When I started in residential real estate some 25 years ago, the MLS was presented in a book: bound pages of newsprint with tiny, grainy pictures (one per listing, black and white) and each book was numbered and marked CONFIDENTIAL all throughout. Agents were held liable for each book and there were serious penalties if you lost or (horrors) gave your book to a non-member of the MLS.

The MLS, by the way, was originally started as a way for a listing broker to offer compensation to a selling broker under a guaranteed payment offer. Termed "Universal Offer of Compensation" the buyer's broker now had some reasonable assurance that they would get paid for selling the property. Up to that point there were no cooperative sales - listing brokers were the only ones who could sell their listings.

Over time and for whatever reason, it seems that brokers and associates began to think of the listings as being their major unique value proposition. If you wanted to buy or sell a house, you had to work through a REALTOR^® . When, in the latter part of the 1990's NAR devised a data sharing plan under which listing brokers could agree to share their listings with each other on their respective websites, many brokers and agents became horrified at the thought of opening the doors to what they saw as their "private club." Some pointed out that we were "giving our industry away."

Even now, a decade later, there are a number of professionals who feel the act of giving our listings to third-party aggregators and syndicators (realtor.com and Point2 as examples of each) was an act of treason. They reason that one does not need a real estate office and the associated expenses to make a fortune in this business. To some degree, they are right. I submit Redfin as an example of a company, born on the Web and  hardly a traditional real estate firm. read the entire story here. . .