Reading Tea Leaves

I just spent a few days last week attending an excellent MLS strategy session, which I obviously won’t talk about… but it gave me quite a good look at where the smartest minds in that sub-industry are. While I was there, the Compass-Anywhere deal closed… which surprised quite a few people who had thought the DOJ and FTC would stop that merger from happening. I get back and learn that Top Agent Network had settled its lawsuit against NAR in a way that makes things far more clear.

Greg Hague already wrote an excellent guest post breaking the TAN-NAR thing down from his perspective.

I grant that I am likely suffering from quite a bit of confirmation bias, seeing as how I have predicted these outcomes in 2026 Seven Predictions (“Private listings go mainstream”) and 2025 Seven Predictions (“Heartbreak for the Proponents of Clear Cooperation Policy”) and so on. But I can’t help but read the tea leaves and speculate as to how things are likely to go moving forward.

In particular, I am now leaning towards the possibility that one of the most anticipated legal rulings in the industry—the preliminary injunction motion between Compass and Zillow—may not be as important as it seemed two weeks ago.

I don’t know that everything changed, but I do think something has. Since I have more presentations coming up this year, this post will be an attempt to read the tea leaves, speculate like crazy, and figure out what I think about the near and mid-term future.