Zillow’s move to ban private listings has sparked intense debate across the industry. For some, it’s the logical next step toward protecting consumers and increasing market transparency. For others, it’s an audacious flex of market dominance.
As the dust settles, industry leaders are grappling with the implications and weighing the benefits of widespread adoption against the cost of change.
Its implementation of the National Association of REALTORS® recent Clear Cooperation Policy (CCP) change—which allows MLSs to prevent listings from being “syndicated” to consumer platforms and challenges large brokerages—Zillow’s new “listing access standards” essentially ban properties previously marketed to a limited audience from being available on Zillow platforms.
For sellers to have their listing posted on one of the largest consumer-facing real estate platforms, the publicly marketed listing must be on the MLS within one day and published on Zillow as well as other sites that receive MLS feeds. This change, designed to maximize market exposure and ensure Fair Housing practices, goes directly against brokerages that have made office exclusives—in which brokers market listings privately within their networks—their norm.
eXp Realty and NextHome, so far, are the only brokerages that have publicly committed to Zillow’s new listing access standards.
‘That’s not how capitalism works’
A “staunch supporter of, and a fierce protector of the American consumer,” James Dwiggins, CEO and co-founder of NextHome, thinks it’s a bad policy to “push sellers into thinking” that marketing their property to a smaller audience will give them the same market opportunity as “opening it up to anyone and everyone.”
NextHome, says Dwiggins, is “supportive of putting properties out in the biggest real estate marketplace in the world.” Although the company has “never done” office-exclusives, Dwiggins said that if there is a use-case where it needs to be done, they will look at it.
“We’re very supportive of Zillow in this; they’re enforcing the rules of CCP,” he says. “If somebody wants to do an office exclusive, they still have the ability to do it, but you can’t market it publicly and not make it available to everyone.”
Regarding seller privacy—which Coldwell Banker Realty’s President and CEO Kamini Lane called “paramount” in an op-ed detailing how marketing to a limited group of people is appropriate in some cases—Dwiggins told RISMedia, “This whole seller privacy thing is a complete ruse.”
“Seller privacy has existed in the MLS for as long as I can remember. You cannot display the address. You can shorten the number of photos that are there. There are lots of options to protect seller privacy that already existed—which somehow got lost in this debate,” he says. “It’s never been about seller privacy; It’s been about convincing sellers that there’s another way to do things to get the same results, and it’s just not true.”
Even in the case where a home is being sold internally, like to a neighbor, it doesn’t need to be an off-market deal, says Dwiggins.
“You are opening yourself up to potential liability for Fair Housing violations. We don’t know how it’s been marketed, where it’s been marketed. We don’t know who’s been excluded from it. Because that’s literally what a private listing network is—the word ‘private’ means exclusionary by definition,” he says. “I think everything should be on the open market.”
Removing potential liability is another reason to list homes on the open market. If you have a client thinking, “Well, my agent said we didn’t need to put it on the MLS, and then I didn’t realize I could have potentially gotten more money from my home,” you could end up in a lawsuit, adds Dwiggins.
The best way to figure out the potential value of a property is to put it on the market and let the market tell you, says Dwiggins. If a buyer offers more money than what the seller initially wanted, they aren’t going to turn down the extra money. “That’s not how capitalism works,” he adds.
Comparing the concept to the auto sales industry, Dwiggins makes the point that even though car dealerships have their inventory available on their website and to the local market, they still “put their inventory on Autotrader, the equivalent of Realtor.com and Zillow.” They do that to advertise to potential buyers in other states or people looking for a specific model.
“Open it up to the entire market and let the buyers tell you what they’re willing to pay for it. That’s why Facebook Marketplace exists. That’s why eBay exists. That’s why these websites exist. That’s why it’s available for real estate. The list goes on and on.”
With this change, Dwiggins hopes that this causes agents to rethink their practice regarding office-exclusives. If they had a conversation with a seller and explained to them what office exclusives meant and how they would not be able to have their listing on Zillow or Trulia, “99% of sellers” will want to go another way.
The informed-consent disclosures will force agents to have that conversation with their sellers, allowing them to make informed decisions as to how their home will be sold.
What do sellers think?
eXp Realty CEO Leo Pareja, having sold real estate his entire adult life, has firsthand experience of how many sellers ask for off-MLS listings for privacy reasons.
“I sat at the kitchen table and had these conversations with sellers, and I can tell you that the amount of people that said they wanted privacy or not to be on the MLS is a handful of people—and I did 4,000 transactions,” he says.
There are certain examples where a seller “truly doesn’t want to be anywhere” to protect their privacy, adds Pareja. “A federal judge overseeing a human trafficking case or a DEA agent in a border town like El Paso (…) I can think of only a few. Tenant-occupied properties, where if a tenant sees the property being advertised, they can freak out and stop paying their rent.”
Given that this is such a minute part of the market, Pareja says, that’s why eXp took this position with Zillow.
“If it’s fully off the market and nobody wants to see it anywhere, and you’re trying to see if it can get some interest, we have a solution for that, that is CCP-compliant, and we’ve had it for years,” Pareja says, referring to eXp access, for sellers who need absolute privacy.
But to “steer” every seller into off-market listings, adds Pareja, is to harm and mislead sellers.
“I think we need to be fiduciary, and if everyone took that same position, the transparency and the liquidity and the access to data and real-time information that this country enjoys disappears,” Pareja warns. “It collapses, and we look a lot more like Europe, South America and Asia, where there are six to eight different websites you have to go to, and that’s only for a fraction of the information.”
Although it’s a small portion, Pareja says that there is a small voice of “selfish companies that are doing this purely for monetary gain, and it’s extremely harmful to the American consumer.”
‘Bullied by a tech platform looking to control an industry’
Andy Florance, founder and CEO of CoStar Group (parent company of Homes.com), had a starkly different view on Zillow’s recent change.
In a letter sent to his agents, Florance called this new policy “an incredible move of audacity and a pure power play of epic proportion.”
A self-serving move, he said this is Zillow protecting its ability to profit from listings by selling leads to competing agents—not to protect consumers.
Regardless of one’s support of the CCP, Florance adds that it’s unacceptable for these portals to “threaten agents this way. We believe every real estate professional deserves to be treated with fairness and respect—never bullied by a tech platform looking to control an industry.”
Calling the new lead-diversion model anti-consumer and anti-agent, Florance said it “hijacks (listing agents’) hard-earned listings to generate commission splits for them and grow their brand at your expense.”
Emphasizing Homes.com’s commitment to an agent-friendly approach, “Your Listing Your Lead,” Florance says that his platform only displays the listing agent’s name and connects potential buyers to them.
Assuring agents who choose to abide by Zillow’s new policy, Florance said they will still be able to have their listing on Homes.com and the other sites.
In a P.S. statement ending his note, he encouraged agents to consider the broader implications of Zillow’s policy, stating that “Zillow’s heavy-handed attempt to use their market power” is anti-competitive. To make it easier for agents, Florance included a hyperlink to the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division.
Making waves
Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman is taking Zillow’s approach, advocating for buyers being able to view all listings, with Redfin.com not publishing any listings that have been publicly marketed before being shared with all real estate websites via the MLS.
His twist on Zillow’s policy includes the “Coming Soon” designation for listings.
“To encourage home sellers to market their listings via the MLS, Redfin is also asking MLSs to create a coming-soon designation for listings that precludes search sites from showing how long a home has been for sale and at what prices,” Kelman shared in a statement. “Other brokers have supported the idea of coming-soon listings, but with access limited to agents, and potentially only to their own agents. This violates the principle established in the last great real-estate anti-trust battle, settled in 2008, that all brokerage customers should be able to see all MLS listings, online or via an agent. And that principle exists for a reason: once brokers give our clients control over how their listing appears online, every client will want that listing to appear everywhere.”
Following Zillow’s announcement, Realtor.com is “giving the topic thoughtful consideration,” according to a spokesperson from the company.
“We firmly support listing cooperation—it ensures buyers see more homes, sellers get maximum exposure, and the market stays fair and competitive.”
Industry reactions
Darryl Frost, a spokesperson on behalf of Keller Williams, told RISMedia that in their 1,000-plus franchises serving over 163,000 agents and their clients, each office has brokers who, together with their agents and clients, decide what’s best for each individual transaction.
“We believe it is up to our franchisees and agents to advocate at the local level for the policies they believe best serve their clients,” Frost said. “This is why KW is the No. 1 real estate franchise as measured by agent count, closed transactions and sales volume. We welcome any real estate professional who wants to join this culture of agent empowerment.”
A spokesperson from Anywhere Real Estate offered the following statement.
“We applaud efforts in our industry to preserve broad access to listings for consumers. While we have long advocated for reform of Clear Cooperation to allow for additional flexibility for sellers, we do not believe that it should come at the expense of widespread transparency for buyers. Our agents continue to have the ability to publish listings on MLSs and public portals, but, as we have said, we will also ensure that they are never disadvantaged if the market moves in favor of private listings.”
Colette Stevenson, CEO of REsides, a South Carolina-based independent MLS based, gave RISMedia the following statement.
“The core flaws with the CCP were there from the start and required immediate action to provide a solution. This was compounded by the growing conversation around ‘coming soon’ listings, with discussions about listings being withheld from the MLS happening as far back as 2014,” she said. “Too often, industry policies like CCP are created in a vacuum without asking the most important question: what actually works for brokers, agents, and consumers?”
Further, she said that Zillow and Redfin’s move to ban private listings “is just the first ripple in a much larger wave of industry change. It begs the question—since Zillow and Redfin are defined as brokerages and marketing platforms, will this open the door for legal ramifications?”
Compass and the National Association of REALTORS® declined RISMedia’s request for comment.
Note: This story was updated on April 16 to include Colette Stevenson’s statements.
