A Look at The Listings Caught in Compass’ StreetEasy Pushback

Compass’ push for agents to leave listings off StreetEasy is in service of clients in a number of possible sensitive situations, Corcoran CEO Pam Liebman said in a recent town hall.

A property could be hitting the market in the case of a divorce, or because its celebrity owner was looking to sell. Those are a small share, she told agents on the call, but were crucial instances for agents to exercise their expertise with respect to advertising, and it was unacceptable for StreetEasy to penalize agents for marketing them elsewhere.

In the town hall and messages ahead of Labor Day, Compass International Holdings told agents to remove their listings from StreetEasy and to instead upload them to the Real Estate Board of New York’s Residential Listing Service and mark them as “Participant Only,” giving member agents access but not the general public.

The listings are the latest momentum in the residential giant’s battle to unseat StreetEasy, the city’s reigning consumer-facing platform. Plus, marketing listings outside of the public eye isn’t unusual in the Big Apple, where agents quietly shop homes for high-profile or wealthy sellers to avoid a headline.

But the share of listings that agents, following prodding by Liebman and Compass CEO Robert Reffkin, took to the RLS has not been clear.

A recent snapshot of data from RealPlus shows that a significant share of “Participant Only” listings are for homes at the lower end of the market. Of the more than 260 “Participant Only” listings in the system as of Oct. 2, about a quarter of them were for homes asking less than $1 million. More than half of them were for homes asking under $3 million.

Among the $40 million penthouses and $27 million townhouses, there are also listings for a $570,000 one-bedroom condo in Bushwick and a $630,000 studio on the Upper West Side.

“What was once the exception is becoming the norm,” Douglas Elliman’s Frances Katzen wrote in the latest edition of her newsletter, the Katzen Report. “Put all those numbers together, and it becomes difficult to dismiss private real estate as merely the world of whisper listings and ultra-high-net-worth sellers.”

Most of the 260 listings — about 86 percent — were represented by agents under the Compass umbrella, with only six of the 70 under $1 million listings attached to agents from other brokerages.

It’s unclear whether the “Participant Only” listings were specifically pulled from StreetEasy at the behest of Compass leaders. Many of them were listed before the push reached a fever pitch, with some even uploaded as early as April 2025.

However, the data does point to the growing popularity of marketing listings outside of consumer-facing websites in New York, echoing the findings of a report from Marketproof published in August.

The platform found that “Participant Only” listings tripled in July, up from 47 to 144, with another 153 added within the first 12 days of August. That report highlighted similar trends in the range of homes uploaded to the RLS, with a third asking under $1 million. A quarter of the listings analyzed were asking over $5 million.

Adding listings to the RLS but not platforms such as StreetEasy doesn’t make them private, as brokers from across companies can see them as long as they’re members of REBNY. But it does mean that buyers won’t be able to find them without hiring an agent, which could raise future questions about what transparency in the market actually means.

In case you missed it…

Manhattan’s luxury market has an inventory problem.

Listings for condos and co-ops at the top 10 percent of the market dropped 14 percent in the third quarter compared to the same period last year, according to Jonathan Miller’s quarterly report for The Real Deal published earlier this week.

The decline was partially due to a steep drop in new development inventory, which plummeted nearly 40 percent over the same time frame. New development executives and agents have for years issued warnings about the shrinking pipeline of projects amid a rise in construction and financing costs.

But the lack of inventory was likely not connected to Compass’ push to pull listings from StreetEasy, according to Miller. Supply in the borough was falling even before then, and he used data from RealPlus, not StreetEasy, for the report.

NYC Deal of the Week

American Eagle Outfitters CEO Jay Schottenstein sold his condo at the Giorgio Armani Residences for $23 million, less than two years after he purchased it for under $22 million. The deal was the most expensive logged in city records this week.

The apartment is on the ninth floor of 760 Madison Avenue and is one of 10 units at the building developed by SL Green. The 4,500-square-foot pad has five bedrooms, four full bathrooms and views of Central Park.

Jake Indursky contributed reporting.