To the City of Chicago.

Today you lost something. You may not feel it yet. You will.

At roughly 9:00 a.m. Central Time this morning, the listings disappeared. Two hundred fifty thousand homes a year, gone from where 200 million Americans look first when they want to buy a place to live. Your MLS — Midwest Real Estate Data — cut Zillow's feed. The reasons being offered to you are technical. Licensing rules. Compliance. A "material breach." We're going to be honest with you. The reasons are not technical.

The reasons are about who controls your home when you sell it.

Thank you, Zillow.

We want to start there. Not because Zillow is perfect. They are not. Like every company that touches real estate, they have made decisions homeowners can argue with.

But Zillow did something this industry had refused to do for a century: they gave the public the public market. Two hundred million people a month, free, no login, every listing in one place, no brokerage gate, no membership card, no "ask your agent for access." Just the homes that were for sale, with the prices, the histories, and the days on market — visible to anyone with a browser.

That is what got cut this morning. Not "a portal." Not "a vendor." The closest thing American homeowners have ever had to a public square for real estate.

Here is what you are being told.

You are being told this is about "consumer choice."

You are being told sellers should be able to market their homes "however they choose."

You are being told the MLS is just "enforcing its rules."

Read those three sentences carefully. Each one sounds like it's about you. None of them are.

Here is what actually happened.

In January 2026, Compass acquired Anywhere Real Estate — the parent of Coldwell Banker, Century 21, Sotheby's International, ERA, Better Homes and Gardens, and Corcoran. In one transaction, one company became the parent of brands that touch roughly one in four U.S. residential transactions.

In April 2026, MRED announced a national partnership with Compass to extend Compass's private listing network through the MLS. Compass agreed to subsidize MRED membership for up to 100,000 of its agents.

In October 2025, according to Zillow's federal complaint, Compass CEO Robert Reffkin emailed at least eight MLS leaders personally urging them to terminate Zillow's listing feeds.

On May 11, 2026 — nine days ago — the President of Compass Illinois, who simultaneously sits on MRED's board of directors, reportedly informed a Compass agent that MRED was going to ban Zillow.

On May 12, Zillow sued.

This morning, at 9 a.m. Central, MRED cut the feed anyway.

That is not rules enforcement. That is a takeover.

What you will notice first.

Not much. For a few days, maybe a week. The homes already listed will still be visible on Zillow if their brokerage set up a direct feed. The buyers searching Chicago will see what they have always seen — for a while.

Then, slowly:

Fewer new listings on Zillow. Older listings going stale. Price changes not updating. The Zillow page for the home down your block will start to lag the truth. Buyers will see less. Sellers will reach fewer people. The "complete and accurate picture of the market" your MLS says it exists to protect will be, for the largest real estate audience in America, incomplete and inaccurate.

And inside that gap — in the space where public information used to be — a private listing network owned by one brokerage will fill in.

Why this matters beyond Chicago.

In recent weeks, Compass has signed similar partnerships with four of the largest MLSs in the country: MRED (Chicago), Bright MLS (Mid-Atlantic), Realtracs (the South), and TheMLS/CLAW (greater Los Angeles).

Chicago is the test. If it holds, the same playbook arrives in your market next.

That is why we are writing this today, and why we are signing our name to it.

What we believe.

We believe homeowners deserve uncompromised advocacy. You no longer have it.

We believe homeowners deserve guarantees. You are not getting them.

We believe homeowners deserve service and advocacy above the people making money on the transaction. You do not have that either.

We believe the public listing — visible to every buyer, on every platform, with complete pricing and history — is one of the most consumer-protective inventions in the history of American real estate. We believe it took the better part of three decades to build. We believe it is being dismantled in front of you, in real time, this week.

And we believe Chicago, six months from now, will look at slower sales, lower prices, longer market times, and fewer offers, and wonder what changed.

We will be here to remind you.

Thank you, Zillow. We mean it.

You opened the door. You made the market visible. You gave 200 million Americans a place to look without an appointment, a password, or a buyer's agent agreement.

Whatever happens next in federal court, whatever the lawyers argue and the press releases claim, the homeowners of this country owe you a clear-eyed thank you for two decades of public access to the public market.

We hope Chicago notices what you built before they accept what is being built to replace it.