with seller- and broker-authorized distribution. Broad exposure should be readily available when that is a prudent strategy, but the technology shouldn't make that decision for the seller.
HW: Do brokers feel that search has been too monetized and given recent happenings, too politicized (from any industry policy perspective)?
CC: I think search lost its way.
The natural evolution of search should have been toward greater efficiency, helping a consumer get as directly as possible to the best and most authoritative source of the information they're seeking. The best source is the listing brokerage and listing agent. They have the relationship with the seller, they brought the property to market, they are very familiar with the property and they are responsible for the accuracy of the listing information.
Instead, an ecosystem evolved in which intermediaries can take that listing information, attract the consumer with it, and then divert that consumer to someone other than the listing broker or agent, frequently because someone else has paid the intermediary to be artificially inserted into what otherwise would have been the natural flow of the consumer's search.
That's where search got off track. We turned the consumer's attention into the product. And in some cases, the brokerage that created the listing, paid to market it and supplied the information that attracted the consumer can wind up being the least visible participant on the page. I've described that as lead arbitrage: the cooperative provides the inventory, an intermediary captures the consumer attracted by that inventory and then monetizes access to the consumer. That's a long way from the original purpose of broker reciprocity.
Recent events are forcing the industry to ask some healthy questions about whether our rules have unintentionally fueled an inefficient and often confusing intermediary model rather than protecting cooperation and consumers and creating clarity and efficiency.
AI may give us an opportunity to get search back on course, at least in one realm. We should be asking how we make the shortest, most efficient path lead back to the authoritative data source — ideally the listing brokerage or the MLS — rather than building another generation of toll booths between the consumer and the source.
HW: Do you believe consumers are paying more or in any way losing out because of the modern search ecosystem?
CC: We certainly have economic inefficiencies in the current system, and ultimately somebody pays for inefficiency.
The consumer's interest is actually pretty straightforward. They want comprehensive and accurate property information, an easy way to find and understand it, and access to a trusted professional who can help them make good decisions. Every additional layer whose principal purpose is capturing, redirecting or monetizing that consumer rather than improving the transaction potentially adds inefficiency, cost and often confusion.
There is also a less obvious way consumers can lose. If MLS rules make it easier for a national portal or other outside technology company to build an excellent consumer experience than for the brokerage that actually has the listing, the rules themselves can unintentionally push consumers toward intermediaries. I've argued that if outside platforms can offer seamless search while local brokerages face registration walls, display restrictions or complicated data rules, we shouldn't be surprised when consumer traffic migrates away from the source of the listing information.
That's becoming even more important with AI. Search is changing again. Instead of asking only which website consumers will visit, we're going to be asking which data source an AI assistant uses when a consumer asks it to find a home. My hope is that we use this transition as an opportunity to shorten the distance between the consumer and the most authoritative sources of property information — the listing brokerage and the MLS — rather than creating another generation of intermediaries whose business depends primarily on monetizing access to somebody else's inventory. I've been encouraging MLS leaders to start thinking about exactly that question now.

09/08/2026

"Brokers want better data management. They reach out to RESO to try to understand why the capability gap exists ...
Standardizing brokers’ data through RESO creates cost savings, streamlines product integrations, accelerates technology development, and unlocks access to new and innovative tools that would never scale across the industry without standards. Keeping brokers’ data current with modern RESO standards should be table stakes for MLS data stewardship." -- Sam DeBord, CEO of the Real Estate Standards Organization (RESO)
https://www.nar.realtor/news/real-estate-news/brokers-data-deserves-modern-mls-infrastructure

09/04/2026

HousingWire: What is your reaction to the Compass-NWMLS settlement, and do you see it as a significant turning point in the relationship between brokerages and MLSs?
Craig Cheatham: I think the settlement reflects a larger and very healthy re-examination of the relationship between MLSs and the brokerages that create most of the value in those systems. It is just one more example of MLSs taking concrete steps in a new direction. For many years, the industry tended to begin MLS policy discussions by asking what brokers should or should not be allowed to do. I think we increasingly need to begin by asking what brokers and their clients legitimately need to be able to do, and then determine what rules are necessary to preserve cooperation, data accuracy, transparency and a vibrant marketplace. The MLS remains an extraordinarily valuable cooperative, but it should be the infrastructure that enables competition among brokerages, rather than an organization that unnecessarily determines how those brokerages must compete. That's why I find this settlement interesting beyond the private-listing debate. It addresses seller-directed marketing choices, but it also touches listing-broker attribution, data access, technology integration and equal application of MLS rules. Those are all issues large brokerage companies have been raising with MLS policymakers around the country.
HW: The new First Look status attempts to give sellers more marketing flexibility while still making listings available to every NWMLS member broker. From a brokerage perspective, does that strike the right balance between seller choice and an open marketplace?
CC: Conceptually, I think it represents a very interesting middle ground that deserves serious attention by MLSs elsewhere. Too much of the private-listing debate has been framed as an all-or-nothing choice: either every listing must immediately be displayed everywhere, or brokerages should be free to keep inventory entirely within their own ecosystems. I don't think either extreme adequately recognizes that sellers have different circumstances and different legitimate marketing objectives. What is particularly interesting about ‘First Look’ is that the listing still goes into the cooperative and is available to all NWMLS member brokers, while the seller receives meaningful choices about how the property is marketed publicly, whether showings occur and whether it is included in IDX. That preserves broad professional access to the inventory without requiring every seller to use exactly the same public-marketing strategy from day one. I recently told an NAR MLS policy work group that brokers continue to believe strongly in cooperation and comprehensive inventory, but that MLS policy should accommodate legitimate seller choices, including appropriately governed delayed-marketing and office-exclusive options. The challenge is preserving the cooperative without assuming that cooperation requires one marketing strategy for every seller and every property.
HW: Beyond the marketing changes, NWMLS is making changes involving listing attribution, data access and broker technology platforms. Do you see these developments as part of a larger shift in what brokers expect from their MLSs?
CC: Absolutely, and in some respects, I think those provisions may prove more consequential than the coming-soon provision. My large brokerages increasingly have sophisticated technology departments, data warehouses, analytics platforms, mobile applications and AI initiatives. They don't want to build their businesses around a collection of disconnected MLS interfaces and legacy feeds. They want the MLS to provide a clean, reliable, standardized data backbone that allows the brokerage to build its own technology and consumer experience on top of it. That's why the additional data and transaction information NWMLS has agreed to make available to broker platforms caught my attention. Attribution is equally important. If a brokerage invests the money and effort required to win a listing, prepare it for market, create the photography, and maintain the data, consumers viewing that listing should be able to tell clearly who the listing broker and listing agent are. The cooperative shouldn't unintentionally create a system in which the company contributing the inventory becomes the least visible participant while someone else monetizes the consumer attention generated by that inventory. NWMLS's new attribution requirements appear to recognize that concern directly. There is an even more fundamental conversation beginning among brokers about whether the traditional definition of an MLS “participant” still makes sense. The modern MLS ecosystem includes brokerages that contribute substantial amounts of listing data, practitioners who primarily consume that data, and entities that use it for technology, analytics or consumer display. Those aren't necessarily identical relationships with the cooperative. I think MLS policymakers should be willing to examine whether different roles appropriately come with different levels of data access, rights, responsibilities and even fee structures. We also shouldn't be afraid to ask whether those who contribute the inventory that makes the MLS valuable should participate differently in the economics of the system than those whose relationship is primarily one of consuming or commercializing that data. This is part of the larger message we're currently taking to NAR and CMLS: preserve “broker reciprocity,” but renew the bargain for the modern digital environment. Brokers need better access to the data they're entitled to use, greater transparency about where their data goes, meaningful control over unauthorized downstream uses, and the freedom to build modern consumer experiences using websites, apps, analytics and AI.
HW: Looking ahead, what do you believe is the most important lesson MLS leaders across the country should take from the Compass-NWMLS dispute about how they govern rules and work with the brokerages that supply their data?
CC: The biggest lesson may be that MLSs should make certain the brokerages that supply their inventory view them as business partners rather than obstacles to innovation. I regularly tell MLS leaders that brokers still consider the MLS one of their most valuable business solutions. The core MLS proposition — competitors cooperating to create the most accurate, reliable and comprehensive source of market information — remains enormously powerful. But brokers are increasingly questioning rules that extend beyond protecting that cooperative and begin dictating brokerage business practices, marketing models or technology choices. That makes broker involvement in policymaking more important than ever. The companies operating at significant scale are investing enormous amounts in technology, data management, cybersecurity, marketing and AI, and their technology teams are encountering the practical consequences of MLS rules every day. MLS leaders should be actively asking them not simply, "What do you think about this proposed rule?" but, "What are you trying to build for your agents and consumers, and are our rules unnecessarily preventing you from building it?" The best MLS policy going forward, in my view, will establish strong guardrails around accuracy, attribution, privacy, security, interoperability and misuse, and then leave room inside those parameters for brokerages to compete and innovate. Cooperation doesn't require uniformity in business models. In fact, a strong cooperative infrastructure should enable more competition and innovation, not less. That's the relationship I think brokers increasingly want with their MLS(s).
https://www.housingwire.com/articles/compass-nwmls-settlement-bigger-than-coming-soon-listings/?utm_source=friend

09/02/2026

https://www.realestatenews.com/2026/09/02/what-brokers-want-mlss-to-build-for-real-estates-next-era

Modernization should be focused on broker needs and the industry's cooperative bargain for the digital age: consumer & data protection, accuracy, and security.

08/28/2026

HousingWire: Northwest Multiple Listing Service (NWMLS) has launched a new AI-powered, ad-free consumer home search experience on NWMLS.com in partnership with Broker Public Portal (BPP), the organizations announced Thursday.

The new platform, powered by BPP’s Cribio technology, gives consumers direct access to Northwest MLS’s real-time listing data across Washington state, along with natural-language search tools and direct connections to listing brokers and firms.

The move comes as MLSs and brokers face heightened scrutiny around how listing data is displayed and monetized, in the wake of commission litigation, evolving buyer broker practices and new state-level rules on transparency. NWMLS said the site is designed as a “consumer-first” alternative to national advertising-driven portals that sell leads next to listings.

08/27/2026

I was recently asked by the National Association of Realtors to share the perspective of residential real estate brokers on how MLS policies and procedures should evolve to better serve brokers, their agents and, ultimately, consumers. I have been asked to speak to one of NAR’s work groups that is examining these issues. As usual, I went directly to the people who are dealing with these issues every day. I asked several chief technology officers and chief marketing officers within The Realty Alliance weigh in on what is working, what is creating unnecessary friction and what they would change if they had the opportunity. What follows is my attempt to synthesize those conversations. I have tried to stay mostly at the conceptual level, while including enough technical detail to make the ideas useful to the people who actually write and administer MLS policy.

The overarching message I expect to take to NAR is fairly simple: MLS policy needs to move from regulating data delivery to governing data use.

That may sound like a subtle distinction, but I think it could represent a significant change in the way we approach IDX and VOW.

One might say IDX and VOW were created for an Internet that no longer exists. IDX was designed primarily around public display of listings on brokerage websites, while VOW was designed around a password-protected online relationship between a consumer and a broker. Those distinctions made sense when websites were the dominant digital experience and when the principal question was whether a consumer was looking at a public website or a broker's online office.

Today's consumer experience is much more complicated. Consumers move among websites, mobile applications, personalized alerts, client portals, automated valuation tools, social platforms and increasingly artificial-intelligence interfaces without having the slightest idea which MLS policy governs any particular experience. They do not care whether the data they're seeing arrived through an IDX feed or a VOW feed. They care whether they can find the information they want, whether it is accurate and understandable, and whether the technology makes the process easier or harder.

That ought to cause us to reconsider whether the distinctions between IDX and VOW are still accomplishing what we intended them to accomplish.

One possibility is to move toward a much simpler model in which a broker has a single, standardized data connection and the rights associated with that connection determine what the broker can do with the data. Instead of saying, in effect, "You qualify for IDX, so here is one version of the data, but if you want to do something different you need VOW, and if you want to do something else you need a back-office feed," we could say, "You are entitled to use this data for these purposes, with these capabilities, under these conditions."

That would allow a broker to use the same underlying data for its public website, its mobile application, its client portal, its listing alerts, its CMAs, its brokerage analytics and potentially its AI-assisted search tools without having to maintain a collection of artificially separated data environments simply because the policy framework created those distinctions.

The technical foundation for doing this already exists. RESO provides the industry with a common data dictionary and Web API framework. The next logical step is to use that infrastructure to establish standardized permissions and data definitions rather than allowing every MLS to create its own interpretation of what belongs in IDX, VOW or a back-office feed.

In practical terms, I could envision a system in which a broker receives a standardized feed and the data itself carries machine-readable information about what can be done with particular fields. Attribution requirements, co-mingling permissions, automated valuation rights and other restrictions could be communicated through standardized metadata rather than buried in hundreds of pages of local policy and individual data agreements.

That would be particularly valuable to large brokerages that operate across multiple MLS markets. Today, a company can have essentially the same consumer-facing product operating in several cities but have to accommodate different field definitions, display requirements, registration rules, vendor approval processes and interpretations of what constitutes an IDX or VOW use. The technical burden is substantial, and it diverts resources away from improving the consumer experience.

I don't think local MLSs need to surrender every bit of local discretion. There are legitimate reasons for local differences. But there should be a common national technical foundation underneath those differences so that "Active" means the same thing, the data fields mean the same thing and a brokerage's technology can function consistently from one market to another.

RESO is particularly well positioned to help accomplish this. I would like to see the industry move beyond treating RESO certification as essentially a badge and toward using RESO standards as the technical mechanism through which MLS policy actually becomes enforceable. If NAR establishes a policy requirement, RESO should be able to help define what compliance looks like technically, and MLSs should be expected to implement that standard consistently. I suppose this would be a good place to point out that brokers are counting on NAR to enforce the requirement that MLSs be RESO certified. Often, when my members experience a gap in service with an MLS, we look into it and find the MLS hasn't met this standard, among other things.

There is another important piece of this conversation: brokers need substantially greater transparency and control over the use of the data they contribute to the cooperative.

A brokerage should be able to understand who is receiving its data, what data they are receiving, what they are permitted to do with it and, ideally, where that data travels after the initial recipient receives it. We are increasingly operating in an environment in which data can be copied, transformed, redistributed and incorporated into other products almost instantaneously. A broker cannot reasonably be responsible for protecting its data if it has no meaningful ability to understand its data's footprint.

That does not mean brokers should receive unlimited rights over everybody else's listings. In fact, I think the bargain has to work both ways.

A brokerage should have broad rights to use other participants' listings for legitimate cooperative purposes. But receiving another broker's listing through the MLS should not automatically give the recipient the right to become an alternative wholesaler of the entire cooperative dataset. If we are going to ask MLSs, portals and technology companies to respect data-use boundaries, brokerages need to accept the same responsibilities when they use data contributed by other brokers.

The key concept is purpose limitation. Permission to access data for one purpose should not automatically become permission to do anything that technology makes possible once the data is in someone's possession.

An IDX license to display listing information, for example, should not automatically be interpreted as permission to use that information to train an artificial-intelligence model. A back-office feed should not automatically authorize resale of the data. Analytics rights should not automatically authorize the creation of an unrelated commercial product.

This is where AI makes the issue particularly urgent. We should not try to write a giant "AI policy" that attempts to anticipate every technology that might exist over the next decade. Instead, we should establish technology-neutral rules about what uses are authorized and what uses are not.

If a consumer asks an AI assistant to find three houses under $700,000 with a swimming pool within 20 minutes of downtown, the policy question should not depend upon whether the interface is called a search engine, an application, a chatbot or something that has not yet been invented. The important questions are whether the user is authorized to access the information, whether the platform is authorized to use the information for that purpose, whether the listing information is accurately represented and attributed, and whether the data is subsequently being used for purposes that were never authorized.

That same philosophy should extend to the consumer experience.

I am particularly interested in eliminating unnecessary friction in VOW requirements. The consumer should not have to navigate a cumbersome registration process simply because the information happens to fall into a category that an old policy labeled "VOW." Modern authentication technologies can establish appropriate consumer relationships without making a local brokerage website feel like it was designed in 2008.

There is a competitive issue here that MLS policymakers should take seriously. If national portals and other technology companies can provide consumers with a seamless search experience while local brokerages are constrained by registration walls, display restrictions and complicated data rules, the rules themselves can inadvertently drive consumers away from the very companies that contribute the listings and employ the agents who actually serve them.

The objective should not be to make brokerage websites identical to portals. It should be to make sure that MLS policy does not artificially prevent brokers from building an excellent consumer experience.

I would make a similar argument regarding listing attribution and lead routing. If a consumer is viewing a listing that my company has brought to the marketplace, there is a strong argument that the listing brokerage and listing agent should receive meaningful, prominent attribution. The cooperative should not unintentionally become a mechanism through which the company that supplied the inventory becomes less visible while another company sells the consumer a lead generated by that inventory.

That is not simply a broker-versus-portal issue. It is a question of whether the rules governing the cooperative marketplace appropriately recognize the economic contribution of the listing broker.

Finally, I think MLS policy should become much more accommodating of the way brokers actually want to operate their businesses. Several of the technology leaders I consulted expressed interest in a future in which the brokerage's own technology could become the primary point of entry for listing information, with standardized APIs allowing information to flow into the MLS and then outward to whatever other destinations the seller and brokerage authorize.

That could eventually reduce the need for agents or staff to enter the same listing information multiple times into different systems, while also creating a much clearer record of where the information originated and who authorized its distribution.

It could also provide a much better framework for handling delayed marketing, office exclusives and other seller-directed choices. A standardized system could distinguish between a listing that is legitimately being held back at the seller's direction and a listing that is being withheld in a way that undermines the cooperative marketplace.

Ultimately, I don't think the answer is simply to modernize IDX and VOW. I think we need to modernize the philosophy behind them.

The MLS remains enormously valuable because it is the industry's central source of property information and because competitors have agreed to cooperate in ways they otherwise would not. That cooperative bargain deserves protection. Consumers deserve accurate information, transparency and a fair marketplace. Brokers deserve meaningful rights over the data they contribute and reasonable freedom to innovate with data they are entitled to use.

Those objectives are not in conflict.

The opportunity for NAR and the MLS industry is to establish a framework that says, in effect: Here are the data you are entitled to use. Here are the purposes for which you may use them. Here are the responsibilities that accompany those rights. Here is how those permissions can be expressed technically and consistently. And here is what happens when someone violates the bargain.

Once that framework exists, IDX, VOW, APIs, AI, mobile applications and whatever comes next become different ways of exercising clearly defined rights rather than separate technologies requiring separate policy regimes.

That is the direction I plan to encourage NAR to consider. It is not intended to be a finished blueprint, and I certainly don't claim that every CMO or CIO in The Realty Alliance would agree with every detail. But after listening to the people inside some of the country's largest residential brokerage companies who are responsible for actually making these systems work, I believe there is a fairly clear consensus around the larger objective: protect the cooperative and the consumer but stop using MLS policy to predetermine what brokers are allowed to build. -- Craig Cheatham, president and CEO of The Realty Alliance