New data: Private listings offer ‘no benefits to sellers’ 

As the residential real estate industry continues to debate the merits of private listings — and seeks to understand who would be most impacted by the practice — a new report from Bright MLS offered insight into several themes often highlighted by brokerages that view office exclusives as a unique competitive opportunity. 

The report's conclusion? Bright "found no benefits to sellers whose brokers used office exclusive listings."

The number of office exclusives is small, but growing: The report, compiled by Chief Economist Lisa Sturtevant, included data on 100,000 listings that sold between Sept. 2024 and Feb. 2025 within Bright MLS's Mid-Atlantic territory. Historically, private exclusives — or pocket listings — were a relatively small percentage of overall listings, the report found. But that number is growing. 

Three to four years ago, private listings accounted for about 2% of the properties in the Bright MLS region. That share increased to nearly 8% in February. Just three member brokerages held 10% or more of their inventory as private exclusives in the last six months, the report noted — and two of the three "also had a relatively significant overall volume of listings" during that time.

Most office exclusives eventually land on the MLS: While some brokerages pitch certain benefits of listing off the MLS — such as avoiding "negative insights" like price reductions and days on market — the report said most properties that start as private listings end up being marketed publicly anyway. 

According to Sturtevant's findings, nearly 9 in 10 homes that started as private listings were later marketed on the MLS — only 13% opened and closed as office exclusives.

Private exclusives also typically took longer to sell. "Overall, the median time to contract for standard listings that closed over the past six months was 20 days," Sturtevant wrote. "By comparison, the median days to contract for listings that started as an office exclusive was 37 days — nearly three weeks longer."

Private exclusives likely offer no price advantage: One of the most fiercely debated private inventory topics is the financial benefit — or lack thereof — for sellers. Many industry leaders, including executives and researchers at Zillow, have shared data suggesting sellers get the highest price when their home is listed on the MLS and widely marketed to the public. 

Compass, on the other hand, published preliminary data in February suggesting that sellers can actually make more money and receive offers faster when their homes are pre-marketed. The brokerage company — one of the biggest proponents of private listings — has not yet released the full report.

And Bright's take on the benefits of pre-marketing? After adjusting for location and other property features to get an apples-to-apples comparison, Sturtevant wrote that whether or not a home was pre-marketed ultimately had "no impact on the close price" and was "an insignificant predictor of the home's selling price."

Based on her analysis of sales data, Strutevant concluded that "office exclusives take longer to sell and offer no price advantages over immediately promoting a home through the MLS. Meanwhile, the marketplace data strongly suggests that an increase of office exclusive listings has the potential to harm prospective buyers and sellers by limiting access to information and creating a fragmented inventory system."