Weekly Real Estate News
An ARELLO analysis found private home sales consistently underperformed standard MLS listings, while coming-soon listings generally commanded higher prices. The regulator group cautioned that the findings show association—not causation.
A new analysis of more than 10 million residential transactions is adding an independent set of numbers to one of real estate’s most contentious fights: whether sellers benefit when their homes are marketed privately rather than broadly exposed to the market.
The Association of Real Estate License Law Officials examined transactions from January 2024 through June 2026 and found that homes it classified as high-confidence private listings generally sold below the price expected for the property. Listings marketed first as “coming soon,” meanwhile, generally sold above the benchmark.
The differences were not enormous nationally, but they were remarkably consistent.
In 2025, private listings sold for a median 0.87% below the benchmark used in the study, equal to about $3,055 per transaction. Coming-soon listings sold 1.16% above the benchmark, or about $5,125 more. The same basic pattern appeared in 2024 and during the first half of 2026.
The findings arrive as Zillow, Compass, multiple listing services and brokerages are battling over how homes should be marketed before they reach the traditional open market. The arguments have moved well beyond industry policy debates, spilling into litigation and competing research purporting to show what different marketing strategies mean for sellers.
That makes an important distinction in ARELLO’s work easy to miss: the organization did not take a position for or against private listing networks.
Instead, its Law and Regulation Committee said the research was intended to provide regulators and other industry stakeholders with evidence about different listing practices and identify questions that may warrant further consideration.
Lower-priced homes showed a bigger gap
The national averages mask substantially larger differences in some segments of the market.
Among homes in the lower price tier—defined in the analysis as the fifth through 35th percentiles—private listings sold 2.13% below standard MLS listings. That translated to a median difference of $5,055.
The difference between those private sales and coming-soon listings was even wider: $9,212.
At the luxury end of the market, the percentage penalty associated with private listings was smaller. Homes in the 95th through 100th percentiles classified as private listings sold roughly 0.27% below standard listings, although the higher property values still produced a median dollar difference of about $3,473.
Geography mattered as well. Urban private listings showed the largest negative gap among the market types examined, selling about 1.54% below standard MLS listings, or approximately $6,400 less. Coming-soon properties in urban markets sold about 1.77% above the standard-listing benchmark, a median difference of approximately $7,825.
Rural markets had narrower differences. Private listings there sold about 0.81% below standard listings, while coming-soon listings carried a roughly 1.3% premium.
The fair housing findings require care
Some of the study’s most consequential numbers involve neighborhood demographics.
Private listings in majority-white neighborhoods sold a median 0.88% below standard listings. The difference increased to 2.21% across majority non-white neighborhoods and reached 3.33% in majority-Hispanic neighborhoods.
Those figures will inevitably become part of the industry’s broader fair housing debate over private inventory, but ARELLO was careful about what the data can—and cannot—establish.
The organization said private listing networks are not inherently discriminatory and warned that differences observed in the data do not establish either causation or unlawful discrimination. Instead, ARELLO said the associations warrant additional examination of potential marketing, access and fair housing implications.
That qualification matters. A statistical relationship between a marketing method and sale price does not by itself establish that the marketing method caused the difference. Property characteristics, seller motivations, privacy considerations and other factors may also influence both how a home is marketed and its ultimate sale price.
How ARELLO identified a private listing
Private transactions are particularly difficult to study because, by definition, they do not produce the same public marketing trail as conventional listings.
ARELLO therefore used what it called “High-Confidence Private Listings,” or HCPLs, rather than claiming it had identified every privately marketed property.
The analysis drew from Zillow residential transaction records, MLS listing-volume information and private-listing rate data from MLSs meeting transaction-volume and economic-quality criteria. Price performance was measured by comparing actual sale prices with expected prices derived from Zillow’s Zestimate or automated valuation model.
That methodology makes the findings useful, but it also places limits on how they should be interpreted. ARELLO’s private-listing count is deliberately conservative. The organization excluded transactions when it could not classify them with sufficient confidence, meaning its estimates should not be treated as a census of all private transactions.
The study found approximately 88,300 high-confidence private transactions in 2024 and 86,805 in 2025, a decline of about 2%. The number fell another 3% when the first half of 2026 was compared with the same period a year earlier.
Coming-soon listings moved the other way, rising 4% from 2024 to 2025 and another 13% during the first half of 2026 compared with the first half of 2025.
Zillow and Compass have produced sharply different results
The study lands in an industry debate already saturated with research from companies that have direct business interests in the outcome.
On Oct. 2, Zillow highlighted research supporting its position on broad listing exposure. Zillow supplied transaction data requested by ARELLO but says it had no role in ARELLO’s analysis or conclusions.
Zillow has adopted listing-access standards requiring publicly marketed properties to become broadly available within one business day if they are to appear on its platform. Its own previous research has also associated private listings with lower seller proceeds.
Compass has produced research pointing in the opposite direction. In July, the brokerage reported that sellers using its phased-marketing strategy—beginning as a Compass Private Exclusive or Coming Soon listing—sold for 4.6% more than comparable Compass listings that went directly to the MLS and public portals.
That analysis covered 70,809 closed Compass residential transactions between April 1, 2025, and March 31, 2026. Compass said its model controlled for confounding factors, but the analysis included only transactions that ultimately closed and combined private exclusives and coming-soon listings into the pre-marketed group for the headline comparison.
That last distinction is especially important now. ARELLO’s analysis separates private listings from coming-soon listings—and finds markedly different results between them. A marketing strategy that gives a property a defined pre-market period before broad MLS exposure is not necessarily producing the same result as a home marketed within a restricted private network.
The studies also use different populations, definitions, time periods and statistical methods, so their headline percentages should not be treated as direct apples-to-apples comparisons.
The fight is becoming a regulatory question
Private listings are no longer merely an argument about brokerage marketing strategy.
State regulators, MLS organizations and policymakers are increasingly being asked to determine what sellers must be told before choosing restricted marketing, whether limited exposure raises fiduciary or disclosure concerns, and how private networks intersect with fair housing obligations.
ARELLO noted that the absence of a state law specifically addressing private listing networks does not mean existing disclosure or fiduciary requirements disappear. It also distinguished state regulatory obligations from the National Association of Realtors’ Code of Ethics and MLS policies.
For brokers and agents, the new research doesn’t settle the private-listing debate. It does make the debate harder to reduce to competing corporate talking points.
ARELLO’s data suggests that privately marketed homes and coming-soon listings should not automatically be lumped together as equivalent forms of pre-marketing. Across the period studied, their sale-price patterns moved in opposite directions.
For sellers deciding how broadly—and when—to expose a property to the market, that distinction may prove more important than the industry’s increasingly polarized labels.
