Private Listings, Fragmented Markets, and the Transferees Caught in the Middle

A significant shift is underway in U.S. real estate, and corporate mobility managers would be well-served to understand it. How homes are listed, marketed, and made visible to buyers is changing. It has the potential to affect the outcomes of every relocation assignment where an employee is selling a home, buying a home, or both.

Teresa Howe, SCRP, SGMS, a well-regarded consultant and thought leader in the relocation and real estate industry, recently published a sharp and candid analysis of what she calls a three-way breakdown in truth, trust, and transparency across the real estate industry. Among her key points: that RMCs and corporate mobility teams should understand these dynamics and how they may affect their programs and the employees they serve.

What's Actually Happening in Real Estate Right Now

For roughly 50 years, residential real estate in the U.S. operated on a relatively open and cooperative system. When a home was listed for sale, it was entered into a Multiple Listing Service (MLS) within 24 hours, giving all member agents, and all major buyer portals like Zillow and Realtor.com, access to that inventory. Sellers got broad exposure. Buyers saw a comprehensive picture of the market. The system wasn't perfect, but it was fundamentally transparent.

That system is now fragmenting, driven by a high-stakes fight between two of the biggest players in real estate:

Compass International Holdings (CIH) — which now owns Century 21, Coldwell Banker, ERA, Better Homes & Gardens, Sotheby's International, Corcoran, @Properties, and others — is pushing a strategy built on "private" or "exclusive" listings that are marketed within their own agent network before (or instead of) hitting the MLS.

Zillow — which has built two decades of consumer trust as the go-to home search portal — is fighting back because Compass keeping listings off the MLS means Zillow loses access to inventory, threatening the platform traffic and lead revenues that drive their business.

MLSs are caught in the middle, scrambling to stay relevant. Regulators and state legislators are beginning to step in. And the consumer, the home seller or buyer sitting at the center of all this, is largely unaware it's happening.

It's also worth understanding a middle-ground category that is adding to the confusion: the "coming soon" or premarket listing. Unlike a fully private listing that is invisible on most portals, premarket listings are advertised online, but selectively. A Compass premarket listing, for example, may appear on Redfin but not on Zillow, while a Zillow-aligned premarket listing may appear on Realtor.com later this year but not on other portals. The practical result for a transferee searching for a home: the same property can appear as available on one platform and off-market on another, with no explanation. Like private listings, premarket listings typically don't display days on market or price-cut history, which limits the buyer's ability to evaluate a listing objectively. The landscape is no longer one market. It is several overlapping ones, and which one a transferee can see depends entirely on which portal they use and which agent they hire.

When the Market Fragments, Buyers Lose Visibility

The fragmentation of listing inventory creates a real access challenge for buyers. When homes are held within a private brokerage network, a buyer whose agent isn't part of that network may never know those properties exist. A home may be priced exactly right for a transferee. But if it's marketed exclusively within a brokerage's private network and the transferee's agent isn't affiliated, the transferee simply won't see it. This isn't necessarily the result of bad intent. It's the structural consequence of a market that is no longer operating from a single shared pool of inventory.

For sellers, private listings also limit transparency. Because these properties don't enter the MLS, there is no public record of days on market or price reductions. The only performance data available comes from the listing brokerage itself, which has an obvious interest in presenting private listings favorably. Sellers deserve to make this choice with a clear-eyed understanding of the tradeoffs. There are legitimate cases where a private approach makes sense, such as executives, high-profile individuals, or sensitive personal circumstances, but the decision should be informed rather than driven by a listing presentation that omits the downside.

Why This Is a Mobility Program Issue

Your relocating employees are not typical homebuyers and sellers. They're operating under time pressure, in unfamiliar markets, often with limited ability to be present for the process. That makes them more dependent on the professionals supporting them, and more exposed when those professionals are operating within a more complex and fragmented marketplace.

Here's where mobility programs may be affected:

• Home Sale Outcomes. If a departing employee's home is listed through a Compass-affiliated broker, a realistic scenario given how many major brands CIH now controls, it may be held in a private network before receiving broad market exposure. Fewer buyers seeing the property can mean longer time on market, lower sale price, or both. In BVO, GBO, or guaranteed buyout programs, this has direct cost implications for the employer. Zillow research found that sellers in the Chicago area who don't list on the MLS lose an average of $6,619 on the sale, a concrete illustration of what reduced exposure costs in practice. Private listing strategies also create program design complications: does a private listing period count toward mandatory marketing time before an appraised-value offer can be triggered? How does a BVO valuation account for comparable sales data that may be incomplete if private listings don't report publicly? If state law creates a delay or penalty after a private marketing period, who bears that liability: the employee, the broker, or the program? These are policy design questions that merit attention now, before an employee requests a private listing period and the program has no clear answer.
• Home Purchase Access. A transferee relying on a buyer's agent who is not in the Compass network may not see every available home in their destination market. They could make a purchase decision thinking they saw everything on the market, when in reality a whole slice of it was invisible to them.
• Broker Network Quality. The agent or broker your program refers an employee to now matters in a new way. What matters is which network that agent belongs to, and whether that network gives the transferee access to the broadest possible inventory on both sides of the transaction.
• Duty of Care. Howe is explicit on this point: relocation professionals have a responsibility to ensure that corporations, RMCs, and transferees understand what is happening in the market and how it affects each stakeholder. A transferee who makes a real estate decision without this context hasn't given truly informed consent.

What Plus Is Watching and What You Should Be Asking

The landscape will continue to shift. The state legislative response is accelerating. Washington State enacted SB 6091, effective June 11, 2026, prohibiting agents from marketing residential properties to an exclusive or limited group unless the property is concurrently marketed to the general public and all other brokers. Wisconsin has enacted a comparable law. Connecticut recently passed legislation requiring listings to appear on a publicly accessible platform at the same time they are marketed through any public channel, explicitly excluding invitation-only or password-protected networks from satisfying that requirement. In New York, the Fair and Transparent Real Estate Listings Act passed both legislative chambers and is pending action by Governor Hochul. Illinois and Hawaii have measures still in progress. Three distinct regulatory structures are emerging across states: a default public marketing mandate, a seller opt-out with disclosure written into statute, and a seller opt-out with disclosure drafted by a regulatory agency, with varying effective dates running through 2027. Litigation and regulatory scrutiny are expanding. And the entry of non-traditional players signals that the pace of change is likely to continue. Howe notes that Bed Bath & Beyond has acquired Fathom Realty, echoing Sears' acquisition of Coldwell Banker in the 1980s.

Federal attention is now being paid to these practices as well. On July 22, 2026, the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on the Administrative State, Regulatory Reform, and Antitrust sent formal letters to Compass CEO Robert Reffkin and MRED CEO Rebecca Jensen demanding briefings on their private listing network partnership. Congress is examining whether the arrangement constitutes anticompetitive conduct designed to insulate brokerages from competition at the expense of consumers. A key concern cited in the letters: that these partnerships incentivize agents to steer sellers toward private listings so brokerages can represent both sides of the transaction, a dual agency conflict that directly harms the seller. This follows a federal antitrust lawsuit filed by Zillow against Compass and MRED in May. The subcommittee set an August 5, 2026 deadline for the executives to arrange those briefings. MRED said it would cooperate, while Compass declined to comment. For mobility programs, this is a space worth watching closely as regulatory clarity develops.

It's also worth understanding why this is happening now. The NAR settlement of 2024, which required new transparency around how real estate agents are compensated, had an unintended consequence. It made brokerages more wary of industry-wide cooperative rules and structures. That pushback created fertile ground for the private listing movement to accelerate. The commission landscape itself remains in flux. Buyer's agent compensation is no longer advertised upfront in the listing; buyers must now request it when submitting an offer. In practice, most markets still reflect roughly a 3% listing-side and 3% buyer-side structure, though regional variation exists. For corporate mobility programs, where the employer is typically funding the commission, this shift adds a new layer of employee education and expectation-setting that programs should be prepared to address.

The state-by-state divergence in private listing rules is creating a compliance challenge that will feel familiar to mobility professionals who navigated the post-NAR settlement period: differing rules across jurisdictions, inconsistent policy administration, and employees in one state operating under entirely different requirements than employees in another. WERC has noted that consistency in program administration may become increasingly difficult as states continue to take their own approaches. RMCs and corporate mobility teams will need to stay current on changing requirements while ensuring employees receive consistent guidance regardless of where their home is located.

For relocating buyers, the fragmentation is equally disorienting. As Howe puts it: "This practice negatively impacts relocating buyers, as they will need to rely on their agent to unearth every possible listing across multiple online locations that meet their criteria, instead of using the MLS or an online listing portal as a one-stop shop." When a brokerage puts a listing only on its own website, it may technically be public-facing, but if it is not in the MLS, it will not reach the widest possible audience, and certain groups outside the brokerage's inner circle may be excluded from seeing it entirely.

For mobility managers, this is the moment to ask your RMC and your real estate partners some pointed questions:

• Which brokers in our destination markets are withholding listings from the MLS, and how does that affect what our transferees can see?
• Are the agents in our referral network affiliated with networks that give transferees full market access on the buy side?
• How are our listing agents marketing departing homes, and are they recommending private listing strategies that could limit buyer exposure and harm sale outcomes?
• What disclosures are we providing to transferees so they understand how their home may be marketed and why?

These aren't abstract questions. They connect directly to program cost, employee experience, and the foundational principle that Howe puts plainly: duty of care is our primary responsibility.

It's a principle Plus Relocation has held since our founding. Plus began as a real estate company, and that origin shapes how we think about every aspect of the relocation experience. We understand the real estate transaction as one of the highest-stakes moments in an employee's relocation journey. That foundation is why duty of care for our clients' relocating employees isn't a policy position for Plus. It's a long-standing tradition built into how we operate.