The Private Listings War Is Escalating. Here’s The Compromise That Could Save Our Industry

The private listings debate just got louder. Howard Hanna Real Estate Services has launched HannaList, an internal listing network that allows Howard Hanna agents to share listings exclusively with Howard Hanna buyer agents before those properties ever reach the MLS. Combined with what Compass has built since acquiring Anywhere, two of the industry’s most significant players are now moving in the same direction simultaneously — keeping listings inside their own walls first, opening them to the broader market second, if at all.

I understand the business logic. Brokerages that sell their own listings in-house earn both sides of the commission. That is legitimate. I sit in the pro-private listing camp because there are other benefits to it, but if brokers who practice private listings start making it the first go to push on a listing appointment, then we are heading toward a fragmented inventory landscape that could fundamentally damage the way buyers search for homes in America. We do not need to imagine what that world looks like. Look at commercial real estate.

There is no commercial equivalent of Zillow or Realtor.com. Brokers work through fragmented systems and word-of-mouth networks. Finding the right property means calling a dozen firms and accepting you may never see what you are missing. That is not a feature — it is a failure. And it is the direction residential real estate is drifting.

Here is what a workable compromise looks like — three concrete steps the industry, the portals and the MLSs could take right now.

Step 1: The portals must remove days on market and price reduction history

One of the most compelling arguments driving the private listings movement — and Howard Hanna’s CEO Hoby Hanna makes it directly — is that public marketing exposes sellers to data that works against them. He is not wrong. The moment a listing goes live on Zillow or Realtor.com, a countdown clock starts ticking in public view. Every day without a contract signals weakness. Every price reduction gets logged and handed to buyers as negotiating ammunition.

That problem is not an argument for private listings. It is an argument for fixing the portals. Days on market and price reduction history do not help buyers make better purchasing decisions — they hijack the buyer’s focus entirely. Instead of asking the only questions that matter — Do I love this home? Is it worth this price to me? — buyers start calculating the seller’s anxiety. The buyer stops being committed to buying a home and becomes committed to winning a negotiation. Those are two very different mindsets, and only one of them moves transactions forward.

There is no federal or state law requiring portals to display this data. Zillow, Realtor.com, and Homes.com made a choice to show it — and they can make a different choice. Remove days on market and price reduction history from public display, and they eliminate one of the strongest justifications for going private in the first place. The portals can do something genuinely constructive here without legislation, without industry consensus and without waiting for anyone’s permission.

Step 2: All listings must enter the MLS with a private designation

It should be a requirement that every residential listing taken by a licensed agent be entered in to the MLS — not to be made available for showings, not to be distributed to every portal, but simply to be entered and tracked. The MLS would add a clear designation — Private, Exclusive, or Office Only — signaling that this property is not currently available to cooperating agents. The listing exists in the system. The data is captured. The inventory picture stays whole.

This does two things. First, it gives buyers and their agents a complete picture of what is on the market. A private MLS designation at least tells a buyer’s agent: this home exists, here is who represents it, here is who to call. Perhaps, that buyer’s agent who is representing the buyer can then call the listing agent and ask if they are willing to co-broke that listing for their buyer. I think most agents would comply, otherwise risking not fulfilling their fiduciary responsibility to their client, the seller.  Second, it preserves the data integrity that every appraisal, market analysis, and policy decision in this industry depends on. When meaningful inventory moves entirely outside the MLS, our market data becomes unreliable — and that is not just an industry problem. It is a consumer protection problem.

Step 3: Private listings must appear on the major portals with leads going directly to the listing firm

If private listings are going to exist — and they are — buyers deserve to know about them in the same place they search for everything else. But right now, the portals themselves cannot agree on how to handle this. Zillow has banned privately marketed listings that are not submitted to the MLS, taking a firm pro-transparency stance. Homes.com has said it will continue showing all listings regardless.

Realtor.com, while critical of private listings, is bound by its MLS relationships and has not followed Zillow’s lead. The result is a fragmented portal landscape where a buyer cannot trust that any single platform shows them a complete picture — which ironically makes the problem worse, not better.

The solution is straightforward: the major portals should adopt a unified standard that allows private listings to appear with a clear consumer-facing label — Not Currently Available for Showings, Contact Listing Agent for Details — and routes all buyer inquiries directly to the listing brokerage. No cooperating agent lead distribution. No portal lead capture resold to competing agents. The listing firm controls the lead entirely, preserving the business model that makes private listings financially attractive in the first place. The brokerage still has its shot at a double-ended transaction. The buyer is not left in the dark. And the portal landscape stops being a shell game.

Compass and Hanna Holdings are not fringe players experimenting at the edges. They are major firms with the infrastructure to sustain private listing networks at scale. When firms of this size move in the same direction, the market follows. If private listings become the default rather than the exception, we will look back at this moment as the one where we had the chance to build guardrails and chose not to.

The three steps outlined here require cooperation from portals, buy-in from MLSs, and willingness from brokerages to accept a framework that serves the market rather than just their market position. That is a significant ask — but far less than what we will sacrifice if fragmentation runs its course. The private listings war is here. The only question is whether we end it before the damage becomes permanent.

Darryl Davis, CSP, is a nationally recognized real estate speaker, coach, and author of three McGraw-Hill books. He has trained over 600,000 real estate professionals worldwide and leads the POWER AGENT® Coaching Program. Learn more at darrylspeaks.com.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of HousingWire’s editorial department and its owners.

To contact the editor responsible for this piece: tracey@hwmedia.com