It seems everyone’s talking about Clear Cooperation these days. Is the policy a power grab from NAR and the MLSs or a sincere effort to level the playing field for buyers?
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Each week on The Download, Inman’s Christy Murdock takes a deeper look at the top-read stories of the week to give you what you’ll need to meet Monday head-on. This week: It seems everyone’s talking about Clear Cooperation these days. Is the policy a power grab from NAR and the MLSs or a sincere effort to level the playing field for buyers?
Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, real estate has a new controversy in store. This time, everyone’s fretting over the National Association of Realtors’ Clear Cooperation Policy and lining up on opposing sides to argue its merits and deficiencies.
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Adopted in 2019, Clear Cooperation was presented as an effort to improve transparency and ensure that brokerages didn’t hoard pocket listings to the detriment of consumer choice — with consumers, in this case, understood to mean buyers. In the years since, the policy has repeatedly come under fire as overly restrictive and impinging on seller options in determining how and when their homes would hit the open market.
Now, with NAR increasingly coming under scrutiny and with brokerages and MLSs looking for new ways to define their value and effectiveness, if some industry leaders have their way, Clear Cooperation may be headed to the chopping block.
This week, Compass founder and CEO Robert Reffkin weighed in with his assessment of Clear Cooperation, arguing that its intended benefits “pale…