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
