Judge Restores Zillow's Chicago Feed But Backs MRED On Banned Listings

The high-stakes standoff between Zillow and Chicago's largest multiple listing service has produced a court ruling that both sides are calling a win. Late on Friday, US District Judge John Tharp Jr. partially granted Zillow's request for a temporary restraining order against Midwest Real Estate Data (MRED), forcing the MLS to restore the portal's access to roughly 43,000 Chicagoland listings while also ordering Zillow to display the nine Compass listings it had previously banned under its controversial Listing Access Standards.

The dispute had erased more than half of Zillow's active Chicago inventory within hours, prompting opportunistic marketing campaigns from Compass and Redfin. MRED suspended Zillow's IDX and VOW feeds on Wednesday morning, days after the portal filed an antitrust lawsuit accusing MRED and Compass of orchestrating a "group boycott" under the Sherman Act. The trigger was Zillow's refusal to display nine private Compass listings located outside MRED's traditional service area, in Florida, Georgia and California.

Judge Tharp's order restores the status quo on listings supply but also bars Zillow from enforcing its private listings ban on any property in ZIP codes where MRED has carried listings between April 2025 and April 2026. Zillow can continue enforcing the policy elsewhere in the country. For MRED, which has run its own private listings network for nearly a decade, the order vindicates its argument that Zillow could not selectively reject feed content under existing licensing agreements.

Compass CEO Robert Reffkin framed the outcome on LinkedIn as a watershed. "Today, a federal judge ruled that Zillow cannot ban our sellers' listings. Every MRED listing Zillow banned has to go back up and Zillow cannot ban any MRED listings going forward inclusive of PLN listings," he wrote, adding that the decision "will reverberate across the country and eliminate Zillow's ability to ban listings."

A Zillow spokesperson countered that the ruling was "an important first step for the Chicago home buyers, sellers and agents who have been harmed by a coordinated scheme between MRED and Compass to reduce transparency in the housing market."

Friday's order is the second courtroom intervention in 2026 to test Zillow's listing access regime, following Judge Jeannette Vargas's February decision in New York refusing to block the policy nationally. The wider antitrust case will now proceed to discovery, with a follow-up hearing set for early this week. Whoever takes the spoils, the fight over who controls American listings data is nowhere near finished.