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On March 25th, 2025 the National Association of Realtors ("NAR") made an announcement that their controversial Clear Cooperation Policy ("CCP") was going to remain in effect and that they were implementing a new rule called the Multiple Listing Options for Sellers rule. This rule allows agents to have a listing in the MLS, but exclude it from being published online to third-party websites. Before I get into what I think about this policy, lets take a step back and look at how we got here.
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The Clear Cooperation Policy, often abbreviated as "CCP", was created in response to market conditions and the actions of a few bad agents. Clear Cooperation came about because in the last "red hot" seller's market, it was regularly possible to list a home and have it sell within days or sooner. In the most recent such market, many listings would sell before they hit the MLS and buyers agents felt that listing agents were not listing them on purpose to try and find their own buyer. This was widely not the case, but with some exceptions. Sadly, instead of researching how widely this was happening, NAR was driven by the minority who complained and implemented Clear Cooperation, even though by that time the market had cooled off and homes were starting to sit for longer periods of time.
The vast majority of agents practiced "pre-marketing", which is to say they marketed the house for a period of time prior to the first showings to build up a buzz so it hit the market with a frenzy and got the seller the most interest and best possible offers in the shortest time. Clear Cooperation killed this practice and greatly hurt sellers. The "Coming Soon" status tried to remedy this, but you still couldn't publicly market it or give out an address or even a street name in many cases.
In addition, Clear Cooperation had two huge loopholes in it, both of which I pointed out to NAR and both of which were ignored. The first loophole is the "Office Exclusive" listing. This is a listing that can be freely marketed only to agents within your office. California law, courtesy of a court case in Malibu, defines a real estate office to be any offices managed by the same Broker, regardless of geographic location. This allows companies to form up regionally or statewide under one Broker, which some already have, and to keep their listings all in-house. To the best of my knowledge, this is currently NOT being done, with the exception of some experimental programs like the "First Look" program at one company, but it is there.
The second loophole is that NAR required agents to put the property in an active status within one "business day" from when they started marketing it to the public. The problem here is that they defined "business day" as Monday to Friday. So an agent wishing to do so, could take a listing on a Friday, market it and do open houses all weekend, and not have to make it available to other agents in the MLS until the following Monday. If Friday or Monday happen to be a holiday, then those days are considered non-business days and they get an extra day.
These two loopholes can be used to bypass Clear Cooperation completely. Clear Cooperation is a perfect example of a governing body interfering with the free market. The market had already corrected itself and eliminated the conditions that created the alleged problem back when NAR sought comments on the proposed rule.
Here's an article I wrote last year that goes into more detail.
After much recent debate, spurred along by potential lawsuits from the Department of Justice as well as several real estate companies, NAR revisited its Clear Cooperation Policy. Sadly, in my opinion, they decided to keep this policy and they decided to make matters even more ripe for abuse by creating the new Multiple Listing Options for Sellers rule instead of just repealing Clear Cooperation completely and going back to what worked very well for the last 40+ years.
This new rule allows a seller to list a property, make it fully available to other agents, and just not have it show up automatically on third-party websites, such as the well-known portals, real estate brokerage websites or individual agent websites. There are some execptions, the most notable one being that if you are logged into your agent's website and have an existing relationship with them (such as a signed buyer broker agreement), then the listing can be displayed there. This rule allows the listing agent to fully market the home, have open houses, and allows other agents to show it to their clients. It also allows the listing agent to list the home on their website and to manually add it to any third-party website they wish as part of the marketing. It just makes it so that it won't show up automatically on publicly accessible websites.
Here's what I like about this. For people who are privacy conscious, this allows their agent a way to advertise the property and still respect the privacy of the client by not having the address or interior photos online. Clear Cooperation, as it was written, made it next to impossible for smaller companies to take these kinds of listings and properly market them, which is something I also pointed out to NAR.
This is a very valuable feature for athletes, celebrities, execs, "high value targets", domestic violence survivors, and more. Think back to when the LA Rams moved to Thousand Oaks from St. Louis. If a move hadn't been announced yet and all of a sudden the whole team lists their house, you know something is up. From another angle, California has lost so many businesses to other states due to how this state is run, that if a company's "C Suite" executives all list their houses and that data is publicly known, one could potentially use that information to target the company.
This also restores the ability of companies to do a proper pre-marketing campaign, whereas currently agents only have the "Coming Soon" status which does not allow for advertising an address or other identifying characteristics of the location.
So here is what I don't like about it. My primary dislike with this new rule is that it can be abused to create the same problems Clear Cooperation was designed to address and there is no way that I can see to determine who is using it within the spirit of the rule and who is not. What I see as possibly happening is that the same agents who would abuse the "one business day" loophole or would use a non-Realtor company to list their properties without needing to be in the MLS, will see the very obvious and big loophole in this rule. They could list the property in this status and make it extremely difficult for other agents to show (appointment with agent, 72+ hours notice, no lockbox, not returning showing requests, no showings until a far out date, etc.) and now that commissions are no longer a thing, there are even more ways that agents can play these games. They can then use various online marketing venues and non-Realtor MLSs to get onto the portals and capture the buyer leads directly and potentially double-side listings.
It will be next to impossible to determine who is doing this for personal gain and who is doing this under the direction of their seller, and I suspect there will be lawsuits relating to abuse of this rule within six months to a year.
My other concerns are that it seems to contradict Clear Cooperation and could render the Coming Soon listing status irrelevant. While I'm no fan of Clear Cooperation, I do not like it when rules contradict each other, especially since I advise multiple Brokerages on the rules and this year, I'm responsible for implementing and enforcing the rules.
In the end, I do not see why NAR just didn't do the smart thing and eliminate Clear Cooperation entirely instead of thrusting another half-baked idea upon its members. With all that said, time for the disclaimer: These are just my thoughts and views and do not necessarily represent those of the Realtor Associations I serve on. All thoughts and opinions are based upon the information available at the time of the writing of this posting (3/27/2025) and data may change as NAR attempts to address the mess they've created.
