NAR says agencies have long backed multiple listing services; DOJ sued it in 2005 over MLS rules

The National Association of Realtors has asked the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission to reaffirm that sharing historical, factual property data supports competitive markets, while emphasizing a point the association says both agencies settled long ago: that multiple listing services are procompetitive infrastructure. The Justice Department's own case file records something more specific. On September 8, 2005, the United States sued the association under Section 1 of the Sherman Act over the rules that decided which brokers could get listings out of those services and onto their own websites.

The claim sits on the association's public page about MLSs and online listings. The page describes comments NAR submitted in coordination with the Council of Multiple Listing Services, arguing that the two agencies have for years treated listing services as procompetitive infrastructure and asking them to reaffirm that sharing historical, factual property data supports competitive markets. Another line on the same page names the DOJ/FTC Business Collaborations Guidance, Docket No. ATR-2026-0001. The version of the page captured for this piece is a plain extraction of lines with no markup, so it cannot establish that the docket line is a heading, or where it sits relative to the description of the comments. Both lines appear on the page. No sentence in the file joins them.

The page also carries the association's warning about what happens if the institution goes away: "A future without the MLS would mean that the real estate market will likely be controlled by the largest brokers, portals, or technology companies, which will limit competition and choices for consumers." Real Estate News reported that NAR made its case in a May 21 letter to the two agencies - the outlet's URL dates that report to May 28, 2026 - and summarized the position in a line of its own: "The MLS is pro-consumer, NAR told the DOJ and FTC". Neither the association's page nor the trade report, as captured, names the person who signed the letter, so no signer is named here.

The record against which the recognition claim can be measured is indexed on the Antitrust Division's own website. In Civil Action No. 05 C 5140, in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, the Division filed a Competitive Impact Statement on 06/12/2008 explaining the settlement it had reached with NAR. The statement gives the purpose of the suit in one clause: to "stop NAR from violating Section 1 of the Sherman Act, 15 U.S.C. § 1". The Division's case-document index lists the Complaint on September 8, 2005 and an Amended Complaint on October 4, 2005.

What the case was about was plumbing. The statement describes virtual office websites as password-protected sites through which brokers deliver brokerage services, and finds that brokers who use them can operate more productively. The Department's settlement announcement puts the consumer end of it plainly: a VOW lets a broker's customers search the listings themselves rather than rely on a broker to run the search for them. The first rule the Department challenged required MLSs to let traditional brokers withhold their listings from those sites through an opt-out, so a listing broker could keep a client's listings off a competitor's site. The second stopped a broker from educating customers about homes through a VOW and then referring them, for a fee, to brokers who would show the homes in person. The announcement records a comparison the advocacy page does not make: NAR did not let brokers withhold their listings from traditional broker members of an MLS.

The scale was not small. The statement counts roughly 800 MLSs affiliated with NAR, the same figure the settlement announcement uses in describing the association's compliance-education obligation. Some VOW brokers, the statement records, had offered discounted commission rates to sellers, and VOW brokers had already delivered tens of millions of dollars in financial benefits directly to their customers. The Department's announcement of the settlement - undated in the text captured here, and placed in May 2008 only by its URL path on justice.gov - states that the policies "prevented consumers from receiving the full benefits of competition, discouraged discounting, and threatened to lock in outmoded business models."

The remedy was repeal, not adjustment. The proposed Final Judgment required NAR to withdraw both its VOW policy and its ILD policy, to adopt and apply new rules, and to direct its member boards to implement them. Under the replacement, brokers could no longer opt out; an MLS had to give a VOW broker the listing information brokers are permitted to give customers; and MLSs were barred from impeding referrals by VOW brokers or from delivering data to them by an inferior method. The association contested the case, moving to dismiss on the ground that it did not restrain brokers, and the court denied that motion on November 27, 2006. The judgment ran for ten years from its entry by the court, and the case index dates the Final Judgment to November 18, 2008. The captured passages of the settlement announcement carry, with no speaker attached to them, the line that "Today's settlement prevents traditional brokers from deliberately impeding competition."

Read together - and this paragraph is analysis, drawn from the two filings - the 2005 case was not a case against the MLS. Its target was the association's rulemaking about who could receive MLS data, and the Department's own description of the suit says as much: it challenged policies and related rules that obstructed brokers using internet-based tools. The association's sentence about a future without the MLS answers a question the case never asked. The two documents are answering different questions, and a reader should not treat one as a verdict on the other.

The collision is narrower, and it is real. The recognition claim is about what the agencies have long said. In the document the Antitrust Division wrote about its own suit, the agency states that the association's policies singled out those innovative brokers and denied them equal access to the listings for sale, and it asked a court to order the policies repealed. Whatever the agencies have recognized about shared property data as such, the same file records an agency treating one association's MLS rules as a Sherman Act problem - a separation the advocacy page and the trade coverage both leave out.

What the file cannot tell a seller or a buyer today is which rules bind an MLS now. The judgment carried a ten-year term, and nothing in these documents describes any policy adopted after it. This piece makes no claim about what expired, when, or what replaced it.

Two things are checkable from here. The first is the docket the association's page names alongside its description of the comments, DOJ/FTC Business Collaborations Guidance, Docket No. ATR-2026-0001: if guidance is published under that name, a reader can set its language about listing services beside the Antitrust Division's 2008 filing from the same building. The second is the case file, which stays online. Daily Pol expects that on December 15, 2026 the Antitrust Division's page for United States v. National Association of Realtors will still show the Final Judgment of November 18, 2008 as the last dispositive entry in Civil Action No. 05 C 5140, with no filing reopening the case. That page, not a press page, is where the record on this sits.