Two renters in Manhattan filed a proposed federal class action against Compass on August 21, claiming they paid roughly$880 a month over the median asking rentbecause inventory was pulled off StreetEasy and routed agent to agent instead of shown to the public.
Read that sentence again and notice who is not in it. No agent is named. Not yet.
Let me be careful about what I’mactually saying, because it is not what most people expect. I am not arguing that private listings should be outlawed. Some homeowners have real reasons to limit who sees their home. My argument is narrower and much harder to wriggle out of. The moment you recommend a limited launch without telling the seller what the research says it’s likely to costthem,you’ve stopped being an advisor and become a liability.
There is a fix. It fits on one page, and it takes about fourminutes to explain atthe kitchen table.
Know what you are supposed to be disclosing
An agent cannotdisclosea risk they never learned. So, let me put the numbers in one place, because most agents have only been handed the half of the research their company paid for.
Zillow looked at more than 15 million sales from 2023 through 2025 and found homes sold off the MLS went for1.3% less, roughly $1.36 billion left on the table. The loss was not spread evenly. Lower priced homes gave up 2.2%, homes in communities of color 1.9%. The sellers with the least cushion lost the most.
Bright MLS and Drexel University examined more than a million sales and found MLS-marketed homes sold for about17.5% more than comparable off-MLS properties, around $54,000 for a typical seller.
Bright MLS chief economist Lisa Sturtevant studied more than 100,000 sales in her footprint and found homes first marketed asoffice exclusives took about two weeks longer to go under contractthan homes listed straight on the MLS, with no evidence they sold for more. Slower and no richer.
Look at what happens when one agent stands on both sides of the transaction. An analysis of thousands of sales from 2018 through 2024 founddouble-ended transactions closed at 6.36% over list price against 8.06% for everything else. Same years, same markets, and the seller’s premium came in about a fifth smaller.
There is researchpointingthe other way, and a fair agent presents it. Compass studied roughly 70,800 of its own closed sales and reported a4.6% premium for phased marketing. A University of Georgia paper found a1.7% bump across 20 years in Dallas, though the authors reported that the advantage nearly vanished after Clear Cooperation took effect in 2020.
Here is the honest way to hold all of that at once. The independent research says exposure raises price. The brokerage research says a limited launch can beat it, but those studies are built on half-truths, and an agent who leans on them in a living room will eventually be asked to defend the indefensible.
The surgeon standard
A surgeon can perform almost any procedure a patientconsentsto. Whatendsa surgeon is not the procedure. It is doing it without telling the patient the risks first. The operation can goperfectly,and the career stillends, becausethe failure was never surgical. It wastheconversation that did not happen.
That is the entire standard here, and nothing about it is new. It is the same fiduciary duty you have owed every seller since the day you were licensed. Obedience, loyalty, disclosure, confidentiality, accountability, and reasonablecare. Disclosure has been on that list the whole time.
The one page disclosure
One page, four items, and the seller keeps a copy.
1. What the seller isactually choosing.Where the property will be marketed, in what order, and for how long, written in plain English rather than company product names. A homeowner should not have to decode Private Exclusive and Coming Soon to figure out that fewer people are going to see their house.
2. What the independent research says.Two or three sentences with the actual figures and sources. Zillow. Bright MLS. Drexel. Not your summary of how you feel about them.
3. The seller’s reason for limited exposure, written by the seller.In their own words, in their own handwriting. A tenant who cannot be disturbed. A divorce nobody knows about yet. A security concern. If that line comes back blank, or if the only reason on the page is that the agent recommended it, stop and put the home on the MLS. That blank line is the exhibit a plaintiff attorney reads aloud to a jury.
4. The exit datefromprivate to MLS.The calendar date the property goes to the MLS if it has not sold. Not at the seller’s discretion. Not when we regroup. A date. Homeowners do not know how to unwind an arrangement they never fully understood, and drift is what turns two weeks into four months.
Then you both sign it, and it lives in that file forever.
The four minutes that make the page work
A disclosureis only as good as the conversation around it. Here is roughly how mine goes.
“Before we talk about where we market your home, I want to give you something most agents will not. There is real research onthis,and it does not all agree. The independent studies say homes marketed to everybody tend to sell for more, and that selling as a private listing, very much like a for sale by owner, sells for less.”
Then the question that does the real work.“Is your goal privacy, or is your goal price? Those two pull in opposite directions, and I want to serve the one that actually matters to you.”
Be quiet after that. Let it sit. Most homeowners have never separated those two goals in their own head, and the moment they do, they usually answer their own question. Whichever way they answer, you just became the most trustworthy person who has walked through their front door this month.
Powerfact:You are not paid to have the answer. You are paid to make sure the homeowner has the information.
Why the clock is running
The action filed on August 21 named a brokerage. That is how these things always start. The House Judiciary antitrust subcommitteesent letters to Compass and MRED on July 22, and Senator Elizabeth Warren sent hers on August 7, warning that the arrangement threatens to createa two-tiered housing market where insiders pay for exclusive access. The New York Attorney General is looking at listing practices. None of this is goingquiet.
And remember how the commission cases went. The first complaintsnamedassociations and brokerages. Then came the amended complaints, the copycat filings, and a great many working agents digging through old files to reconstruct conversations they had three years earlier with nothing on paper to support them.
You do not control the litigation. You do not control your leadership. You control one page and four minutes.
Get the signature.
Darryl Davis, CSP, is a national speaker, coach, and the bestselling McGraw-Hill author of How to Become a Power Agent® in Real Estate. Over four decades he has trained hundreds of thousands of real estate professionals, and he is the founder of the POWER AGENT® Coaching Program. His independent research on private listings and market transparency was cited by the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Administrative State, Regulatory Reform, and Antitrust in July 2026. The full body of that work is open to the public at PrivateListingsDebate.com. For more information, go to DarrylSpeaks.com.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of HousingWire’s editorial department and its owners.
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