Can a Listing Agent Tell You Where the Offers Are?

I ran into a prominent real estate attorney at an event this week. He told me he reads what I write, which I appreciated more than I let on at the time. Then he asked me a question, and the question turned out to be better than anything I had planned to write about.

Here is the situation he described. He called a listing agent on behalf of clients and asked where the offers stood on price. Reasonable question. His clients did not want to spend a Saturday and a weekend of emotional energy on a house that had already moved past their number.

The listing agent told him, and I am paraphrasing his paraphrase, that disclosing that would be against ethics.

He had never gotten that answer before. He wanted to know whether it was legitimate.

The short answer, and then the better answer

My first reaction was to reassure him. Based on what he described, that agent was almost certainly doing their job correctly. The overwhelming majority of agents I deal with operate at a high level, and I would rather assume competence than the opposite.

But when I went back to the actual language, the situation turned out to be more precise than either of us had framed it. There are two separate questions tangled together here, and the industry tends to answer them as one.

First, is a listing agent required to disclose the existence of offers or their prices? Second, setting requirement aside, is full transparency about offer prices even a good strategy?

Different questions. Different answers.

What the Code actually says

Article 1 is where every conversation like this starts.

Read that carefully. Two duties, and they are not equal in rank. The obligation to the client is primary. The obligation to everyone else is honesty. Honesty is not the same thing as disclosure, and that gap is where this entire question lives.

The specific rule sits underneath it.

Now look at what that provision covers and what it does not.

It covers the existence of offers. It covers who obtained them, which is a fair housing and dual agency safeguard that deserves its own article someday. And it conditions both on the seller's approval.

It says nothing about price. My colleague asked about price, and the Standard of Practice everyone reaches for in this situation does not address price at all.

That is not a loophole. It means price disclosure is governed somewhere else, by the seller's instructions, by state law, and by the fiduciary duty the listing agent carries. Which is a more demanding standard, not a looser one.

The part that surprises people

Here is where the phrasing in that phone call was imprecise, and I say that with no criticism of the agent, because I have said sloppier things on a Tuesday afternoon.

The Code of Ethics does not prohibit disclosing offer information. NAR's own guidance on multiple offers, published in the Code of Ethics and Arbitration Manual, states plainly that real estate brokers may, unless prohibited by law or regulation, shop offers. It goes further and instructs buyer representatives to warn their clients that the existence, terms and conditions of any offer they make may be disclosed to other buyers.

That instruction is codified. Standard of Practice 1-13 requires REALTORS®, when entering into buyer representation agreements, to advise clients of the possibility that sellers or their representatives may not treat the existence, terms, or conditions of offers as confidential unless confidentiality is required by law, regulation, or a confidentiality agreement.

So the accurate sentence is not "that would be against ethics." The accurate sentence is "I do not have my seller's authorization to share that."

Same outcome. Very different meaning. One says a rule forbids it. The other says a client has not permitted it, which is the truth and which also tells the caller exactly where the decision lives.

Where my colleague was right

He made a point that I want to give full credit, because it is not a layman's observation.

He suggested that knowing roughly where the offers stood might keep more buyers engaged rather than fewer, and that keeping buyers engaged serves the seller. He is not wrong. That is a real strategic argument and plenty of good agents make it.

The Code leans in that direction too, further than most agents realize. Article 3 requires cooperation with other brokers except when cooperation is not in the client's interest. NAR's multiple offer guidance is direct about what that implies in practice, noting that much of the frustration in these situations comes from cooperating brokers being unaware of the status of offers they procured, and that listing brokers should make reasonable efforts to keep cooperating brokers informed.

So the instinct that something felt off in that phone call was not misplaced. There is a genuine cooperation duty pulling toward more communication. It simply does not override the seller's authority to decide what gets shared about their own transaction.

Where the decision actually gets made

Everything above comes down to a conversation that happens weeks before any buyer calls.

NAR's guidance tells agents to explain at the listing table that multiple offers are a possibility, to walk through the ways they can be handled, and to explain the upside and downside of each approach. Accept the best offer. Tell everyone offers are on the table and invite best and final. Counter one and hold the others. Counter one and reject the rest.

Every one of those is legitimate. They produce different outcomes and they carry different risks. Inviting best and final might produce a better number, or it might scatter your buyers to other houses.

I have this conversation with every seller before we list, and I have it over email on purpose. Not because I distrust anyone. Because a decision this consequential should exist in writing, with a date on it, in a thread either of us can pull up nine months later.

I am a fiduciary. If I take an action my seller did not authorize, I have not been clever. I have breached a duty. The paper trail is not bureaucracy, it is the difference between representing someone and improvising on their behalf.

The rule most agents miss

If a seller authorizes disclosure, it goes to everyone.

NAR states it directly. While the Code does not expressly mandate fairness given how subjective the word is, the Preamble has long held that REALTOR® connotes competency, fairness and high integrity. If a seller directs you to advise buyers about the existence of other offers, fairness dictates that all offerors or their representatives be informed.

Telling the agent who called first, or the one you know, or the one whose buyer you would rather work with, and leaving the others in the dark is where a defensible practice becomes an indefensible one. That is also where fair housing exposure enters the picture, because inconsistent process applied across different buyers is exactly the pattern a complaint is built on.

All or none. Write it down and apply it the same way every time.

The second question: is total transparency a good strategy?

Now set the rules aside. Assume a seller says do whatever you think is best. Should the answer be to publish every offer?

I have spent real time on this question from both sides. Before I came back to practice full time, I worked on the product side of real estate software, and I consulted for companies building fully open bidding platforms. I went in sympathetic to the idea. Auction style transparency solves genuine problems.

What open bidding gets right

It kills the phone tree. A buyer's agent asking where we need to be is asking a fair question, and answering it forty times over a weekend is not a good use of anyone's Saturday.

It creates a record. Blind processes invite suspicion, some of it earned. A visible audit trail answers questions before they get asked.

It converts hesitation. Buyers who see real competition make real decisions faster, and a seller who watches a number get bid up has no lingering question about whether they left money behind.

Those are not small things. I do not dismiss them.

Where it breaks down

The first problem is the one I could never engineer around, and it is not about protecting anyone's business model. It is structural.

My license makes me a fiduciary. My obligation is to secure the best outcome for my seller. Total transparency is a tool that sometimes serves that obligation and sometimes works directly against it. When a listing has one offer at a soft number, publishing that fact hands every other buyer a reason to wait or to come in lower. There are days when disclosure is the right call and days when it costs the client money, and I do not get to pick the approach I prefer philosophically. I have to pick the one that serves the person who hired me.

The second problem is that price is not the offer. It is one term in an offer.

Consider a seller who needs to close in six weeks because they are buying elsewhere. An offer at $500,000 with a financing contingency and a closing date two months past what they need is worth less to that seller than an offer at $485,000 that fits their calendar. A number on a screen cannot express that. Financing type, deposit structure, contingency deadlines, and timing all carry real weight, and in Massachusetts every buyer has a right to an inspection, so the thoughtful conversation is about deadlines and scope rather than about whether one happens.

That nuance is most of my job during a negotiation. It is the part that does not reduce to a leaderboard.

The third thing I learned building these platforms is simpler. The model kept running into the same wall, which was that it required telling brokerages and sellers how to conduct their own business. A seller is entitled to decide how their property gets marketed and negotiated. When the answer to that structural question is that everyone must participate in one process, the product is no longer serving the client's choice. It is replacing it.

None of which means the idea is worthless. Transparency where the seller wants it, applied consistently, is a legitimate approach and I have used it. It is one strategy among several, and the seller picks.

If you are the buyer's agent on the other end of that call

You have more tools than you might think, and none of them require anyone to break a duty.

One more thing worth knowing. Sellers are not bound by the Code of Ethics. A seller can shop offers, and their agent may be directed to do so. If you are representing a buyer, that is a conversation to have with your client before they write, not after they find out.

Where this lands

The agent my colleague spoke with was doing the job. The phrasing was imprecise, and precision matters when you are talking to an attorney, but the substance was sound. Without written authorization from the seller, there was nothing to share.

What I keep coming back to is the structure of Article 1 itself. The obligation to the client is primary. It does not relieve us of the obligation to treat all parties honestly.

Both halves. Not one.

That means I do not owe every caller every piece of information I have. It also means I never get to mislead one to serve the other. I cannot invent an offer that does not exist. I cannot suggest a number is on the table when it is not. I cannot tell one buyer's agent something I would not tell the next one. What I can do is decline to disclose what my client has not authorized me to disclose, say so plainly, and treat the person asking with respect while I do it.

That is not a loophole in the duty. That is the duty.

To the attorney who asked, thank you. You improved my week and you gave me something better to write about than what was on the calendar. You know who you are.