The announcement of Open Real Estate was welcome news. It also raised an uncomfortable question: How did we reach the point where keeping the housing market open required an announcement?
Buyers should be able to find available homes. Sellers should understand who can see their property and what they may sacrifice by limiting its exposure. Brokerages should compete on the quality of their advice, service and results.
These principles should be ordinary expectations of our profession. The fact that they now need a name, a coalition and a public defense is a troubling sign of how far the conversation has veered off course.
Brown Harris Stevens, where I serve as executive director, is an initial participating member of Open Real Estate. I support the initiative’s stated commitment to broader access, informed seller decisions and fair competition. But the larger issue extends beyond any platform or participating company. Openness should be how we conduct business every day.
When access becomes the product.
The appeal of exclusive inventory to a brokerage is easy to understand. If buyers believe they need a relationship with a particular company to see certain homes, that company gains an advantage. Exclusive inventory can help attract buyers, recruit and retain agents and strengthen the firm’s position.
The benefit to the seller is less easy to understand and requires a separate explanation. A brokerage’s ability to use a listing to grow its business does not establish that limiting the property’s exposure is the best strategy for the homeowner. Those interests may align in a particular transaction, but that does not make them interchangeable.
Compass has made private exclusives and phased marketing central to its offering, promoting the opportunity to test pricing and generate interest before a broader public launch. Those claims deserve scrutiny because they concern decisions sellers are trusting their advisors to help them make.
What does the seller gain during that period? Which potential buyers cannot see the property? How representative is pricing feedback from a limited audience? What opportunities might the seller lose while broader exposure is delayed?
The recruiting appeal of the strategy is clear: Access to inventory agents and their buyers might otherwise miss. But sellers deserve to hear the other side of that pitch. The inventory attracting people into the network is their home, and restricting access may exclude buyers who could compete for it.
There is a revealing conflict in marketing the scale of a private-listing network. If seller privacy is the rationale, why is the volume of inventory unavailable to the broader market a selling point? A homeowner may have a legitimate need for discretion. A brokerage advertising how much inventory outsiders cannot access is making a pitch about exclusivity. Sellers deserve to understand whose interests that exclusivity serves.
A large brokerage network can provide meaningful exposure, but it still represents only part of the market. The strength of that network does not, by itself, establish that a seller benefits from postponing access to everyone else.
For sellers seeking the strongest price within a practical time frame, I believe broad exposure should be the starting point. Making a home available to more potential buyers creates more opportunity for competing offers and gives the seller a fuller picture of demand. A recommendation to delay that exposure should explain what the seller stands to gain and what they may give up.
The pricing argument also deserves scrutiny. Sellers hire brokers in part for their ability to analyze comparable sales, assess competing inventory and recommend a pricing strategy. If an agent recommends testing a price privately, the seller should ask: Why is feedback from a limited audience more useful than feedback from the broader market? What uncertainty does this approach resolve, and why does resolving it require restricted exposure?
A broker should be prepared to answer those questions with evidence specific to the property and the seller’s circumstances. And the answer shouldn’t be just about obfuscating days on market. When we evaluate how quickly the strategy produces a sale, we should count any private marketing period. The absence of public days on the market does not mean the seller’s clock has stopped.
Privacy deserves a place. So does perspective.
Some sellers have legitimate reasons to limit exposure. Security, personal circumstances, timing and discretion can all matter. A thoughtful advisor should understand those priorities and recommend a strategy that reflects them.
Those needs existed long before private exclusives became the manufactured proposition they are today. They deserve individual solutions. Their existence does not justify making restricted access the default starting point for sellers.
Seller choice matters. So does how an advisor presents that choice. Which option is introduced first? Which benefits are emphasized? Are the limitations explained with the same conviction? Did the conversation start by asking what the seller’s goals are in the selling process, or did the broker prescribe a strategy without first understanding the specific circumstances and goals?
A signed disclosure is needed, sure, but the quality of the conversation that leads to that signature matters even more.
A parallel worth considering.
An individual brokerage may argue that its private network is large enough to serve its sellers well. But imagine that argument becoming the operating model across the industry. Buyers would need to navigate multiple networks to understand what is available.
Their selection could depend on which brokerage they contacted. Sellers could reach substantial audiences while still missing qualified buyers connected to other firms. Each company might describe its own network as an advantage. Together, those networks could create a more fragmented and less useful marketplace.
Consider Southwest Airlines. For years, travelers searching online travel agencies would not see its fares. They had to search Southwest separately. In 2025, Southwest expanded distribution to Expedia, Priceline and the other aggregators, making its flights available where more travelers were already shopping.
The parallel has limits, but the visibility question matters: How many potential customers never consider an offering because it doesn’t appear where they are looking?
In real estate, that question carries an additional responsibility. An airline decides how to distribute its own inventory. A brokerage advises a homeowner on how to market theirs. If a brokerage recommends limiting exposure, it should explain why that serves the seller better than reaching the broader market.
Brokerage leaders have a responsibility to consider the marketplace our decisions create. Our clients, buyers and sellers alike, depend on it, and the practices we normalize shape its usefulness.
An announcement is a beginning.
Open Real Estate’s promise deserves support. Its implementation will deserve scrutiny. Its governance, participation rules and distribution practices must deliver the openness it advocates. Every participating company, including my own, should be held to that standard. The initiative must demonstrate that it expands access in practice.
The underlying principle should already guide our decisions: a homeowner’s marketing strategy should serve the homeowner’s goals. Any benefit to the brokerage must be evaluated alongside that responsibility, and any conflict should be explained candidly.
Our advantage should come from understanding a property, interpreting the evidence, negotiating effectively and helping a client make a sound decision. Those are the capabilities clients hire us for. They should also be the basis on which we compete.
I welcome an initiative that helps protect those conditions. But its announcement should prompt industry-wide reflection. When keeping the housing market open becomes a position companies must organize to defend, we’ve let the conversation drift too far from the people we serve.
Open Real Estate should not be a novel idea. It should describe how we do business.
