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Once the National Association of Realtors announced a new classification of Delayed Marketing Exempt Listings, chaos reigned supreme. Industry leaders, brokerages, portals and agents have strong views on all sides of this issue. Everyone has an opinion, especially the portals and brokerages with involvement in these portals.
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They seem to be masking arguments for what’s best for the public versus those who are the very reason that the listings exist in the first place — the property owner who decides to sell.
As an agent who works equally with buyers and sellers, I have a few thoughts based on my 23 years of being in the trenches from the agent side of the aisle and as someone who built their business solely on relationships, hard work and unwavering client service.
Choice
With Zillow, Redfin and EXP’s latest stance against a delayed marketing option without public syndication to all websites, they are forgetting one thing: choice. If we have learned anything over the past two years, it’s about having options.
Sellers don’t have to pay compensation to a buyer’s agent if they don’t want to. Sellers don’t have to pay a certain amount to that buyer’s agent.
Agents can no longer declare, silently or otherwise, they aren’t showing a listing if it isn’t paying X percent because it’s all negotiable, and you can now request compensation as part of your offer — and you can negotiate how it is accounted for between the offer, seller and buyer if needed.
You can and should tell a buyer, “I don’t work for free, and here’s how my compensation would be structured based on working together.”
A delayed marketing option is about a seller making the best decision for themselves when coming on the market. It’s not about hoarding listings or intentionally harming the public.
When you don’t have a platform like the MLS to be able to offer different options for marketing listings, whether private or public, it becomes a convoluted mess of:
- Private social media groups
- cryptic emails
- Screenshots
- Texts and info sharing of “off market” properties at a meeting or gathering of agents where you don’t truly know who has the authority to represent these properties.
In addition, there could be more than one agent who has been told by a would-be seller, “If you can find a buyer for me, I’ll sell, but I’m not signing any listing agreement.”
It’s impossible to control what I call “backdoor” behavior in this regard, and it may likely continue despite a delayed marketing option in MLS. This can be difficult to enforce, and quite frankly, we all have much better things to do with our time than run interference with this.
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Sellers should have the various options explained to them with the pros and cons outlined so they can decide what is best for them and their situation.
Many markets have such a disclosure, and eXp just released an open-sourced version of its own.
Every decision in life and business has consequences — some good, some bad and some of minimal effect. Now, when given choices, some sellers may prefer to remain off the public market for privacy or safety reasons as well as those regarding their personal circumstances.
If they don’t feel like being on 500 websites, they shouldn’t have to be, but they should still be able to be found by agents through the MLS. Are the portals considerate of a seller’s reasons for not wanting to go public? There is a phrase I heard many years ago during a training class I was taking about pricing, and it was “When was the last time Zillow walked through your home?”
This was directed at consumers who rely on this portal and many others as the gospel of real estate when it comes to values on both the selling and buying side. We all know Zillow hasn’t walked through the home, and it can’t give context like a human real estate agent can, such as why a home on one street may sell for more than one on an adjoining street.
It’s why the value is way off because of what the portal is pulling in around that home (like condos or townhomes) that confuses the true price range the home should be in and any other nuances that only a real estate agent knows, such as the unsightly power lines behind the property or across the street, the warehouse behind it, the flight path that contributes to a steady stream of airplane noise in the neighborhood, etc.
Selling a home is very much a personal, emotional and business decision, and as such, the seller has the right to make the best decision possible after being informed of their options under advice and counsel of their agent.
Real estate 411
If you have been in the industry long enough, you may remember floor time, calls from consumers regarding real estate newspaper ads, as well as those from a For Sale sign.
In the “old days,” many real estate companies required agents to use signs that had their office phone number on them — this was long before cell phones and, of course, pagers.
Then it evolved to both company and agent phone numbers on the For Sale sign when someone was actually in the office to answer the phone. During floor time, which was highly coveted, it was up to the agent to work the lead and convert it to a listing or sale. It was yours to take the ball and run with it. Embrace it, work it, own it.
Information was more limited at that time, and we didn’t have all the ways to quickly and easily do a ton of research and vetting on people we met. Many of these inquiries were simply people looking for information as they were driving or walking by.
Sometimes people would call in asking if we could help them locate a property they saw for sale and attempt to describe the street or area where they thought it was. Again, no interest in engaging further.
You could spend hours researching and sending information to prospects who had no intention of buying or selling (at least with you). All of this was done at no cost, of course. But an attorney would have definitely charged by the hour for their time.
The Sitzer | Burnett case and related copycat lawsuits wanted to clarify, as part of the settlement, that our services are not free, which our industry used to tell buyers .
Too many consumer portals have contributed to a DIY, instant-gratification attitude among the public when it comes to real estate, at no cost to the consumer. Click here to see a house, and — boom — numerous agents are blowing up the consumer’s phone with calls and texts.
And as CoStar CEO Andy Florance recently explained in his op-ed on Inman, they are royally confused as they just wanted to see the house, had a few questions or thought they were contacting the listing agent, and no one who is calling them can answer their questions.
The consumer has no idea of the difference between the listing agent and any number of agents calling them. Many consumers get quite upset to learn that the agents they are talking to are anyone but the listing agent. Some demand to get the name of that person, so they can talk to them.
Is an agent who’s paying big bucks for this kind of lead inclined to give them that information? These portals create the notion that we are a free service at the end of a 1-800 line that can answer all sorts of questions, provide guidance, information, and insight, and then drop everything to show them a home. They have no idea how we are compensated or where the money comes from. Is that really what we want to be known for as an industry?
As real estate coach Darryl Davis articulated, these portals are not our friend, and never were. They exist to make money and confuse consumers and agents alike. As it is, we can’t manually edit any of our listing information once it has been syndicated if things are not accurate from the IDX feed.
Have you ever had a seller ask why their listing had discrepancies on the portals versus what they are seeing on the public and private MLS links you shared? Lots of luck calling one of these portals to try to correct it — there is no one to get assistance from.
It’s unacceptable that our industry turned the spigot on to allow our data to be syndicated across hundreds of websites, and we have no direct way to seek resolution from them when there is an issue with how our listing, profile or other information relevant to our business may appear inaccurate, duplicative and confusing.
These portals were given our data with no accountability on how information is depicted or if it needs to be modified or corrected. All of this reflects poorly on us as a profession, as we are viewed by the consumer as one and the same. They don’t give away our information for free — they make agents pay for it by buying leads so they can make money off ZIP codes, territories, etc.
They aren’t transparent about how many agents have subscribed to buying leads from a particular ZIP code or a specific area. They don’t tell you that you have to be a really, really big player (to the tune of spending several hundred thousand dollars a year) to get their cream of the crop leads and live transfer calls — it’s purely pay to play. If you have an unlimited budget and the bandwidth and manpower to incubate and service these leads, then it may work for you.
Yet the overhead associated with this from a brokerage, team and individual agent standpoint can put even the best into a financial hole if very few of these leads close.
With rising interest rates, rising home prices, inflation, tariffs and overall economic uncertainty, who is really profiting from selling all of these leads? The agents running around with them are expending a tremendous amount of time and money running helter-skelter from one home to another.
More inventory on the market, along with price reductions, causes them to freeze up like deer in headlights. When an agent wants to cancel or modify their subscription, good luck. They all love autorenewals, and you can’t magically talk to someone when you want to cancel, so you have to spend copious amounts of time going up the chain to find someone to help.
The public has no idea how these portals work, and they don’t care. They just see them as a means to an end when finding a home to buy, but that doesn’t mean every seller has to have their property listed on them if they don’t want to. The public can find them, however, by working through a reputable agent.
And under our new practice changes, consumers will need to engage with an agent who has written documentation on some level to purchase a property, whether you go through the listing agent or a buyer’s agent.
Fear: False evidence appearing real
If you’ve been in real estate a while, you’ve likely heard that acronym bantered about through tough markets, challenging situations, and working to overcome objections with buyers, sellers, and potential prospects.
For these portals and brokerages that rely on them to feed their agents leads, they are operating from a position of fear that something will be taken away, but packaging that fear in disguise as advocacy for “the best interest of the public.”
They are fearful that there will be fewer listings for them to generate revenue from because the listings are essentially paid ad revenue on their websites. They have to sell leads, and the more leads they sell, the better they do, however they choose to structure it.
The portals are scared that sellers will elect not to make their listings public with this option in place. Sellers have had this ability all along, regardless of this new classification in MLS. It’s just that there hasn’t been a cohesive platform to keep track of this information or a way to always be aware of these properties.
The sky is not falling. Just like the practice changes post Sitzer Burnett. There was a ton of fear about how agents would get compensated. Would sellers be willing to pay compensation to a buyer’s agent? What if they didn’t? What if a buyer couldn’t or wouldn’t pay if a seller wouldn’t?
A million questions arose out of fear, understandably, and for the most part after working through the initial bumps in the road, it’s business as usual. Buyers are signing buyer representation agreements, and agents are requesting and receiving compensation as part of an offer being made.
The same potentially paralyzing fear appears here. Many sellers will want their listing to go public and appear across as many websites as syndication will allow. These are the same sellers who typically want a sign in their front yard, a broker open and public open houses.
At the same time, there are sellers who don’t want a sign or a lockbox, or maybe a lockbox is not appropriate for the kind of home they are selling. They don’t want any kind of open house and would prefer to be quieter about their home sale. That’s OK.
And some would-be sellers or those that expired have had bad experiences being on the “open market” for all to see before, including:
- Agents and prospective buyers who didn’t respect their property
- Agents and prospective buyers who showed up late for showings
- No shows or appointments cancelled at the last minute
- Agents and prospective buyers who left lights on, doors unlocked, let children run amok, etc.
Their trust in our system was eroded, and rightly so. The buyer representation agreement process may change some of that, rather than the prospect requesting to see a house with the click of a mouse and getting an agent who knows nothing about the listing to show it.
They have not qualified the prospect too much because they’ve been coached not to get into 20 questions and wait until you are at the property. That house now serves as that agent’s “field office” to try to build rapport with the buyer.
Is that scenario really in the best interest of a seller?
At the end of the day, the portals will have plenty of listings on their sites. There will still be listings that go public and appear on these portals. I don’t think nearly the number of sellers who choose not to be publicly listed, at least initially, is going to cause a lack of listings on these portals.
And portals only benefit those who create them. Content is king, as they say, and those with listings control the content. Where that content goes ultimately is up to the driver of that content, who is the seller.
More inventory
The ability for a property owner to go into a delayed status just might create more inventory than previously has been available. It creates an avenue for sellers who may otherwise have been uncomfortable going on the market because they had to be all in or nothing at all. Even though sellers had the option to opt out of an IDX feed, an agent’s mantra was always to promote going on all those sites for obvious reasons.
But what’s good for “all” may not be good for one — just like how sellers used to be told they “had” to offer X amount of compensation to the buyer’s agent in MLS or the listings wouldn’t be shown. No one wanted to test that theory by daring to put $1 in the co-op compensation field in MLS, and quite frankly, many of us didn’t even know that was an option until all that came out in NAR’s defense in the Sitzer | Burnett case.
This option allows sellers to get their feet wet in a comfortable way. Agents with buyers for whom it is a fit will share the information with buyers. They will have confidence and clarity that the agent representing the property is truly authorized to do so.
Buyers may have a less-pressured showing experience rather than not being able to see a property until an open house. While the portals and some brokerages are pontificating about potential lack of exposure, let’s not assume every seller wants hordes of people traipsing through their home at any given time. There are safety and security reasons, not to mention the wear and tear that comes with foot traffic.
The reality is agents aren’t likely to have manpower or a security detail at every entrance to the home front and back, posted at every room, and in the garage to keep track of people’s comings and goings.
I recently attended an open house for a home my buyers were interested in, and it was only available for viewing that weekend. It was an absolute zoo. It was an occupied home that was all fixed up and turnkey. Every door to the home was open, and I couldn’t tell if an agent was present.
No one was by the front door or entrance to the home. The garage looked like they took all the belongings in the house and put them in the middle of the floor — anyone could have gone through that and seen what they could find, not to mention tools and an expensive classic car parked in there.
At one point, I thought the agent may have opened the house up and left. The backyard was xeriscaped and lacked ground cover. People were walking in the yard, getting sandy dirt on their shoes, and going in and out of the house.
The carpet ran up the stairs and through the second floor and was starting to look pretty beat up from all the footprints. I finally found the agent, who honestly looked like any consumer who could have been coming through. I asked if shoes should be removed, and they said it didn’t matter. I couldn’t help but think how dirty the floors were starting to look. Is a scenario like this really in the best interest of the seller?
So let’s not assume there will be fewer options for the public if a seller doesn’t opt to go on the portals. If a seller wants to transition to a public listing, they have the option to do so in the MLS and should not be penalized because they didn’t choose that option initially. We don’t have the right to tell owners of private homes where their home has to appear and on what websites and when.
Lawsuits, litigation and lawyers — oh, my
Those against the delayed marketing option claim this is opening up the industry for more litigation. I would argue that any sort of “forced” or “mandatory” requirements of having to go public on the portals are equally prone to litigation. It smells a bit like antitrust with strong-arming.
They are saying an owner of a home has no choice but to go public out of the gate or forgo the ability to appear on their portals. EXp has gone so far as to say that it will respect seller privacy, but that privacy ends with going into MLS. Doesn’t sound like much choice to me.
Private listing networks
Let’s not confuse delayed marketing with private listing networks. These two are not the same. Delayed Marketing Exempt Listings allow listings to be shared among MLS members who can match buyers with sellers in this status. Private listing networks provide a seller an option to test the waters, so to speak, within a brokerage, but it’s quite a narrow set of eyeballs.
And when Compass launched their Compass One portal, several other brokerages followed suit or felt the need to let the public know they have these, too. So with all these “private listing networks,” what’s truly coveted and special anymore?
The reality is that no brokerage or person holds the key to off-market listings. And there are numerous strategies agents use to uncover them, as many of us have done for buyers focused on a particular neighborhood or kind of home in an area they want to be in. Working these angles can take quite a long time of sleuthing, mining owner data about years of ownership and equity, communicating with numerous agents, walking the streets, talking to neighbors, sending letters, notes, posting on social media, and rinse and repeat.
In my piece regarding ways to move through the off-market debate, I articulated that a happy medium was necessary, and a delayed marketing option is exactly that. The seller gets exposure to agents who may have a buyer without having to go on display to the general public if they don’t want to. I am not suggesting that keeping listings from agents outside of a particular brokerage is the right thing to do.
As our industry continues to evolve, disruption continues to reign supreme. Choice and flexibility must remain at the forefront of all we do. Our business demands it. No two consumers are alike, nor are their situations. People can be complicated for a variety of reasons.
Buying and selling is a highly charged and emotional process. In 2025, we need flexible business options to meet people where they are. We still have a long way to go, and no agent or consumer should be told it’s this way or the highway when it comes to how a seller chooses to market their home. It’s their home, their choice.
Cara Ameer is a bi-coastal agent licensed in California and Florida with Coldwell Banker. You can follow her on Facebook or on X, formerly known as Twitter.
