Mike DelRose Jr.DelRose McShane Team, Coldwell Banker Realty
The Battle Over Private Exclusives

Industry

Who Gets to See the House? Private Listings and the Future of Real Estate

By Mike DelRose Jr., REALTOR® · DelRose McShane Team · Coldwell Banker Realty · November 9, 2026 · 12 minute read

A private listing network lets a brokerage share homes for sale with its own agents before, or instead of, putting them on the MLS. Sellers get privacy and a way to test price without racking up days on market. The cost is exposure. Fewer buyers see the home, and buyers outside the network may never know it existed.

Private listings are the biggest fight in real estate right now. MLSs are suing in federal court, and national brokerages are building their own databases. Meanwhile, the people this affects most, buyers and sellers, aren't hearing much about it. I want to walk through how we got here, what the data actually shows, and how I'm advising my own clients.

One thing up front. My brokerage is part of one of the largest networks that offers private listings, so I see both sides of this every day.

How did the MLS start?

Long before the internet, brokers figured out they could sell more homes by working together. In the late 1800s, they'd gather at the offices of their local real estate associations to share what they had for sale. They agreed to pay any broker who helped sell one of their listings, and the first MLS was born.

When my father got licensed in 1978, the MLS was a printed book. New listings came out on paper. If a buyer wanted to know what was for sale, they called an agent. The format has changed completely since then, but the idea hasn't. It's still one shared database where every participating agent can see every listing and bring a buyer to it.

It isn't a perfect system. It's run by agents and brokers who compete with each other, and that tension has always been there. It's also a big reason real estate is so slow to change. When the people writing the rules are the same people competing under them, change rarely starts from the inside. Still, the MLS gave buyers and sellers something valuable: one place where the whole market was visible.

What is Clear Cooperation, and why does it matter?

Pocket listings are as old as the MLS. An agent takes a listing, keeps it off the database, and sells it to one of their own buyers or to a buyer from a friendly office.

NAR's board approved the Clear Cooperation Policy in November 2019, and MLSs had until May 2020 to put it in place. The core rule is short. Once a listing is marketed to the public, the listing broker has to submit it to the MLS within one business day. Yard signs, social media posts, flyers and email blasts to other agents all count as public marketing.

Clear Cooperation didn't ban private sales. Sellers have always been able to market their home privately, and they still can. An office exclusive stays inside one brokerage and is never advertised. Our team has handled private sales ourselves when a seller had a very good reason not to come to market. Those sales are still the exception, though, and they aren't what I recommend. The policy shut down the gray area where a home was promoted to the public but kept off the database other agents rely on.

In March 2025, NAR kept Clear Cooperation and added a policy it calls Multiple Listing Options for Sellers. It created two exempt options: delayed marketing listings and office exclusive listings. A seller who picks either one has to sign a disclosure confirming their informed consent.

Why does exposure matter so much when you sell?

Price comes from competition. One interested buyer can make you an offer, but it takes two or more to make buyers compete.

Every buyer who never sees your home is a buyer who can't bid on it. Maybe that person wasn't going to pay more. Maybe they were. You'll never find out, because they never got the chance.

Timing matters as well. Over the last 90 days, Belmont single-family homes went under agreement in a median of 15 days, according to MLSPIN (August 8 to November 6, 2026). Buyers pay close attention to days on market. Once a listing sits past that window, people start asking what's wrong with it, fair or not, and the seller loses leverage every week after that.

That's the strongest argument for private networks, and it's a fair one. A seller can test a price privately, gather feedback from agents and buyers, and adjust before the public ever sees a days-on-market count.

What changed after the NAR settlement?

That slow pace is why most of the big shifts I've seen came from outside the industry. Technology forces some of them, and the government forces others.

The Department of Justice had NAR's rules in its sights for years. In November 2020, it reached a proposed settlement with NAR. Among other things, it would have barred rules that let buyer agents tell buyers their services were free, and it would have stopped NAR from discouraging MLSs from publishing what buyer agents were being offered. In July 2021, the DOJ withdrew from that agreement so it could pursue a broader investigation.

In October 2023, a federal jury in Kansas City found NAR and several large brokerages liable in the Sitzer/Burnett case and awarded home sellers $1.78 billion. NAR settled in March 2024, and the practice changes took effect August 17, 2024. Offers of buyer agent compensation came off the MLS. Buyers now sign a written agreement with their agent before touring a home, and that agreement has to state that fees are "fully negotiable and not set by law." I covered what that meant locally in my earlier piece on the NAR settlement in Massachusetts.

I supported the principle behind those changes. More transparency for consumers is a good thing, and I still believe that.

The settlement also loosened something, though. Once compensation came out of the MLS, some brokerages started asking why they needed the database for everything. Private networks grew quickly after that.

How do private listing networks work?

The model the largest networks use has three stages. First, the home is posted as a private exclusive, visible only to agents inside the network and their buyers. Next, it can move to Coming Soon. Finally, it goes on the MLS, where every agent and buyer can see it.

Not every home goes through all three stages. Some sell in the first one and never reach the MLS.

For sellers, the pitch is real. You get privacy. You can test a price without public days on market piling up, and you hear what agents and buyers think before you commit.

Coming Soon is where it gets murky. Here in Massachusetts, the MLS PIN rules are clear. A Coming Soon listing can sit in that status for up to 21 days, and during that time there can be no showings at all. In the words of MLS PIN's own summary, a Coming Soon listing "cannot be shown to potential buyers until it becomes a traditional 'active' listing." These homes are absolutely headed to market. When a network shares a Coming Soon listing with its own agents first, though, those agents and their buyers get a head start the rest of the market doesn't.

Questions like that are a big part of why listing rules have landed in federal court. Nine MLSs are now in active litigation over cooperation rules. This month, a group of national brokerages announced a shared listing database of their own.

What does the data say about private listings?

Every study I could find was produced or paid for by someone with a stake in the answer. Keep that in mind as you read these.

That's four sources and four different answers: a premium, a discount, no difference, and a premium that faded away. My read is that nobody has settled this yet. I'd be careful with anyone who tells you otherwise.

What do I recommend to sellers?

I'm a fiduciary. My job is to act in my client's best interest, whatever the industry is doing and however the lawsuits play out.

With a few exceptions, I encourage my sellers to put their home on the market. More exposure brings more competition. It also means no buyer gets shut out before they've had a chance.

The exceptions are real. Some sellers need privacy. A home might carry a stigma that's better handled one conversation at a time. Some owners just don't want crowds of strangers walking through over a weekend. And some homes are going to be hard to sell, where a public launch could pile up days on market that end up hurting the seller. In those cases, a private or delayed approach can make sense, and I'll tell my client that.

Two of my own situations show how differently this can play out.

The first was a condo I listed on Gill Road in Waltham. My seller already had a home under agreement with me and was under real financial pressure to sell the first weekend we hit the market. Competitive pricing was a must. We talked through the trade-off. A private sale could take a lot of the anxiety away, but it would likely cost them equity. At their instruction, I brought in an offer before the listing went live. I still recommended going on the market. That early offer gave them a solid floor, and they felt good about it. Then the real results came in, with multiple offers, an escalation clause, and cash buyers. They were ecstatic.

The second is a listing I don't have yet, because it isn't quite time to sell. The homeowner and I have already talked through different scenarios. Coming to market will bring some real challenges with this property, and we expect it to take much longer to sell than relative properties in the area. A private sale may be the right fit for them. When the time comes, they'll know exactly what the market is doing and decide which path they want to take.

Those two situations look nothing alike. The strategy was different, and so was the level of risk tied to each decision. Large studies can tell us that one approach tends to net more or less across thousands of sales. I don't believe that kind of data should outweigh a specific seller's situation and a specific property.

Whichever route a seller chooses, they'll hear one thing from me first: the best chance of selling successfully, and for the most money, comes from putting the home on the market and letting every possible buyer see it. If they still go private, that's their call. I just want it to be an informed one.

On the seller side, the risk is an early offer that feels great. Sometimes taking it is the smart move. The trouble is that a seller who accepts during a private round never finds out what the open market would have paid.

What do buyers get, and what could they lose?

On the buying side, I have access to a lot of listings that aren't on the market yet. My buyers get the benefit of that, and I'd be letting them down if I didn't use it.

This is also the part that bothers me most.

Right now, the largest networks hold a big piece of the market. What happens as more of them form? Every brokerage builds its own walled-off pool of inventory, and agents start seeing only part of what's really for sale. Buyers get limited to whatever their agent's company happens to have. Worse, many of them won't know there's anything they're missing.

Buyers already feel this. In Zillow's 2026 survey of recent buyers, 72% said privately sold listings mainly benefit agents. About 40% said they'd feel cheated if a home matching their search sold privately without them knowing.

It also raises fair housing questions. When a home is shown to a narrow group of buyers instead of the whole market, other buyers are left out by default. Zillow's research found sellers in communities of color lost more value when they skipped the MLS than sellers in majority-white neighborhoods. I don't think anyone in this fight wants that result. It's still a risk, and it should be said out loud.

How does this affect agents?

Buyer agents are in a tough spot. If part of the inventory sits inside networks they can't see, they can't give their clients a full picture of the market, and their value drops.

Some people won't lose sleep over that, and I understand why. But 85% of recent buyers used an agent, according to that same Zillow survey, and most of them need real guidance. If their agent can only see part of the market, the buyer pays for it.

Where does this leave the market?

My colleague Wendy Gilch, founder of Housing Rebels at Selling Later, has been leading the charge against unfair industry practices. If you're thinking about selling, her piece on how real estate companies use private listings is worth your time.

This fight is far bigger than me. Courts and the largest brokerages in the country will decide most of it. Can we keep a real estate market that works, and works fairly, for everyone in it? That's the question I keep coming back to.

All I want is to do my job: represent buyers and sellers, with access to the information that job requires.

What I control is the advice I give. Every client's plan looks different because every situation is different. They all have one thing in common. I make my recommendations with this fight over listing data in full view and my client's goals first.

The opinions in this article are my own and don't necessarily reflect those of Coldwell Banker Realty or its affiliated companies. I welcome any tool that helps my clients, as long as it supports sustainable industry practices that benefit home buyers and sellers.

Selling soon, or just starting to think about it?

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Sources

This article is general information and is not legal advice. Talk with a Massachusetts real estate attorney about questions on a specific property or transaction.

Mike DelRose Jr. is a third-generation REALTOR® and Co-Leader and Director of Marketing for the DelRose McShane Team at Coldwell Banker Realty in Belmont, Massachusetts. He holds a Bachelor's in Marketing and a Master's in Innovation and Strategic Management, and he consulted for real estate technology startups from 2018 to 2024. He works with buyers and sellers across Belmont, Watertown and Greater Boston. Reach him at 617.515.7715 or [email protected].