This is the introduction. We will be rolling out a three part comprehensive antitrust exposé after this in the paid Industry Insider section.
The newly filed Zea litigation against the real estate associations and Multiple Listing Services offers a compelling framework for understanding how antitrust violations manifest not only through direct collusion but also through the strategic failure to enforce pro-competitive rules. The complaint argues that while rules were drafted to encourage openness after prior antitrust violations, the MLSs and associations deliberately avoided enforcing them, preserving the power of entrenched insiders. This same dynamic is alive and well in the mortgage field services industry, where the National Association of Mortgage Field Services, alongside firms like MCS and Verisk, maintain control through selective enforcement, consolidation, and the manipulation of supposedly neutral industry platforms.
NAMFS has long presented itself as the industry’s guardian of professionalism and compliance. Yet in practice, its history is defined by silence in the face of widespread abuse by its most powerful members. Field Service Technicians routinely face excessive chargebacks, unilateral pricing cuts, and misappropriation of their photos and reports, but NAMFS has never acted to protect them. Instead, much like the MLS defendants in Zea, NAMFS has allowed insiders to continue exploiting labor while promoting the illusion of fair standards. The rules exist on paper, but they are wielded only against the weakest members of the ecosystem, never the sponsors whose dues and donations underwrite the association itself.
On the corporate side, MCS has pursued an aggressive strategy of buying out property preservation companies. Its acquisitions include MSI, GIS Field Services, acquired by MCS owner Littlejohn & Co., Five Brothers, and a collection of other firms once considered independent. By pulling these competitors into its orbit, MCS has shrunk the number of options available to mortgage servicers while cementing its role as the industry’s dominant order mill. This consolidation mirrors the control exercised by MLS systems in real estate, where the absence of true competition ensures that labor and smaller firms must operate under whatever terms the dominant player sets. Field Service Technicians and Inspectors are the collateral damage, forced into tighter margins and heavier workloads under the dictates of a shrinking pool of employers.
Verisk has pursued a different but equally troubling path: consolidation of property preservation software. By buying up platforms like Pruvan and Property Pres Wizard, Verisk has placed itself at the heart of the digital infrastructure that governs how orders are assigned, tracked, and paid. The connection becomes even more glaring when noting that the founder of Property Pres Wizard, Matt Zoldowski, not only sold his software to Verisk but also went on to become president of NAMFS. This intertwining of corporate consolidation and association leadership exemplifies the very kind of conflict of interest Zea highlights: the same individuals and firms charged with upholding pro-competitive standards are the ones benefitting from anticompetitive consolidation.
The influence of Verisk now extends beyond software. As the largest sponsor of NAMFS Annual Conferences, Verisk has effectively purchased a form of institutional immunity. Any attempt to hold software platforms accountable for unfair practices is muted by the association’s reliance on Verisk funding. Just as MLSs in the Zea case were accused of avoiding enforcement against dominant brokers, NAMFS avoids applying scrutiny to its financial backers. This selective enforcement is indistinguishable from active collusion, because it ensures that labor and smaller vendors have no recourse against the very entities that control the tools of their trade.
The antitrust injury here is multifaceted. When MCS buys out competitors, the marketplace for preservation firms shrinks. When Verisk consolidates software, the tools of labor and compliance become locked under one roof. When NAMFS accepts sponsorships from these same firms, it guarantees that its supposed standards will never be enforced against them. The combined result is an ecosystem where the largest players dictate every dimension of participation, from who gets the work to how that work is measured and how it is paid. This mirrors precisely the failures outlined in Zea, where associations claimed neutrality but served only to protect their insiders.
For labor, the outcome is predictable and devastating. Field Service Technicians face shrinking pay scales and rising liability, while Inspectors are burdened with increasingly complex demands at stagnant wages. Chargebacks tied to software glitches or arbitrary rules fall squarely on the shoulders of workers who have no power to challenge them. The monopolization of software also means that photos, reports, and invoices submitted by labor become permanent assets of Verisk, which can then repurpose or resell them without compensation. This is anticompetitive in the truest sense, foreclosing innovation and denying labor any ownership of its own production.
The history of NAMFS reform efforts reads like a case study in the kind of selective silence Zea describes. Codes of conduct are published but ignored, compliance frameworks are touted but unenforced, and leadership roles are filled by those with direct financial interests in the very firms reshaping the market to their benefit. What is presented as reform is nothing more than consolidation in disguise. In this way, NAMFS, MCS, and Verisk together ensure that competition remains stifled while labor remains captive.
When courts begin to examine these practices under the same lens applied in Zea, the parallels will be undeniable. Associations that fail to enforce their own pro-competitive rules are not neutral observers but active participants in anticompetitive harm. Platforms that present themselves as neutral technology providers are in reality bottlenecks designed to control market access. The alignment of these forces within mortgage field services reveals a system engineered not for fairness or efficiency but for the enrichment of a handful of firms at the expense of labor and smaller competitors.
For those who perform the work on the ground, the legal theories of Zea are not abstract. They are lived realities of shrinking opportunities, stolen intellectual property, and manipulated compliance standards. The convergence of MCS’s company acquisitions, Verisk’s software consolidation, and NAMFS’s selective silence forms a trifecta of antitrust injury that echoes the very patterns now being litigated in real estate. If Zea succeeds, it may well pave the way for similar challenges in property preservation, where labor has long known that the rules were written for show, never for protection.
