Private listings are creating a buyer problem. How will we solve it?

This article was originally published by Inman News on July 27, 2026. 

The House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Administrative State, Regulatory Reform, and Antitrust just sent letters to Compass CEO Robert Reffkin and Midwest Real Estate Data (MRED) CEO Rebecca Jensen, demanding briefings on the companies’ private listing partnership. Congress wants to know whether the deal – which pushes Compass’s “Private Exclusives” and “Coming Soon” listings nationwide through a database built for regional use – amounts to anticompetitive conduct.  

Lawmakers highlighted concerns that private listing networks could fragment inventory, weaken price competition, and build “velvet ropes” around homes, shutting out anyone not already inside the right circle of agents and buyers. 

It’s a moment our industry should welcome. But buried almost as an aside in the subcommittee’s letter is a troubling question: whether these partnerships incentivize agents to steer sellers toward private listings so a brokerage can represent both sides of a deal, or as the letter noted, “capture” buyers who contact the listing agent directly.  

Read that again. Congress isn’t only asking whether Compass has gotten too big. It’s asking whether buyers are being funneled toward whichever agent benefits the brokerage, rather than the one who actually serves them.  

That is a buyer problem, and it deserves to be treated like one. 

An incomplete story 

For months, the industry’s defense of private listing networks has centered almost entirely on the seller. Sellers benefit from privacy, sellers deserve choice, and full transparency exposes them to unfair judgment over how long a home quietly sat unsold.  

Given this congressional inquiry, a Consumer Federation of America request that the DOJ investigate the same partnership, an ongoing Zillow lawsuit alleging collusion, and a New York Attorney General probe into the Compass-Anywhere merger, you’d think the industry might finally widen the lens. 

Instead, the same seller-centered defense keeps getting pushed. Missing from nearly every version of this narrative is the party that is actually being squeezed out of the market: the buyer.  

The buyer is already losing ground 

The National Association of Realtors’ own 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers tells a sobering story. First-time buyers made up just 21% of all purchasers this year, the lowest share NAR has recorded since it began tracking the data in 1981, and roughly half the historical norm of about 40% before the 2008 crash. The typical first-time buyer is now 40 years old, an all-time high, up from the late 20s a generation ago, and NAR’s own research leadership notes that delaying a first purchase by a decade can cost a buyer roughly $150,000 in lost home equity over time. That is not a market functioning normally. That is a generation of would-be buyers, including younger families, first-generation wealth builders, and renters trying to break in, all being pushed further to the margins. Into that environment, some brokerages want to normalize keeping listings quiet, curated, and shared selectively before the broader buyer pool ever sees them. It makes no sense. 

“Seller choice” has been weaponized 

The justification usually offered is seller choice. Some sellers simply prefer privacy, and in select cases that’s true and justifiable. But when you look at what’s actually driving the rise of private and pre-marketed listings, seller demand isn’t the obvious explanation. Independent surveys of agents have found that the overwhelming majority – roughly seven in ten – say no client has ever actually asked them to market a home privately.  

If sellers didn’t drive this tactic, it’s worth asking who benefits. The answer is the brokerage. A private or pre-marketed listing gives the listing brokerage a longer runway to also produce the buyer, collecting both sides of the commission before the property is exposed to the full marketplace. That’s not seller protection, it’s a business model, and buyers absorb the cost in reduced access and information. Interestingly, the metrics also show private sales tend to hurt the seller too, by leaving money on the table, which is why I see private listing networks as a perfect lose/lose. Neither the seller, nor the information-starved buyer, benefit. 

Consumer advocates are noticing, and now so is Washington 

This isn’t a fringe concern. A recent report from the Consumer Federation of America, produced with the National Urban League and drawing on a survey of housing counselors across dozens of states, flagged pocket and private listings as an emerging threat to fair and equal access to housing. Civil rights advocates have raised similar alarms for years. A marketplace that lets some buyers in early and keeps others out isn’t just inefficient, it can reproduce the very access barriers our industry has fought to dismantle. Congress asking hard questions is a good start, but they shouldn’t stop at market concentration, they should extend to every buyer who never got a fair look at a home because they weren’t plugged into the right network. 

Transparency isn’t a threat to sellers, it protects everyone 

At Windermere, we don’t believe that transparency and strong seller outcomes are in conflict. A well-informed marketplace, where buyers trust they’re seeing the full picture, produces more competitive offers and more durable transactions for sellers and buyers alike. And skilled real estate professionals should not need to rely on the artificial suppression of public inventory and market data to do their jobs. That’s why we’ve taken concrete steps to make sure our own listings clearly disclose their marketing history, so buyers aren’t left guessing what’s been withheld.  

As lawmakers dig into the Compass-MRED partnership, I hope they ask the question our industry keeps avoiding, not just whether this arrangement makes one brokerage too powerful, but whether it leaves buyers with less information, less access, and less leverage than they deserve.  

The industry can keep telling a story where sellers are the only ones at risk. Or it can look honestly, finally, at who’s actually being locked out of the market right now. First-time buyers aren’t disappearing because the market is transparent. They’re disappearing because, in too many ways, it isn’t.