Is Real Estate Quietly Moving Behind A Velvet Rope?

Most buyers won’t notice the change when it happens. There won’t be a headline or a public debate. Unless you happened to open an email from CRMLS, the largest MLS in the country, you might never know it occurred at all.

Starting February 17, buyers in CRMLS markets will lose access to one of the most important tools for understanding how homes actually sell: the ability to see interior photos of comparable properties once they close.

This quiet adjustment limits IDX feeds used by consumer-facing portals reaching hundreds of millions of users monthly to a single primary photo, typically the exterior, for closed listings. Full photo sets remain available inside professional MLS systems.

This may be the first gatekeeping move in real estate that no one objected to, because it benefits every intermediary at once. The information hasn’t disappeared. Agents can still see it. Brokerages can still reference it. But buyers can no longer access it on their own. To understand why one home sold for more than another, buyers will increasingly need to ask someone who already has permission to see what they can’t.

That shift matters more than it might appear

In real estate, comparable sales are not just about price. They’re about context. A sale price without an understanding of condition is a weak signal at best. Did the home have original cabinetry and worn flooring, or was it fully renovated and turnkey? Was the kitchen untouched since the 1990s, or recently redone with modern finishes? These details explain why a home sold for what it did and help buyers calibrate expectations.

Without interior photos, buyers are left guessing. Condition is often the difference between setting a new neighborhood record and selling below the last comp. Without visibility into that condition, buyers can’t tell where their bid reflects true value. Comps become numbers without meaning, useful for record-keeping, but far less useful for learning the market.

To be clear, buyers will still be able to see sale prices, dates and basic facts. Public records will still exist. But stripped of interior context, that information becomes harder to interpret independently. The ability to learn the market, not just observe it, is diminished.

This changes who has access to the information

The photos still exist inside the MLS, where agents and brokerages can access and analyze them. Buyers can still receive them, but only if an agent chooses to send them manually, outside of any self-serve system. The change doesn’t eliminate information; it changes who controls access to it.

This isn’t about whether buyers can obtain the information. It’s whether they can access it directly. A buyer who wants to study past sales, understand condition differences and form an independent opinion now has fewer tools to do so without an intermediary.

Broader industry shifts in transparency

That restriction arrives amid broader industry shifts toward transparency. In the wake of recent settlements and reforms, the industry has emphasized clearer buyer agreements and fee disclosures — a post-settlement era framed around openness. Against that backdrop, reducing access to self-serve market context moves in the opposite direction.

What makes this change notable is not just its impact, but the reaction to it, or lack thereof.

Real estate has seen plenty of high-profile disputes over access and control in recent years. When portals built consumer audiences that agents relied on, competitors cried foul. When large brokerages experimented with inventory strategies that limited MLS exposure, other firms objected loudly. In those cases, gatekeeping created competitive advantages for some and disadvantages for others, and the industry reacted accordingly.

This change is different

Here, the restriction applies broadly, but its impact is asymmetrical. The information still exists inside professional systems, meaning portals and brokerages are largely unaffected in practice. Buyers, on the other hand, lose the ability to access that context independently. The result isn’t a redistribution of power among intermediaries, it’s a consolidation of reliance on them. When it benefits everyone at once, the response is silence.

That silence doesn’t mean the change is harmless. It means the incentives are aligned. While CRMLS cites member feedback in its rulemaking, broader consumer input, such as documented buyer preferences around comp visuals, doesn’t appear to be publicly reflected in the process.

CRMLS concerns deserve acknowledgement

CRMLS has pointed to privacy and safety concerns, including the potential misuse of interior listing photos, as a motivating factor behind the change. Those concerns deserve acknowledgment. But the timing and mechanics of the rule raise uncomfortable questions. Interior photos are most actionable while a home is actively listed, when contents and layouts reflect current conditions. After a sale, interiors change quickly. Anyone intent on misusing listing data could easily save photos while a home is on the market. Restricting historical photos addresses visibility after the fact, not exposure at the point of highest risk.

Floorplans are sometimes cited as a more durable concern, but outside of unusually large or complex properties, they offer limited long-term value. The scope of the restriction far exceeds the scope of the risk it’s meant to address, a universal limitation justified by a narrow set of edge cases.

Other options

In practice, requests to remove sold listing photos have also been rare. In my own experience as a broker, only two clients have ever requested photo removal after closing. That doesn’t invalidate privacy concerns, but it suggests they are not universal and raises the question of whether a blanket policy is the appropriate response.

More proportional alternatives exist. Some MLSs, including Bay East, already support more nuanced approaches through public-private photo toggles. Others could adopt standardized opt-out mechanisms or time-limited access. For example, sold listing photos could remain available for three to six months, when they are most useful to buyers as comps and be phased out as their relevance declines.

Those approaches protect privacy without eliminating market understanding.

More transparency or less?

Real estate has faced this choice before. When confronted with new technology or shifting consumer behavior, the industry’s instinct has often been to narrow access rather than expand it. Sometimes that instinct is framed as protection. Sometimes as professionalism. Sometimes as privacy. The effect is often the same: information flows upward, and understanding becomes permissioned.

The cost of that approach falls most heavily on buyers trying to educate themselves. First-time buyers, analytical buyers and anyone seeking confidence before engaging an agent lose an important learning tool. Instead of forming views grounded in evidence, they must increasingly rely on interpretation.

That doesn’t make agents less important. It makes them more necessary, but in a different way. It shifts the balance from guidance to gatekeeping, from helping buyers interpret shared information to being the conduit through which information flows.

Markets tend to function best when participants can observe, compare and learn independently. Transparency doesn’t eliminate the need for expertise; it makes expertise more valuable by grounding it in shared facts. When understanding the market requires permission, confidence erodes and dependence grows.

This change may seem small. Most buyers won’t notice it immediately. But over time, it reinforces a familiar pattern: when faced with complexity, real estate often chooses restriction over openness. And each time it does, the market becomes a little harder to understand on your own.

Dean DiCarlo is a real estate and technology veteran and CEO of Homing and Inlumina.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of HousingWire’s editorial department and its owners.

To contact the editor responsible for this piece: tracey@hwmedia.com