With Compass and Zillow locked into a high-stakes fight over listing restrictions and market power, company executives testified in federal court for the third day yesterday as Compass leadership addressed the specifics of its private listing-focused strategy, from alleged harm to its business from the Zillow rules, to how it communicated with agents. The trial—officially…

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NEW YORK CITY–As the afternoon session of the Compass-Zillow preliminary injunction hearing got underway in courtroom 14C at the Daniel Patrick Moynihan U.S. Courthouse in downtown Manhattan on Nov. 18, with Judge Jeannette Vargas presiding, the intensity from the morning session continued with Compass CEO Robert Reffkin on the stand. Throughout the day, attorney Bonnie…

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When Zillow announced its new rules restricting certain private listings, one MLS was quickly thrown into the spotlight—Midwest Real Estate Data, or MRED, in the Chicago region. That’s because for almost a decade, MRED has hosted an internal private listing service—properties shared within the MLS, but not necessarily to anyone else. While Zillow didn’t immediately…

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In a relatively short time, the power dynamics in residential real estate have shifted dramatically. The National Association of Realtors® (NAR) sits alongside portal giant Zillow on one side, and on the other is New York-based venture capital-backed Compass, a new behemoth that has consolidated a huge brokerage empire and appears ready to use its…

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