Elizabeth Warren Is Actually Right About This One, Trump Should Beat Her To The Fix

Interesting affordability, bob barr, donald trump, elizabeth warren, housing crisis, housing market, jetblue, merger, spirit airlines admin August 25, 2026 0 Comments

Elizabeth Warren Is Actually Right About This One, Trump Should Beat Her To The Fix

Democrat Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, believe it or not, has a valid point: should the country’s biggest real estate players be allowed to prevent American citizens from simply looking at which homes are even for sale? It’s hard enough to find an affordable home on the market today — should the available inventory now sit behind a paywall, too?

Unfortunately, that’s exactly the situation today for potential homebuyers.

The nation’s largest brokerage, Compass, and the dominant multiple listing service (MLS) in the Chicago area — Midwest Real Estate Data (MRED) — are working in cahoots to wall off listings behind a private, pay-to-see network.

If lawmakers don’t step in, it will be only a matter of time before the practice spreads to listings nationwide.

Warren sent a letter demanding answers, with a deadline of Aug. 21. As of this writing, and to no surprise, there has been no public indication that either company has responded. Wisconsin Republican Rep. Scott Fitzgerald, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust subcommittee, sent a similar letter in July with an Aug. 5 deadline, asking Compass and MRED to brief subcommittee staff by that date; however, Compass never confirmed it would do so.

The ball is now in the Trump administration’s hands — specifically the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission — to do something.

For decades, MLS databases have been the shared bulletin board of the real estate world, and have worked like this: A real estate agent posts a house on the board, other agents immediately see it, and it soon appears on Zillow, Redfin, and other sites. Without this open-source board, it is virtually impossible for potential homebuyers to know what’s for sale.

In a sense, MLS databases end up as local monopolies. A listings database is only useful if everyone uses it — a board with “some” of the homes for sale in any particular area isn’t worth much to buyers and sellers, or, most importantly, to their agents.

In this “network effect” system, it becomes nearly impossible for a rival database to get off the ground once an MLS reaches critical mass in a metro area. Local “realtor” associations reinforce that dominance by tying MLS access to mandatory membership. This is precisely the type of arrangement on which multiple private antitrust suits are based — and which, at times in the past two decades, the Justice Department itself has challenged.

Importantly, however, Compass (the largest brokerage in the country by sales) and MRED are now building a different, private system for many of their listings.

In the proposed listing system, homes published on their private network remain hidden from the public websites and from non-member agents. Thus, a family searching online for a home to purchase would, if unknowingly, be significantly limited in the pool of homes they might bid on. Consequently, with fewer houses available for them to bid on, many home buyers would be bidding against each other in a smaller pool, resulting in higher prices.

This is a far cry from a free market. It is, rather, a captive market — one that the industry’s monopolies are taking advantage of for their own self-serving purposes.

Which raises the question: What will Attorney General Todd Blanche and FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson do about it?

This should be an easy win for the home-buying consumer. Housing is the single largest expense for most American families; voters regularly cite it as one of their major concerns. An administration that can point to concrete action lowering barriers in the housing market has a rare victory sitting right in front of it — one requiring no new spending or expanded regulatory powers — simply enforcement of existing antitrust rules in cases this administration has declared it wants to bring.

The Biden Justice Department’s marquee fight was blocking the JetBlue-Spirit merger: preventing two popular but struggling low-cost airlines from combining, a move that caused Spirit to close its doors for good in May. Conservatives rightly point to that case as a clear example of the government’s antitrust power being wielded wrongly, significantly harming both businesses and consumers.

Now, we are seeing the opposite fact pattern. Compass and MRED are the furthest thing from pro-consumer. They are using their combined market position to fence off the one shared resource on which the entire real estate market runs. In most metro areas, there is no meaningful alternative to the local MLS; it is the closest thing residential real estate has to a public utility.

When the same companies that control it start deciding who sees which homes — an open feed for some, a paywall for others — it becomes a clear-as-day antitrust violation and precisely the type of case that free-market conservatives have said they want to bring. A fight not against size or success for its own sake, but against incumbents using their size to pick winners and losers.

Senator Warren spotted the opening. Trump’s Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission should take the ball and run with it before she does. This would show the American public that limited-government antitrust enforcement looks nothing like the airline case that helped sink Spirit, but rather resembles tearing down a toll booth that should not have been there in the first place.

Bob Barr represented Georgia’s Seventh District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He served previously as the United States Attorney in Atlanta from 1986 to 1990 and was an official with the CIA in the 1970s. He now practices law in Atlanta, Georgia, serves as head of Liberty Guard, and is the immediate past president of the National Rifle Association of America.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.