While his firm may not be named as a defendant in Compass’s lawsuit against Zillow, it doesn’t that mean Glenn Sanford, the CEO of eXp World Holdings, doesn’t have thoughts to share.
In its complaint, Compass (the nation’s largest brokerage by sales volume) named eXp Realty (the top brokerage by transaction sides), as a co-conspirator. Due to this, Sanford wrote on LinkedIn that he has been “following the Compass-Zillow lawsuit with great interest.”
According to Sanford, his support for an open marketplace comes from eXp’s origin story.
“When I founded eXp 15 years ago, we raised very little capital compared to today’s mega-brokerages,” he wrote. “What allowed us to grow from a startup to 84,000+ agents wasn’t access to massive funding for acquisitions — it was our ability to compete on a level playing field where all agents could access the same listing inventory through the MLS system.”
Sanford argues that private listings kill innovation and competition for a variety of reasons. This includes access to inventory, as private listing networks lock smaller brokerages out from premium listings, and agent recruitment, as agents do not want to join a small startup with limited inventory availability.
He also argues that this would cause market fragmentation and would force small brokerages to consolidate with larger firms to remain competitive.
Ultimately, Sanford said he does not see this fight tied to any company’s business model.
“It’s about whether real estate maintains a competitive landscape where innovation can emerge from anywhere, or becomes dominated by a handful of capital-intensive players controlling listing access,” he wrote.
“The MLS system, despite its flaws, has been the great equalizer. It ensured that a small brokerage in rural America could offer clients access to the same cooperative database as the largest firms in Manhattan.”
As the largest brokerage in the nation by transaction side count, Sanford acknowledges that eXp could conceivably create its own very successful private marketplace, but the company has chosen not to.
“When we support Zillow‘s position on listing transparency, we’re not conspiring against competition — we’re defending the system that allowed us to compete in the first place. We’re supporting the principle that listing access should be based on professional cooperation, not capital concentration, even though we could now benefit from the alternative,” he wrote.
As the real estate industry looks to the future, Sanford said it’s important to foster more innovation and not more consolidation.
“The path forward should reward companies that serve agents and consumers better, not those that can afford to acquire market share and then wall it off,” he wrote.
“Every small brokerage owner watching this case should ask: What kind of industry do we want? One where success depends on providing better service and innovation, or one where it depends on having enough capital to control listing access? The future of real estate competition may well be decided by how this case resolves.”
As the first brokerage to sign on to Zillow’s listing standards policy, which bans listings that are not input into the MLS within one business day of public marketing, Compass has argued that eXp Realty colluded with Zillow on the policy.
According to the policy, public marketing includes things like yard signs, social media posts and brokerage private listing networks that consumers must log into. Compass argues that this harms its business by preventing agents and clients from utilizing Compass’s private exclusive network, and that Zillow enacted this policy to maintain its alleged monopoly over home searches.
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