Inside KW GO’s $1 billion private listing playbook 

As the residential real estate industry awaits a decision from the National Association of Realtors on the fate of its embattled Clear Cooperation Policy, a handful of brokerages and other players are already aggressively pushing their private listing playbook forward.

'There's not just one way of doing things'

One of those brokerage players is the KW GO franchise network, which has offices in Texas, New Mexico and Tennessee. GO — which boasts 4,000 agents and claims the title of being the largest Keller Williams franchisee — recently shared a milestone: Over the course of a year, the network amassed $1 billion in private listings, which translates to roughly 3,000 properties, KW GO Founder and Principal Smokey Garrett told Real Estate News.

The franchise group accelerated its push toward private listings in January 2024 with the launch of KW GO Private Collection. The primary motivators behind the move, Garrett said, were a desire to provide sellers with more choices and to solidify the brokerage's position as a local market leader. 

"What we know is that sellers and buyers are pushing for a different way of doing things and there's not just one way of doing things. There's multiple different options," Garrett said. 

An agent's role as an advisor is not to apply a one-size-fits-all model, he added, but to take a personalized approach where each client's specific needs are met. For some sellers, Garrett noted, that will mean going with Private Collection, while others may choose to list on the open market from the start or take advantage of GO's "buy before you sell" option. 

A response to consumer demand?

Garrett isn't alone in contending that private listings give consumers more options. Some of KW GO's competitors — most notably Compass — have been making the same argument as they add products and services to bolster off-market listings.

Compass' president of growth and communications, Rory Golod, recently told Real Estate News that privately marketing a home puts regular sellers on the same level as "homebuilders, celebrities and ultra-high-net worth clients" who often sell their homes off the MLS. "Taking a listing and just throwing it on the MLS and aggregators on the first day you launch it" isn't serving a client's best interest, he said.  

Tim Quirk, co-founder and chief strategy officer at Final Offer, said it's consumers who "are actually demanding" the ability to start marketing their home off-market before going public when he discussed Final Offer's acquisition of the Private Collection private listing network. Just a few weeks earlier, Luxury Presence announced the release of an off-the-shelf private listing product in response to "strong demand" from brokerages.

Differing views on consumer benefit

But critics of the industry's recent enthusiasm for private listings argue that marketing homes off the MLS doesn't help sellers, pointing to data that sellers who list privately are actually leaving real money on the table. Some opponents have also expressed concerns about disclosure and whether agents are properly educating their sellers about the implications of marketing their home off the MLS, suggesting that such behavior could potentially put agents at risk for litigation. 

Garrett said his agents present a separate disclosure agreement before putting a listing into its Private Collection, adding that "90% of those" properties will end up "going into the MLS" anyway. "Everything we're doing is both transparent and legal inside of the current rules," he explained. He believes KW GO's ability to privately market a home "is a value proposition for our agents" and also creates value for clients. 

A growth opportunity for big brokerages

Still, some see the push toward private listings not as a consumer benefit, but as an attempt by brokerages to "double end" deals or "double dip" on commissions to boost their own bottom line.

Without the guardrails of Clear Cooperation, a panel of industry leaders warned, brokerages would be incentivized to hoard their own listings — a situation that would reward larger brokerages at the expense of smaller, independent firms, they argued. Compass CEO Robert Reffkin recently dismissed the idea that his firm is trying to prevent outside agents from accessing its private listings, however, saying "we co-broke with everyone."

As for KW GO, there's plenty of room to grow its share of private listings and have a further "impact in the marketplace," Garrett believes. "I would love to be [at] $2 billion in inventory next year. I would love to be more if that's what the market dictates."