The Real Deal Private Listings Explanation
The conversation over where, how and when homes should be listed — and who gets to set those rules — has intensified in the wake of the megamerger between Compass and Anywhere Real Estate. The $1.6 billion deal gave Compass, the industry’s biggest advocate for private listings, the scale to challenge what it views as the powers that be, including multiple listing services and portals such as Zillow.
Compass CEO Robert Reffkin’s refrain is “seller choice,” meaning that homeowners should control how and when their properties are marketed, without third parties dictating the terms. He contends that MLSs and listing aggregators profit from content supplied by agents and that agents should have more control over the distribution of their listings.
On the other side is Zillow CEO Jeremy Wacksman, who maintains that keeping listings within private brokerage networks limits buyers from seeing what’s available and obscures crucial information, like days on market. In his view, private listings come at the expense of consumers, including sellers, who, he claims, need more eyeballs on their properties to score the highest price.
After Compass rolled out its three-phase marketing plan, which includes first introducing listings as private exclusives, Wacksman changed Zillow’s rules to essentially mandate that brokers upload their listings to the MLS within a day of public marketing or risk losing the ability to add the listing to Zillow later. The policy update launched the debate over private listings into a new, more contentious stratosphere, resulting in more public mudslinging and litigation from allies and opponents.
Here’s what the industry’s loudest voices have spent the past year arguing, and how to piece together their talking points into the full story.
Jeremy Wacksman,
Zillow CEO
What it means: Wacksman argues that the rules Zillow enacted are aimed at keeping the market transparent. That may be true. If brokerages don’t advertise their listings outside of their own internal databases, then prospective buyers and agents without access won’t be able to see the full picture of available inventory, which could also skew the market data that buyers and sellers use to inform their decisions.
What Wacksman doesn’t often mention in his calls for transparency is that his company makes money on the buyer leads it generates from agents’ listings on its site.
When a buyer asks to connect with an agent on a Zillow listing, Zillow can direct that buyer to an agent in its Preferred or Premier program, who doesn’t have a connection to the listing or seller. If the buyer agrees to work with a Preferred agent, for example, and the deal closes, the agent gives Zillow a cut of their commission. Because many MLSs automatically syndicate their listings to Zillow, agents who upload them to share with the broader brokerage community have little choice but to also have them appear on Zillow.
Reffkin has pushed back on this part of Zillow’s business model, as have other agents and some homebuyers, who sued the platform over allegations that they were unknowingly diverted to an agent in the program, resulting in higher fees and home prices. (A federal judge dismissed the suit in July.)
“That policy is really about protecting transparency…There are companies in the space that want to take those listings off the internet and hide them for themselves and not put them as part of the database. We don’t think that’s a good thing.”
Robert Reffkin,
Compass CEO
What it means: Reffkin’s central “seller choice” argument excludes buyers from the equation. The more sellers choose to market their properties on private listing networks, the fewer homes buyers will find on consumer-facing platforms they’ve relied on for years.
Changing those go-to platforms is ultimately Reffkin’s play. He wants Compass and its subsidiary brands to become the primary home search destinations, which would allow the company to maintain control over its data. However, it could also mean that buyers won’t be able to access all listings without having to hire an agent in the Compass universe.
Then there’s the question of how much choice sellers actually have. Compass and its brands are already offering agents incentives to remove their listings from one of Zillow’s subsidiaries in New York City, Streeteasy. Sellers, of course, tend to listen to their agents.
“Zillow isn’t banning and suing to protect the consumer, Zillow is just trying to protect their bottom line. While Compass is fighting to protect agents and homesellers with choices, Zillow is fighting to control agents and homesellers.”
Bess Freedman,
Brown Harris Stevens CEO
What it means: Freedman and other critics of Compass also say its strategy is aimed at allowing its agents to double-end more deals. If Compass agents are encouraging their clients to introduce their listings as private exclusives and buyers feel like they have to hire a Compass agent to see the inventory, then it stands to reason that a Compass agent could be on both sides of the transaction.
Freedman, like Wacksman, has angled her opposition to private listings on the implications for consumers. The change could also have a significant impact on her brokerage: BHS is a midsize, independent shop, not a behemoth like Compass. Her agents rely on cooperation across the industry, and the more Compass takes both sides, the more sharply her company gets cut out of the market. With fewer agents, BHS also won’t have enough exclusive inventory to keep buyers on their platform, instead of Compass.
She may say she’s fighting for consumer transparency, but she’s also pushing back against private listings for her brokerage’s survival.
“If people can’t see what’s on the market and it’s being hidden, what does that do for consumers? Remember, transparency is not a luxury. We can always accommodate sellers who have to have things quiet, but what they’re doing is not that.”
Pam Liebman,
Corcoran CEO
What it means: That’s true. For one, Compass and its brands display their “Coming Soon” listings and others on their websites and on Redfin.
In New York, Liebman and Reffkin have been encouraging agents to upload their listings on the Real Estate Board of New York’s residential listing service and mark them as “Participant Only,” which means agents from any firm can see them, but they won’t be disseminated outside of the RLS.
In the Midwest, one of the region’s top MLSs, Midwest Real Estate Data, displays Compass’ private listings network, allowing its member brokers outside of the Compass umbrella to access those listings.
Most brokerages also feed their listings into back-end platforms attached to their brokerage websites, and those platforms in turn push to other brokerage websites. Even if a broker doesn’t put their listing on Streeteasy or Zillow, consumers could conceivably find them in one of these locations, though that’s a consumer experience so disjointed you see why a platform like Zillow caught on.
“A home doesn’t ‘disappear from the market’ when a seller chooses not to advertise on every consumer website.”
Caroline Burton,
StreetEasy
What it means: The data is anything but clear, especially because most of the numbers are coming from studies backed by the companies at the center of the private listing debate.
In the post, Burton links to a Zillow report which found that properties that weren’t listed on the MLS traded for a mere $5,000 less on average than those that were, based on an analysis of millions of home sales between 2023 and 2024. A separate report from Bright MLS in the Mid-Atlantic region found that listings that started as private exclusives typically took two weeks longer to sell than those that began on the MLS.
But another study by Compass’ in-house research team indicated the opposite. The brokerage examined more than 70,000 Compass transactions between April 1, 2025 and March 31, 2026 and found that homes for which the listing was first marketed outside of the MLS sold for 4.6 percent more and went into contract 34 percent faster once on the open market, compared to fully public listings.
The studies are from different time periods and regions and use different methodologies. It’s unclear whether any one is more reliable than the other.
“The data is clear: homes sold off-market consistently trade for less than comparable homes given full public exposure.”
Rebecca Jensen,
Midwest Real Estate Data CEO
What it means: Every battle needs foot soldiers, and Jensen has been at the front since the start of the fight, defending Reffkin and Compass on the philosophical level as well as by pulling the plug on Zillow’s listing feed, axing 43,000 Chicago-area homes from the platform earlier this year. Zillow sued, but Jensen prevailed when a federal judge in September ruled in favor of MRED and Compass. That victory could allow private networks to grow, though any momentum could be tempered by Compass dropping its New York case against Zillow over the latter’s rules tamping down on private listings.
“I’m not going to back down… I’m the referee. I don’t care how big Zillow thinks they are on the field.”
