OneKey MLS, the multiple listing service for New York City, Long Island and the Hudson Valley, said on Oct. 20, 2026, that it has rejected demands from Compass, Inc. to change its rules on sharing publicly marketed listings. The refusal, announced in a release on OneKey’s newsroom and distributed through Business Wire, puts one of the country’s largest housing markets on the side of MLSs that are refusing to loosen cooperation rules under legal pressure from Compass, which describes itself as the largest U.S. residential brokerage by sales volume.
OneKey says it serves real estate professionals across New York City, Long Island and the Hudson Valley and holds more than one million active, pending and historical listings. It has posted its formal response and related communications to participants and subscribers on a dedicated “Choice and Competition” page.
The core disagreement
The dispute is over listings that a brokerage advertises to the public but does not submit to the shared MLS database. OneKey’s release frames Compass’s request as “the ability to advertise homes for sale while hiding them from the shared MLS database,” and argues that this “allows a single brokerage to act as a gatekeeper, controlling who can see a listing and which competing agents can bring buyers to the table.”
OneKey says it already offers sellers “a range of marketing options, including those that protect seller privacy,” and that its rules apply equally to every participant. “A single brokerage should not be permitted to benefit from the shared inventory of its competitors while keeping its own publicly marketed listings outside the shared marketplace,” the release says.
“A truly competitive real estate marketplace relies on shared, cooperative infrastructure, not fragmented, private networks,” OneKey CEO Richard Haggerty said. “Withholding inventory from the open marketplace comes at the direct expense of consumers by restricting buyer access and potentially limiting a seller’s return on their investment.”
Compass has made the opposite case in its own product launches, arguing that sellers should be able to test price and demand before a listing hits the MLS. When it introduced its “See It First” feature in September, Compass said sellers could gauge demand “without accruing public days on market or public price changes.” The OneKey release does not quote a Compass response to the refusal.
The evidence OneKey cites
OneKey leans on outside research to argue that limiting exposure costs sellers money. It cites a study by Bright MLS and Drexel University that found homes marketed openly on the MLS sold for 17.5% more than comparable off-market properties, or about $53,890 for the average seller, and a Zillow report that New York sellers who sold off-market lost a median of $13,749 per home. Both come from earlier studies rather than new OneKey data.
The MLS also points to Washington. It notes that Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker recently asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate practices in the online home-buying market, including private listings, a request RealtyWire covered when the senators wrote to the FTC on Oct. 15. OneKey further cites NAACP President Derrick Johnson, who it says called private listing networks a “modern form of digital redlining” in an August 2026 essay, framing the issue as one of fair housing and equal access.
Part of a broader campaign
OneKey is the latest MLS to go public with a refusal. On Oct. 6, Austin’s Unlock MLS published a letter rejecting a Compass demand to stop penalizing agents for publicly marketing listings without sharing them through the MLS; that letter said Compass’s attorneys had threatened a federal antitrust suit. In California, CRMLS went further and sued Compass first, asking a federal court in New York to declare its cooperation rules lawful, and has said Compass threatened to sue any MLS that did not meet its demands.
OneKey’s release does not say whether Compass set a deadline for its response or whether litigation has been threatened against it specifically. It says only that OneKey “firmly opposes any proposals that would weaken the reciprocal framework” and calls such proposals “a dangerous step backward to a less transparent era, where housing access depended entirely on who you knew.”
On our reading, the New York refusal raises the stakes. Compass is headquartered in New York City, so the standoff has now reached the brokerage’s home market rather than a peripheral one. Whether Compass answers with a lawsuit, as it has threatened elsewhere according to the other MLSs, is the open question. More coverage of the brokerage fight is on RealtyWire’s agents and brokerages page.
