Matt Fowler, CEO, Doorify MLS

In an interview with Invest:, Matt Fowler, CEO of Doorify MLS, discussed the Triangle’s housing market, affordability pressures, inventory constraints, the growing role of AI in real estate data, and the state of the market. “The Triangle is a standout market,” Fowler said.

What changes over the past year have had the greatest impact on Doorify MLS and the real estate professionals you serve?

The greatest impact has definitely been the Anthropic MCP protocol that was released last fall. That has made our API, or data products, more accessible to our 14,000 subscribers than I could have imagined years ago.

I’ve referred to it as a technology that has made APIs accessible to liberal arts majors. These are people who are not programmers, and they are able to do some pretty amazing things with their data.

Last summer, the National Association of REALTORS® chose to remove a primary data element from our database, which is the amount that a realtor gets paid. The realtor’s commission had always been a data element, like square footage or number of bathrooms, that was shared in the MLS compilation. That was removed last July, which was an enormous change in the industry.

As big as that is, I still pick AI as the bigger impact. Both were enormous in our space, and they happened around the same time.

How would you describe the state of the housing market across the Triangle and surrounding counties?

The Triangle is a standout market. We are the 33rd-largest multiple listing service in the country, around that range in rankings. We did $22 billion last year, and we are on pace to do about $24 billion this year.

That is just under $9 million per business hour, so the economic impact is enormous on the Triangle. It is also quite stable. We are probably within 5% of what we were doing last year, so that enormous economic impact happens every year.

If you look at the charts, it looks like the market had a stroke around COVID and is starting to return to normal. We even had an affordability index in the 90s briefly in January this year. That means houses were 90% affordable for people at median income. It has been in the 70s for a long time, so 90% is a significant improvement.

With home prices remaining elevated and affordability continuing to be a concern, what trends are you seeing among buyers, sellers, and investors?

New construction is clearly filling the need for affordable housing. Resales, or sales of existing homes, remain high in terms of pricing. Builders are recognizing that the bulk of the market in our area is between maybe $300,000 and $450,000. There is enormous demand for houses in that lower price range, including entry-level and first-time homes. Those prices are rare, and we see builders meeting that need. You drive by new-home communities all the time in this area.

Almost 40% of our total sales reported through the MLS are new construction. That is huge, and it will no doubt continue to be a trend in how we meet affordable housing demand.

How are population growth, business expansion, and continued investment in the Raleigh-Durham region influencing housing demand and market activity?

The Triangle is a special area, and the story behind that is income. The jobs we have here pay more than they do in many parts of the country, which is a big driver behind affordability.

It is not that prices have gone down. They have not. They have stopped going up as fast as they were before. We have not seen actual price decreases except in extremely small submarkets. For the most part, pricing is stable, if not up just a little bit.

I think pricing in some areas is being affected by a lack of new building in areas that are more restrictive. That is causing building to happen in adjacent counties with less restrictive land-use rules.

Also, enormous population shifts are happening. We have a partnership with the University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler Business School, and they recently gave a presentation to our members about elementary school openings and closures following the path of young families. These are families with children who are seeking a place where they can afford a house and pay taxes. In many cases, that is not in some of our core counties, which is causing continued movement out of employment centers.

That is a trend we expect to continue. We have 86 municipalities in the 16 counties we cover, so it is a patchwork of zoning rules and acceptance of new development.

Inventory levels have improved compared to recent years. How is that changing the balance between buyers and sellers?

We look at the number of months in inventory. That means, if we sell at the rate we are currently selling and there are no new houses, how long would it take until we run out? Historically, inventory stood at eight months in both 2010 and 2014, compared with a normal range of about six months. Today, market-wide inventory is 3.1 months, up slightly from 2.9 months last year but still well below normal, reflecting a thin supply of available homes. We should have about twice as many homes for sale on the market as we do right now, at the rate of sale we are experiencing.

I think building is the only answer for that. There are not going to be more resales coming on the market. I think people are rate-stuck. The Fed talks a lot about migration lock, where people do not move across the country for jobs like they used to.

We do not see people moving out of affordable homes, which means price decreases are going to continue to be constrained.

How is technology changing the way agents, consumers, and investors make decisions in the real estate market?

It is AI again. Several years ago, there were 500 or so MLSs in the country. We got together and formed an organization called the Real Estate Standards Organization, or RESO. We built a dictionary and made changes to standardize everything, or normalize the labels. We count square footage the same way, and we describe it the same way. That is the group that said we have to call it the primary bedroom now, not master. Master is a sincerely dated phrase. Primary is accurate and less culturally destructive.

Because we standardized everything, metaphorically, we put everything in Excel format so that any copy of Excel can open that file. That has allowed us to do things like data shares. We are in the process of building a statewide data share so that realtors with offices and people working in Asheville, Charlotte, Greenville, and the coast can use their AI agent to ask a question about the whole company’s data and get one answer, regardless of what software choices each of those markets has made.

Working as a broker across North Carolina, you are forced to use Paragon in some markets, Matrix in others, and Flexmls in others. It’s like having to use Chrome on some sites and Edge on others and Firefox on some. It is a hassle. AI lets us put all this together. MLSs are focused on delivering a clean data set for your AI model. That is a primary focus for 2026.

What is your outlook for the regional housing market, and what are the top priorities for Doorify MLS?

Our strategic plan and statement are focused on consumers and making sure that the 14,000 licensed real estate professionals who belong to my group have the information they need. That includes 1,000 home inspectors, 1,000 real estate appraisers, and effectively every broker in the area. We want to make sure they have full knowledge of every housing unit and new construction project that is coming along.

Young families and people moving into the area, or thinking about buying property in the area, need to know about every single option, including the ones that are about to be built. We are working closely with homebuilders.

About 40% or so of our inventory is in new construction, and around 40% of the 168 million page views that my network delivered on houses for sale across the internet were new construction.

The builders in this area increasingly look to us as a great marketing channel, and consumers can find new construction on the MLS. Many people do not know that. Almost half the traffic is houses that you can buy that are either under construction, about to be built, or just built and available for sale.