Will Final Offer help accelerate shift to private listings? 

Final Offer, a home search and negotiation platform, is aiming to establish itself as a top player in the private listings technology space. 

This week, the company announced its acquisition of Private Collection, a plug-and-play solution that enables brokerages to create and share off-MLS and coming soon listings with their clients and brokerage colleagues — and bolsters Final Offers' position in the PLN market. The deal comes as the industry-wide debate around the Clear Cooperation Policy and merits of private listing networks has hit a fever pitch. 

Private Collection facilitated $1 billion in off-market transactions in 2024 and currently has another $1 billion worth of inventory — or nearly 2,000 individual listings — on the site, according to Tim Quirk, Final Offer co-founder and chief strategy officer. 

That inventory will be integrated into Final Offer's newly launched Exclusive Listings portal, Quirk told Real Estate News, but the company plans to maintain the existing site and functionality for a "reasonable amount of time" before doing so. 

Addressing a 'wildly inefficient' listing process

Quirk said the acquisition and broader push into private listings is meant to "solve an extreme pain point in the market today" and help small and independent brokerages with what he described as a "wildly inefficient" and unorganized process. 

"The majority of brokerages do not have technology to provide to their agents to be able to share [private listings]," he said. "So the way that this happens today is done through mass emailing, private Facebook groups or private WhatsApp groups — there's no way to be able to really search or collaborate."

As far as Clear Cooperation is concerned, Quirk emphasized that everything is above board, because when a private listing is created in Private Collection, it only lives there. Agents within a brokerage can register to view and share off-MLS and coming soon listings or set up searches for their buyer clients. Additionally, Quirk explained, if a seller gets a lot of interest in their property, they can still decide to take it to the open market — and Final Offer — to track the formal negotiation process. 

A window into pre-market data 'that has never been seen'

There could also be untapped value in the offer data itself, said Derek Taylor, T3 Sixty vice president of consulting.

"Managing the offer process in a private network creates a unique pre-market first-party data set that has never been seen," Taylor said.

"The seller takes the internal offer or leverages the data from real-time buyers to adjust and go to the open market. It's a dynamic we have never seen before." (Note: Taylor works with Final Offer in his consulting role at T3 Sixty. Real Estate News is an editorially independent division of T3 Sixty.)

Consumers 'demanding' more listing options

Expanding the use of private listings, some advocates say, helps agents meet their clients' needs and gives sellers more control over their listings. Compass, for one, has integrated private listings into its "3-phase marketing strategy," arguing that putting a listing directly onto the MLS is "not serving your clients' best interests." And in January, Luxury Presence introduced its own off-the-shelf PLN product in response to "strong demand for tools that empower brokerages to work with private listings more effectively."

Quirk said Final Offer sees an opportunity to provide the industry with these types of services and products, but added that it's consumers who "are actually demanding" the ability to start marketing their home off-market before going public. 

And as far as Clear Cooperation is concerned?

"We don't have a horse in that race," Quirk said. "We're just providing technology that our brokerage clients and our agent clients are looking to use."