When activist investor and corporate raider Carl Icahn agitates for a change of direction in a company he owns shares in, he does so through a flurry of shareholder letters, proxy filings and board seat power grabs.
In 2014, when he pushed for eBay to spin off PayPal, he wrote that “the complete disregard for accountability at eBay is the most blatant we have ever seen” in an open letter to shareholders.
While Compass CEO Robert Reffkin is not a shareholder in the National Association of Realtors, he and his more than 30,000 agents are dues-paying members of the trade group, and the outspoken executive has in recent months taken a similar tack to trying to mold the future shape of the organization.
And Reffkin’s open letters have come in the form of social media posts.
“Was NAR’s Clear Cooperation Policy really designed to protect the consumer, or was it designed to protect the annual agent membership dues paid to NAR and the MLSs they control?” Reffkin asked the caption accompanying a photo posted to Instagram of NAR’s empty boardroom.
The post was the latest in an escalating war of words between Compass and an increasingly mobilized opposition group that now includes certain smaller brokerages, MLSes, aggregators like Zillow and hybrid listing platform-brokerages like Redfin.
One of the most heated public spats that has played out on social media between Compass and Washington-based Northwest MLS spilled over into policy.
In March, Reffkin wrote in an Instagram post that “[t]here are ~600 MLSs in the United States, and Northwest Multiple Listing Service (NWMLS) is the ONLY MLS in the country that has until now prevented homesellers from utilizing Compass Private Exclusives to protect them from the risk of days on market and price drop history.”
That post also showed what Reffkin described as the “first ever” Compass private exclusive in the state of Washington. Over the next several weeks, Reffkin continued to post — to the grid no less, aesthetics be damned — private exclusive listings in Washington while calling out NWMLS for its “restrictive ‘mandatory’” rule on marketing homes outside its system.
But NWMLS this week struck back, shutting off its IDX feed to Compass, which is how the brokerages share listing information between each other and display it on third-party websites.
Reffkin has also been working behind the scenes, imploring MLSes to adopt policies and ease restrictions on private and coming soon listings.
Reffkin sent letters to MLSes asking them not to include delayed marketing exempt listings, a new category of listing recently launched by NAR, to appear in virtual office website (VOW) feeds, which is another way that MLS participants share and display listings, industry commentator Rob Hahn reported on his Substack.
The fight over VOW feeds comes as Reffkin — and his company’s marketing strategy that relies on listings marketed off the MLS — now also faces pushback from Zillow, which announced its own new policy banning listings that have been publicly marketed without being submitted to the MLS within 24 hours.
Though it’s unclear how receptive MLSes will be to disavowing established NAR policy, Reffkin has not taken his foot off the pedal in his drive to end CCP.
In Icahn’s case, his efforts to prompt a PayPal spin-off appeared all for naught amid a chorus of opposition from eBay’s management and board that led him to drop the public campaign — only for the board to announce a spin-off months later.
Read more
Zillow clamps down on private listings
NAR has ruled on CCP — so what’s next?
NAR to keep Clear Cooperation Policy — with a twist
