By Nicole Friedman

Thousands of home sellers in Chicago are in for a rude awakening. As of Wednesday, their homes are no longer available on the popular Zillow listings site.

The disappearing sales listings are caught up in an increasingly contentious dispute between Zillow and the local listings database that serves the Chicago area, Midwest Real Estate Data, or MRED.

MRED cut off its feed of about 43,000 listings to Zillow in and around Chicago, saying that Zillow's rules violate its agreement with the local listing platform.

The platform's decision to remove Zillow listings in Illinois -- and parts of Indiana, Iowa and Wisconsin -- is one of the most extreme responses yet in a feud over the growing prevalence of private listings.

On one side is Compass, the biggest U.S. real-estate brokerage. It encourages home sellers to share their listings first with Compass agents, their clients and anyone who inquires. In some cases, these listings are kept from the broader public for several weeks before Compass more widely advertises them.

Compass says this helps sellers gauge interest and make sure they are priced correctly before their listing goes public. MRED supports the private listing approach.

But Zillow, the most-visited U.S. real-estate website, is one of the biggest opponents of this practice. The firm says sellers and buyers benefit when listings are advertised as widely as possible. To support this belief, Zillow said it may block a listing from its site if it isn't available publicly within a day of it being advertised to buyers elsewhere.

The dispute threatens to divide the residential real-estate brokerage business, making it more complicated for home sellers and buyers to navigate listings.

Already Zillow's home listings have dropped noticeably. As of midday Wednesday, Zillow displayed about 2,000 for-sale listings in the city of Chicago, while Redfin showed about 5,000, Realtor.com showed more than 8,600 and Homes.com showed 4,700. Zillow gets an average of 220 million unique users a month, according to the company.

The change is likely to confuse home sellers in the region who expect to see their listings on Zillow and buyers who are using Zillow in their housing search, real-estate agents said.

"They don't know what they're not seeing," said Chicago-area real-estate broker Josh Black. "It's going to be a problem."

Some brokerages have set up direct feeds to share their listings with Zillow as a workaround. "You still want to make sure the listing is everywhere," said Ryan Gable, owner of StartingPoint Realty in Schaumburg, Ill.

The industry fight over private listings has escalated in recent years.

"Our rules apply equally to every participant," MRED Chief Executive Rebecca Jensen said in a statement Wednesday. "We have a duty to educate our participants and vendors, counsel them when they are out of compliance, and require that breaches be cured."

Zillow sued MRED and Compass earlier this month, alleging that they conspired to cut off Zillow's access to Chicago-area listings.

"Chicagoland home buyers and sellers this morning have far worse access to the housing market than they had yesterday," Zillow said in a statement Wednesday. "MRED and Compass have colluded to turn back the clock on consumer transparency."

News Corp, parent of The Wall Street Journal, operates Realtor.com.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

May 20, 2026 15:08 ET (19:08 GMT)

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