Seller ‘Choice’

The real battle over private listings isn't happening in courtrooms. It's happening at your dining room table.

The harder it is to pin down someone’s plain meaning, the more skeptical I am that they are telling the truth.

More often than not, when listening to real estate leaders speak, I feel much like Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride, thinking to myself, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Throughout the years, there have been many examples. ‘Dual Agency’ is the easy one to pick on. While a few holdouts still defend it, you must be dangerously far out on the proverbial limb to insist that it’s possible to provide legitimate agency to two competing parties simultaneously. The concept of dual agency remains inconceivable.

But there are plenty of other examples within the real estate industry:

“Buyer’s agents are free to the buyer.”
“Now is the best time to buy/sell!”

Even the meaning of ‘clear cooperation’ is more difficult to navigate than the infamous Fire Swamp. (That’s my last Princess Bride reference. I swear. But thank you for indulging me this far.)

Perhaps in some future post I’ll do a full breakdown of all the real estate doublespeak. But for today, I’m honing in on just one: ‘Seller Choice.’

I’ll begin by revisiting something I said nearly three months ago in my piece, The Pre-Market Arms Race. Reflecting generally on all the rapidly expanding ‘off MLS’ options for sellers, I wrote, “Buyers and sellers didn’t march on Washington demanding pre-market listing platforms. This is not a groundswell, grassroots effort. This is corporate strategy shrouded in consumer-centric language.”

Since then, I’ve spent well over a hundred trackable hours thinking about, writing on, and debating these issues. While my perspective on a few other things has shifted slightly, I stand by those couple of sentences more confidently today than ever before.

But if you ask the largest brokerages and MLSs building out and boasting over their Private Listing Networks, they’ll still proudly tell you they’re doing it in the name of ‘seller choice.’

To which I say, (in my best Tim Robinson impression, of course), “You sure about that?”

Before tearing into the argument, I do think it’s important to acknowledge the diabolical brilliance of the ‘seller choice’ framing. Annoyingly, it puts consumer advocates, like myself, in apparent opposition to sellers’ rights. If I had a dollar for every time someone in the comments has accused me of attempting to curb sellers’ rights, I could retire from writing on Substack. Alas, I’m still here.

So let me be plain: I wholeheartedly support homeowners having control over how their property is marketed. So long as it doesn’t violate the law and honors the intent of Fair Housing, whether sellers list privately or publicly, by land or by sea — it’s all the same to me.

What I don’t like is home-sellers being manipulated into choosing a strategy that doesn’t best align with their interests. And, candidly, that’s what I suspect is happening in the majority of cases where sellers are apparently choosing to list their home privately before taking their home to the broadest, public market.

Bold accusation. I know.

So how is this playing out?

Well, rather than answer in the abstract, I invite you to join me in a very familiar place: your dining room table, where we are just sitting down for a listing presentation with a top-selling agent.

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The agent has arrived three minutes early.

She’s prepared. She’s got comps pulled, photos of your home from the county record already loaded on her iPad, and a minimalistic black folder with your address printed on the cover. She compliments the pendant lighting in your kitchen, and you can tell she means it. You like her. She’s genuinely lovely and easy to talk to. Her sincere personality and professionalism are exactly what you’d hope for in someone you’re going to entrust with representing you in selling your home.

This is off to a spectacular start.

Twenty minutes in, after the comps and the commission conversation, she slides a single glossy page across the table. The header reads 3-Phased Marketing Strategy. It’s subtle, but you subconsciously note that this is the first thing that feels corporately-branded in the presentation up to this point.

“As part of the listing strategy for your home,” she says, “I want to walk through how we protect you first.”

Protect is doing a lot of work in that sentence. After all, it is a scary world out there. So, naturally, you lean in. What dangers is this agent going to protect you from that other agents haven’t acknowledged?

She explains: the moment your home hits the MLS, the clock starts. Days on market. Price-drop history. Zillow’s algorithm rendering a verdict on your largest asset before a single buyer walks through.

“Once you’re public, the market starts judging you,” she says. “Phase one keeps you in control. We market your home privately — to our network of more than 340,000 agents and their buyers — all with no days on market, no price history, none of those negative insights working against you.”

Again, sounds good: you don’t want to be judged. And you know that days on market can potentially be used against you if the sale doesn’t go quickly. This all sounds interesting. But that word ‘private’ sticks in your mind.

You ask the first natural question. “What do you mean by marketing my home privately? Wouldn’t I want everyone to see it?”

She smiles like she expected this question might be coming. “In most cases, you will expose your home to the entire market, but that comes later, in Phase Three. For now, consider how builders market homes. They don’t open the model home before the landscaping is in, touch-ups are complete, and the furnishings are properly staged. Well, we’re giving you the same playbook that homebuilding professionals use for their own properties.”

That lands. It’s flattering. You look down at the one-pager she’s handed you and see the headline, Savvy sellers start here. The glossy page agrees.

“And honestly,” she adds, “you can test your price this way. If we’re not sure whether your home is an $850k house or an $880k house, Phase One lets us find out without the market punishing us for guessing high.” She taps a chart on the page. “Our data shows homes marketed this way sell for 2.9%* more on average. Almost three percent — on your home, that’s real money.”

Since she brought up numbers, you ask the second most natural question: “What does this cost me?”

“Nothing extra. My commission is the same either way.”

You’re thinking to yourself, “This is all sounding good. But why haven’t I heard of this strategy before? There must be something I’m missing.” So you bravely ask, “What’s the catch?”

Again, she smiles — not a salesman’s smile, a genuine one, because she truly does not believe there is a catch. “That’s the best part: there isn’t one! Best case, a buyer makes you a great offer before we ever go public, and you get to decide whether to accept. But you’re never obligated. If you don’t love an offer, we just move to phase two. There’s really no downside.”

She turns the page over to have you initial the disclosure. Your eyes pass across a paragraph of smaller type — something about how a property not distributed to other brokerages and public websites may reduce the number of potential buyers, the number of offers, and the final sale price.

You hesitate for half a second.

“Standard legal language,” she says gently. “Every strategy has required disclosures.”

She’s not lying to you. She’s reading the page the same way you are — the front in headline type, the back in eight-point.

The pen is on the table. It’s your move.

Are you going to sign?

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If you’re reading this, odds are you work in this industry, and you already know your answer. You spotted the moves. You know what a hedonic regression is, and you know who ran this one. The question above is easy for you.

So let me ask the harder one.

Would your mom sign?

Would your son, selling his first townhouse, sitting across from a warm, credentialed, well-dressed expert with a beautiful one-pager and a brand he’s seen on yard signs all around his neighborhood? Would he know that “test your price” and “no days on market” are claims with counter-evidence? Would he ask who verified the 2.9% statistic? Would he think to ask if there are ways the agent or the brokerage might also benefit from this strategy?

Or would he do what nearly every seller does at that table — trust the expert in front of him and initial where the agent pointed?

Sit with that for a moment.

While most of the trade press and headlines frame private listings as a policy argument, the real battle isn’t happening in the courts or the field of public opinion. It’s taking place at dining tables — where only one side knows the script.

And as I see it, the entire ‘seller choice’ debate lives inside that half-second hesitation over the fine print. But that half-second pause contains unanswered questions that, if addressed straightforwardly, would likely cause most sellers to pass on the 3 Phase Marketing strategy.

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So, let’s replay the scene — this time with those unasked questions.

“You said pre-marketed homes sell for 2.9% more. Who verified that?”
No one outside Compass. It’s an internal analysis, comparing Compass listings to other Compass listings, and Compass itself publishes the statistic with an asterisk stating that it shouldn’t be read as a prediction of outcomes. Independent research from Bright MLS and Zillow points the opposite direction — off-MLS sales correlated with lower prices, not higher. Would anyone believe McDonald’s if they said, according to their own studies, Big Macs are good for heart health? Why would we be any more inclined to take Compass’s statistics seriously when they are grading their own homework?

“If we hide the days on market, what happens if a buyer asks how long my home has actually been for sale?”
The listing agent must tell them. The true marketing history of a home — when it was first offered, including privately, and what the price has done since — is a material fact. An agent who misrepresents or conceals material facts when directly asked isn’t executing a marketing strategy; she’s courting a license complaint and a violation of the Realtor Code of Ethics. Which means the “no days on market” benefit only functions against buyers who don’t know to ask. The strategy’s main advantage is, by design, a way of taking advantage of less-informed buyers — and it evaporates the moment a well-represented one shows up.

“If a buyer makes me an offer before anyone else can see my home, how do I know it’s a good offer?”
This is the question that matters most, and the script’s answer — you can always say no and go public — actually concedes the problem. Ask Caitlin Bigelow. Selling her San Francisco condo last year, she took her trusted Compass agent’s advice and listed as a Private Exclusive. Phase One produced a solid offer of $2.1 million. Her ‘magic number,’ as she called it. It appeared to be a clear win, so she accepted. Then the buyer backed out — and Bigelow, tellingly, felt relief instead of disappointment. She relisted on the open market: six days and some sixty showings later, she had multiple offers, and accepted a contract for $100,000 more than the private deal would have paid. Her verdict afterward: the off-market exclusive is “bad for people and good for Compass.”

“Who’s on the other side of that early offer?”
In Phase One, more than likely, any offers will be made by buyers represented by Compass. Meaning, Compass sits on both sides of your transaction. Remember dual agency, from the top of this piece? Phase One is a machine for producing it at scale — except now it arrives wearing the costume of a seller benefit. Which raises the question: who stands to gain more from Private Exclusive listings — sellers or Compass?

“If pre-marketing builds demand, why does the demand have to live inside one company?”
“Coming soon” statuses exist on most MLSs. You can prep your home, signal the market, and avoid the DOM clock without restricting your buyer pool to one brokerage’s network. The strategy’s legitimate benefits don’t require exclusivity. Again, when we ask who benefits most from exclusivity — it’s rarely sellers, but it’s always the brokerage.

If ‘seller choice’ were a neutral menu, you’d expect Compass clients to choose private marketing at roughly the rate sellers choose it everywhere else. But they don’t. Not even remotely.

Historically, deliberately private listings have hovered around 2–4% of home sales nationally. And I grant, there are sellers for whom private marketing is genuinely right. So it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if those are the 2–4% of sellers who’ve always chosen it. By February 2025, real estate researcher Mike DelPrete found — using Compass’s own publicly available data — that Private Exclusives made up roughly 30% of all Compass listings, and a full 55% of new Compass listings that month began as a Private Exclusive or Coming Soon.

When a majority of one brokerage’s clients “freely choose” a strategy that nearly everyone else’s clients decline — or simply never thought to ask for! — you’re not looking at seller demand. You’re looking at the implementation of a corporate strategy.

The ‘choice’ isn’t coming from the sellers. It’s coming to them. And it’s reaching them across tens of thousands of dining tables, on glossy one-pagers that the agent didn’t write.

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The part that should bother my industry colleagues most is this: trace every branch of that conversation and find one where the brokerage loses.

The home sells in phase one? There’s a meaningful chance Compass just captured both sides of the commission.

The home goes to phase three and sells on the MLS? Compass enjoyed an exclusive marketing window, harvested the buyer demand and pricing data for itself, and increased their chances of collecting new buyer client leads.

The seller got less money than the open market might have produced? No one will ever be able to prove it, because the counterfactual evidence was never given the opportunity to exist.

Heads, the house wins. Tails, the house wins again.

The only party bearing risk at that table is the one holding the pen.

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Here’s the crazy part I sincerely believe: The agent who sold the seller on 3PM goes home believing she is protecting and serving her client by doing so. At the ground level, I really don’t think most Compass agents are willfully scamming their clients. They are repeating what the training said and presenting what the marketing department printed.

And that’s what makes this corrosive rather than merely cynical.

You don’t need legions of dishonest agents to move inventory into a private, exclusive network. You need one persuasive one-pager and a sales force that is bought in deeply enough to the culture that most never think to question it.

These agents then go sit across from your loved ones, explaining all the benefits and protections afforded by their 3 Phase Marketing plan. Why wouldn’t you want this? is the subtle implication.

But the devil is always in the details. And the real choice facing sellers today is whether they ask the hard questions at the table — or sign the page that was designed to keep them from asking.

That’s the ‘seller choice’ that matters most today.

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