Google is plugging search straight into the MLS — Phoenix is next.

Start with what's already true: your buyers don't open Zillow first anymore. They open Google. Almost every home search now begins in Google before it ever reaches Zillow, Realtor.com, or your own website. What changed this month is what Google does next with those searches.

On June 11, Google and a company called HouseCanary announced something new: for-sale listings that appear right at the top of the search results on your phone — photos, price, beds and baths, and a button to call, message, or book a showing with an agent, all without leaving Google. They're calling it a nationwide rollout.

Here's the honest version, and the reason you're hearing it from us early: “nationwide” means it's allowed everywhere — not that it's working everywhere yet. Right now only three MLSs are feeding listings into it, in about eight test cities like Los Angeles, San Diego, New York, and Austin. It only shows up on phones, and not on every search. Arizona's MLS isn't part of it yet. So if you Google one of your own Gilbert listings today, you'll still just see Zillow and the usual sites. Phoenix is not live yet.

But the groundwork is done. Every listing in this new Google feature comes straight from the MLS — nowhere else. (HouseCanary had to become a licensed brokerage in all 50 states just to be allowed to pull that MLS data, the same thing Zillow did years ago.) Google plans to add more cities through the summer, with the whole country as the goal. When it reaches Arizona, the homes that show up in Google will be the ones on the MLS — and the ones that aren't on the MLS simply won't appear.

So what does it cost a seller to stay off the MLS? Zillow studied it and found that homes sold off the MLS went for about 1.5% less. Take that number with a little skepticism — Zillow makes money when listings run through the MLS, so it has a stake in the answer. But the basic idea is hard to argue with: the more buyers who see a home, the more competition there is, and competition pushes the price up. And Google is about to put MLS listings in front of more buyers than anywhere else online.

Google is changing where buyers look. The Cromford Report's June 20 numbers should change how you talk about prices. The short version: the Phoenix market isn't simply “up” or “down” anymore — it depends entirely on the price range. Looking at the average price per square foot over the past year, the Valley has split into four different markets:

This isn't the whole market heating up or cooling down. It's the market splitting apart. The everyday buyers most of us work with are shopping in the one price range that's actually gotten cheaper per square foot, while the high end keeps climbing on its own.

Two things to do with this. First, stop describing “the Phoenix market” as one number — depending on your client's price range, that number is probably wrong. Second, connect it back to exposure: in the under-$500K range, where buyers have options and the upper hand, getting the home in front of everyone matters most. When listings in that range aren't drawing multiple offers, every extra buyer who sees the home counts.

Source: The Cromford Report — 12-month moving average sales price per square foot, Greater Phoenix ARMLS resale, updated June 20, 2026.

Here's a story worth keeping in mind the next time a vendor pitches you the cutting edge.

This month, Anthropic — the company behind the Claude AI — released the most powerful model it had ever made public. A few days later, it was gone. The U.S. government ordered it shut down over national-security concerns, and the company had to switch it off for every customer in the world. It went from “the best AI you could get” to “gone” in under a week. Their older, more established models kept working fine.

Now imagine you'd spent that week rebuilding your transaction workflow around it. You'd be starting over.

That's the quiet risk underneath the AI gold rush, and it's the same lesson whether the tool vanishes or just underdelivers. The hot trend right now is “agentic” AI — tools that don't wait for a prompt but act on your behalf, like CRMs that mine your database for likely-seller signals. Some of it is genuinely useful. A lot of it is a subscription in search of a problem.

The habit that protects you is boring, and it works: name the exact problem before you buy the tool. Say out loud what specific task in your week it's going to take off your plate. If you can't finish that sentence, you're chasing a trend, not fixing a problem. Pick the boring, proven tool you actually control over the brand-new one that could be amazing on Monday and shut down by Friday. New and powerful is exciting. Proven and stable is what your business actually runs on.

This Google change makes one conversation more important than it used to be: the seller who wants to keep their home private, “coming soon,” or off the MLS. Here's how to handle it without sounding like you're just protecting your commission.

The core of it is one sentence: “Buyers don't start their search on any one website anymore — they start on Google. And the homes Google shows them come straight out of the MLS. A listing that skips the MLS doesn't just miss Zillow; it misses the starting line.” It's not a scare tactic and it's not a rule you're imposing — it's exposure, and exposure is what you were hired to deliver.

One thing to get right so you don't overstate it: the rule that a listing has to go on the MLS within a day of public marketing comes from NAR's Clear Cooperation Policy and your MLS — it is not an Arizona law or an ADRE requirement. Frame it for sellers as a marketing decision, not a legal one. If you call it the law, you've told your seller something that isn't true.

To walk in ready for the pushback, paste this into Claude or ChatGPT before the appointment:

The point: Google is changing how buyers find homes, and this gives you the words for a seller who hasn't realized it yet.

Nathan White, a REALTOR and instructor in Ohio, made a simple argument in Real Estate News this week: our industry wants to be treated like a real profession, but it has some of the lightest training requirements of any field that handles decisions this big. His sharpest point is about continuing education — too often it's just checking a box instead of actually getting better at the job.

We read that and nodded, because it's the exact problem we built Avance to fix. Most CE is a slideshow you click through to get the certificate and forget by lunch. We built the opposite — a real conversation. You sit down with Ada, our AI instructor, and ask the actual questions that come up in real deals. Every answer comes straight from the Arizona Law Book and the course material — not filler, not outdated talking points. It's continuing education built to make you a better agent on Monday, not just a licensed one. That's not a bonus feature. It's the whole reason the school exists.

Google one of your own active listings on your phone. In Phoenix, it probably won't show up in Google's new listing results yet — and that's exactly the head start. When it does reach us, will your sellers' homes be on the MLS so they show up? Hit reply and tell me what you saw — it showed up, it didn't, or you're not sure. I read every response.