Universal Consulting Opportunities (UCO), a subsidiary of Stellar MLS, has continued its international engagement in 2025, supporting multiple markets in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and Europe. The organization provides consulting, strategy development and educational resources to help real estate professionals and organizations adopt MLS frameworks and modernize practices. In the past year,…

Read More

The COURT REPORT is RISMedia’s weekly look at current and upcoming lawsuits, investigations and other legal developments around real estate. Four days of testimony set battle lines in Zillow-Compass showdown With top executives, brokers and a mob of journalists packing a high-rise federal courtroom in Manhattan last week, the public got its first glimpse of…

Read More

After the National Association of Realtors® (NAR) made comprehensive updates to MLS policies—saying that most are meant to “modernize” and remove “outdated practices”—brokers who are currently suing NAR are citing the changes as an acknowledgment that these policies ran afoul of the law. In a court filing yesterday, lawyers representing three real estate professionals in…

Read More

A little over a week after Zillow sought to clarify its discussions with Chicago-based Midwest Real Estate Data (MRED) over restrictions on private listings, the MLS appears to be digging in, as this week MRED CEO Rebecca Jensen sent an emotional open letter to members defending its private listing network against a “one-size-fits-all model.” With…

Read More

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…

Read More

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…

Read More

CoStar is providing a more forceful—and specific—pushback against accusations by Zillow that the company’s 3D home tour subsidiary, Matterport, blocked users from uploading tours on third-party websites, as earlier this week, one of the nation’s largest MLSs sought to remove CoStar-created media, before quickly reversing course. After Zillow on Monday removed Matterport tours from its…

Read More

BeachesMLS, operated by Broward, Palm Beaches & St. Lucie Realtors®, has announced an exclusive partnership with RetroRate, a South Florida-based intelligence platform designed to help Realtors® and homebuyers unlock the advantages of properties with assumable loans. These loans let qualified buyers take over a seller’s existing mortgage at its original interest and terms, often lower…

Read More

In a statement released this morning, the National Association of Realtors® (NAR) appeared to defer on the question of whether Zillow’s new ChatGPT app complies with MLS policies regarding use and display of data, as real estate continues to grapple with big questions around AI technology. “For enforcement, each MLS is individually responsible for conducting…

Read More

Universal Consulting Opportunities (UCO), a subsidiary of Stellar MLS, has announced an alliance with the Confederación Inmobiliaria Latinoamericana (CILA), a private international organization representing 700,000 real estate professionals in Latin America, to deliver Multiple Listing Service (MLS) expertise and education across the region. With this agreement, CILA and UCO will work to elevate real estate…

Read More