Congress didn’t create the private listings problem. We did.

On July 22, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Administrative State, Regulatory Reform, and Antitrust sent letters to Compass and to Midwest Real Estate Data. Both letters ask for a briefing on private listing networks and on the data partnership the two companies announced in April. The subcommittee wants those briefings scheduled by 10 a.m. on August 5. That is the news. Here is the part worth sitting with. The subcommittee is asking a fair question. It wants to understand what happens to competition, and to buyers, when a real share of the homes for sale in a market are visible to some agents and invisible to everybody else. That is a reasonable thing for a lawmaker to wonder about. It is also a question this industry has been asked, in one form or another, since 2020. We had every chance to answer it ourselves. We did not. And now the answer is going to get written by people who do not sit in our meetings. Nobody gets to call this partisan Look at the last seven months. In December, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ron Wyden wrote to the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission asking them to closely scrutinize the Compass acquisition of Anywhere. In May, Zillow to...