Finding an affordable home today feels like a game where the rules are rigged and the board is hidden. While headlines focus on interest rates, zoning laws, and regulatory red tape, a quiet crisis is brewing behind closed doors: a powerful real estate collusion designed to keep ordinary buyers completely in the dark.
When it comes to high home prices, there’s no shortage of blame to go around. Causes include restrictive zoning, excessive regulations, burdensome environmental reviews, and stubbornly high interest rates. Congress recently addressed several of these factors with the first major federal housing bill in decades. The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, which became law in July 2026, stops private equity firms from buying up starter homes to rent out, slashes regulations and environmental review standards that slow construction and drive up prices, and rewards jurisdictions that build more homes.
Local data also suggest that the Trump administration’s focus on illegal immigration has helped ease the pressure on housing costs. Even traditionally left-leaning outlets like the LA Times have acknowledged the basic economic reality: fewer people means less demand, which ultimately leads to cheaper homes. Furthermore, the administration took the unusual step in January 2026 of ordering Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy up $200 billion in mortgage-backed securities, successfully pulling 30-year fixed mortgage rates down to their lowest levels in months.
Another culprit, however, hardly ever shows up in headlines and is one the Trump administration could easily tackle through antitrust enforcement: collusion among powerful real estate interests to restrict access to information.
For decades, the real estate market has been transparent. Every home has been listed in a shared database — the MLS — that every broker and for-sale website used by the public can see. Now, however, a handful of powerful players are deciding which homes the public even gets to see. For example, Compass — the world’s largest brokerage — entered a partnership with the MLS that runs the Chicago market (MRED) to place some listings outside the public system and instead hide them inside a private network run by that same MLS. Access to those listings is limited to brokers who participate in the MLS and pay its fees.
In other words, the MLS — the gatekeeper of real estate in the region — is now charging for the privilege of seeing certain homes that are for sale. Homes can now be marketed for sale while remaining invisible to ordinary consumers. And because many metropolitan areas are dominated by a single MLS, consumers have little to no ability to go elsewhere.
This controversy has now reached Washington and drawn scrutiny from both sides of the political aisle. Rep. Scott Fitzgerald (R-WI), the Chair of the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Administrative State, Regulatory Reform, and Antitrust sent letters to Compass CEO Robert Reffkin and MRED CEO Rebecca Jensen, warning their partnership could build “velvet ropes” around certain properties and demanding a staff briefing by August 5. While Compass let that specific briefing deadline pass, Reffkin used an August 4 earnings call to publicly defend the arrangement. Meanwhile, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee, followed up with a nine-page letter of her own, warning the deal risked creating a “two-tiered housing market” and setting a response deadline of August 21.
Warren and I disagree on plenty. But competition policy should not be ideological. A housing marketplace in which one group gets access to inventory that another group cannot see deserves scrutiny by all — and, with Republicans and Democrats in Congress converging on this point, that’s exactly what’s happening.
Industry-erected barriers that artificially restrict information can harm housing affordability just as government-erected barriers that restrict supply do. One limits the number of homes that can be built; the other limits the information consumers need for a competitive market to work.
The Trump administration has already taken action to address the regulatory barriers. Now it’s time to tear down the information barriers as well. The Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission should examine private listing arrangements that restrict access to housing inventory and determine whether they violate federal antitrust law. Americans already have a hard enough time finding a home they can afford. They shouldn’t also have to wonder whether the home they would have bought was hidden from them in the first place. That’s why it’s so important that the Trump antitrust team support this bipartisan congressional coalition and work on getting this competitive marketplace reopened.
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Bob Goodlatte is a former member of Congress from Virginia and former chair of the House Judiciary Committee.
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