Mainstreet REALTORS is bringing Gitcha’s Buyer Listing Service to more than 18,000 suburban Chicagoland members, giving buyer agents a structured way to publish what clients want before the right property necessarily hits the market.
The association and Gitcha announced the partnership Sept. 22, and Mainstreet says the Buyer Listing Network will launch in Q4 2026. The service will be integrated with the MyMainstreet member dashboard.
How Gitcha’s buyer want-listings work
Instead of starting with a property, Gitcha starts with the buyer. Agents can enter details such as location, property type, price, timing and financing, creating a structured “want-listing” that makes the buyer’s search visible across the participating network, according to the partnership announcement.
Other agents can then see that demand and potentially identify a matching property. Gitcha says the platform can match buyer criteria against active and coming-soon inventory while giving agents another way to surface demand beyond saved searches and private groups.
That approach arrives as agents are still navigating uneven inventory. National active listings recently reached their highest level since 2019, but months of supply remained relatively constrained, and local conditions continue to vary sharply. In Chicagoland, Mainstreet reported two months of housing supply in July, up from 1.7 months in January and February.
Mainstreet CEO John Gormley said the association hopes the service could “unearth some more inventory,” while Gitcha CEO Dan Cooper said greater visibility into buyer demand could help agents bring appropriate inventory to market. Their comments were included in coverage of the Sept. 22 announcement.
Who gets access — and why agents outside Chicago should watch
The rollout covers Mainstreet’s more than 18,000 REALTORS in DuPage, Lake and western and southern suburban Cook County. Buyer agents get another channel for broadcasting client criteria, while listing agents can see demand that may be useful in conversations with homeowners considering a sale.
Chicago is not an isolated test. Gitcha has announced Buyer Listing Service partnerships in Indiana, Texas and Arizona in 2026, part of a broader effort to move buyer demand from texts, private groups and office networks into structured real estate platforms.
The pattern fits a wider push to bring new tools directly into established MLS and association workflows. OneKey MLS, for example, recently added a new listing-entry platform alongside its existing system. Buyer-facing and premarket tools are also changing how agents think about when and where inventory becomes visible.
There are no Mainstreet-specific adoption, match-rate or closed-deal figures yet. With the Q4 rollout still ahead, the question is whether enough agents post accurate, current buyer searches for the network to become more useful than the informal channels it is designed to organize.
Gitcha’s BLS is separate from MRED
The Buyer Listing Service should not be confused with MRED itself. Mainstreet is the largest local Realtor association in the Midwest Real Estate Data footprint, but Gitcha’s service is being deployed through Mainstreet rather than MRED.
Mainstreet separately offers members access to MRED’s Private Listing Network, which deals with property inventory. Gitcha approaches the market from the other direction: it starts with buyer demand.
That difference comes as listing distribution itself is changing. Brokerages and portals are experimenting with more premarket exposure, including expanding Coming Soon strategies that can put homes in front of buyers before a conventional active listing reaches its broadest audience.
A private listing says, in effect, “Here is a property that may be available.” A buyer want-listing says, “Here is what my client is looking for.”
For Mainstreet agents, the real test begins after the Q4 launch. For agents elsewhere, Chicago is another sign that buyer demand is starting to get some of the same structured infrastructure long built around listings for sale. Whether that becomes a routine part of the MLS workflow will depend on whether agents keep posting accurate searches — and whether those searches produce opportunities worth coming back for.