Zillow is asking a federal judge for emergency relief after Chicago’s dominant MLS, Midwest Real Estate Data (MRED), cut off access to more than 30,000 residential listings, a move the online real estate platform characterizes as an illegal retaliation orchestrated with competitor Compass.
In a motion May 21 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Zillow requests a temporary restraining order to restore its access to listings controlled by MRED, which terminated the data feeds early Wednesday morning—less than 48 hours after Zillow filed a lawsuit alleging antitrust violations.
The dispute centers on Zillow’s “Listing Access Standards,” which exclude nine Compass private listings located in Florida, Georgia and California from appearing on Zillow’s platform. According to the complaint, Zillow has been enforcing the standards in those states for nearly a year without incident.
MRED, which controls approximately 98% of residential for-sale listings in the Chicago area, said it terminated Zillow’s access in response to the company’s refusal to display the Compass properties. But Zillow contends the action is an unlawful boycott orchestrated by MRED and Compass to coerce Zillow into abandoning its standards nationwide.
“MRED did so in service of an illegal conspiracy with Compass, Zillow’s and MRED’s mutual competitor, to protect nine Compass private listings in Florida, Georgia, and California (well outside MRED’s historical territory) from Zillow’s pro-transparency Listing Access Standards,” Zillow’s lawyers wrote in the filing.
On May 22, MRED filed its response, asking the court to deny Zillow’s motion—or alternatively, force Zillow to carry the disputed listings while the lawsuit plays out—and characterized the conflict as “a simple dispute over the terms of license agreements.”
“Zillow alleges nothing more than harm to its own business practices,” MRED wrote.
MRED also claimed Zillow had months to seek court intervention and that losing the listing feed was no surprise, filing emailed correspondence between lawyers representing both companies from back in October. In those exchanges, MRED attorney Dylan Carson wrote that “Zillow’s subjective and arbitrary enforcement of its Listing Access Standards to listings received from MRED may risk contravening Zillow’s data license.”
“Zillow’s own allegations reveal that its asserted injury was neither sudden nor unforeseen,” MRED’s latest filing said. “Zillow’s conduct is incompatible
with the extraordinary relief of a (restraining order).”
Zillow, for its part, has said that MRED revised its rules in order to manufacture a reason to ban the portal. Those rules, which focus on the “objective criteria” used to filter IDX and VOW fees, appear to be a central focus of both party’s legal arguments. Other MLSs have made similar updates (which Compass has directly lobbied for) and at least one other has threatened to cut Zillow off from its feed based on the listing access standards, according to Zillow’s filings.
Zillow’s filing also claimed that MRED’s cutoff of the Zillow feed in order to protect Compass private listings in other parts of the country has no benefit to agents, buyers and sellers in the Chicagoland area.
“Panicked Chicagoland agents have rushed to the phone lines to ask Zillow when MRED will restore their listings and explain the immediate harms to their independent businesses,” the filing claimed.
According to the filing, Compass has “seized on Zillow’s loss of listings” to promote a competitive advantage it has “unfairly secured through the conspiracy.”
“Indeed, Compass CEO Robert Reffkin has touted on social media that ‘Zillow’s missing the majority of listings in Chicago’ and displayed a direct side-by-side comparison of Zillow’s platform to Compass’s. Zillow will be irreparably harmed by Compass’s active, ongoing exploitation of the conspiracy to advantage itself in competition between Zillow and Compass,” read the filing.
Zillow also contends in the filing that the cutoff causes irreparable harm, particularly to its new Zillow Preview product, which directly competes against Compass’s private listing networks.
“There is no way to quantify the monumental and irreparable harms that Defendants’ listings blackout already has begun to inflict on Zillow’s business in the region, to agents, to the public, and to the market, and particularly to the nascent Zillow Preview offering,” the filing reads. “To stop those harms, prevent further injury, and restore the status quo, Zillow seeks a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) to reinstate Zillow’s longstanding access to MRED Listing Feeds until Zillow’s Preliminary Injunction (PI) Motion can be decided.”
MRED, for its part, argued all of this is merely business related, and said that Zillow has not articulated any sort of antitrust violation, or harm to consumers.
“A private plaintiff, like Zillow, cannot establish an antitrust injury by merely showing that a defendant’s lawful business practices, like MRED’s, disrupted its desired business model,” the MLS wrote, noting that Zillow admitted in its lawsuit that all the listings in question are still available on competing portals like Realtor.com.
In its own filing, Zillow also argues that it has no reasonable alternative to MRED for comprehensive listing data in the region, as Compass has instructed its agents not to provide listings independently to Zillow, and MRED has warned its member brokerages against extending direct feeds to the platform.
A spokesperson for Zillow offered the following statement to RISMedia.
“MRED has cut Chicago sellers off from the largest real estate platform in the country in order to advance the business goals of the country’s largest brokerage. We filed a motion for a temporary restraining order today asking the court to immediately restore their access while our antitrust lawsuit against MRED and Compass proceeds. Every day these listings are blocked from Zillow is a day Chicago sellers have fewer buyers competing for their homes, and Chicago buyers see fewer homes on Zillow.”
MRED did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A hearing on Zillow’s motion seeking a temporary restraining order will be held at 11:00 a.m. CT on May 22.
Editor’s note: this story was updated with information from MRED’s latest court filings and additional background at 8:45 a.m. eastern time on May 22.
