Industry leaders: Zillow Preview isn't the answer — it's acceleration

When Zillow announced its Preview program — partnering with Keller Williams, RE/MAX, HomeServices of America, United Real Estate and Side to enable coming-soon listings before MLS entry — the industry exhaled. A responsible version of pre-marketing, the thinking went. Open to all buyers. MLS-compliant. Not a private club.

I understand the relief. But Zillow Preview is not a solution to the private listings problem. It is a more palatable on-ramp to the same destination.

2 models, 1 direction

Two weeks earlier, Compass and Redfin unveiled their own partnership — Compass listings on Redfin before the MLS, stripped of days-on-market data, built around one brokerage’s ecosystem. The industry criticized it as a two-tiered system where the right brokerage gets first access, and everyone else gets what’s left.

Zillow Preview is structurally different: listings visible to all buyers, MLS-compliant, listing agents retain branding. Real distinctions. But here is what both models share: The MLS is no longer the starting point.

When the MLS becomes the second stop instead of the first, it does not matter how open or closed the first stop is. The damage is the same.

The normalization problem

Zillow Preview sends two messages: First, it validates Compass’s argument, which Zillow has been fighting against all this time. Second, buyers now will now be told that Zillow has inventory the MLS does not; agents learn that Preview generates priority placement — rewards the MLS does not offer.

Over time, sellers ask for the pre-market phase, agents default to it and the MLS quietly becomes where listings go after the real action.

This is not hypothetical. According to the nation’s largest brokerage’s own Q4 2024 SEC earnings filing, 55 percent of new listings began as private or coming soon in February 2025 — never reaching the MLS on Day 1. Zillow Preview accelerates that normalization.

The distinction that matters

I have always been pro-private listings. If a homeowner wants privacy or prefers working exclusively with their listing agent, that is their right. I support it.

What I oppose is this: 55 percent of new listings starting private is not seller choice. No informed seller who understood that MLS exposure produces more competition and higher offers would choose to limit their buyer pool in such numbers.

Zillow’s own research found that sellers who list privately sell for 1.5 percent less nationwide — and in states like California and New York, that gap widens to 3.7 percent, or more than $30,000 per home. Bright MLS data confirms they take longer to sell with no price advantage.

What we are seeing is a rollout designed to benefit brokerages — double-sided commissions, an agent recruiting tool and proprietary inventory — dressed as consumer empowerment. That is my objection. Not to private listings. To invoking seller choice as a shield while withholding the one fact most sellers need to hear: choosing private likely means choosing a lower sales price.

A seller who knows that and still wants privacy? I will fight for their right. A seller handed a form and never told “You may sell for less” — that seller was given a script, not a choice.

Zillow Preview is better than the Compass-Redfin model — more open, more compliant, more transparent. But better is not the same as good for the market long-term.

What we should be doing instead

This problem is solvable — without legislation, without banning private listings. Here is my three-part framework that preserves the MLS and serves buyers and sellers fairly.

First: Every portal — Zillow, Redfin, Realtor.com, all of them — should remove days on market and price adjustment history from all listing displays. This is the single most powerful thing the industry could do right now, and it does not require a single law to be passed.

The fear of accumulating days on market and the stigma of a visible price drop are the two arguments listing agents use most often to steer sellers toward a private phase. Remove those data points from public view, and you torpedo the primary justification for going private.

A seller who is no longer afraid of a price drop being seen on Zillow has far less reason to hide their listing in a brokerage silo. This change alone would redirect a significant portion of that 55 percent back to the open market.

Second: MLSs should formally allow private listings — but require that every listing, including private ones, be entered into the MLS and tagged accordingly.

Here is what that looks like in practice: A seller chooses a private listing. Their agent enters it into the MLS with a private designation. The listing is visible to all MLS participants — every broker, every agent — but tagged as private, meaning showings are managed exclusively through the listing agent.

If a cooperating agent from another firm has a buyer who is a strong fit for that property, they can contact the listing agent and request a co-broke arrangement for that specific showing, with that specific buyer. No obligation. No blanket cooperation required.

But the listing agent — honoring their fiduciary duty to get their seller the highest possible price — will almost certainly say yes. Because turning away a qualified buyer is not serving the seller. It is serving the brokerage.

Under this model, buyers and their agents still have visibility into the full universe of available inventory. No listing disappears into a private portal that only one brokerage’s clients can see. The private tag is a showing preference, not an inventory wall.

Third: Portals should route all leads on a listing directly to the listing agent — not to a competing agent, not into a portal’s referral network, not to whoever paid the most for placement. The listing agent won that business. They earned the right to be the first point of contact for every buyer who expresses interest in their seller’s property.

This is not a radical idea. It is how the industry is supposed to work. Enforcing it universally removes one of the hidden economic incentives that makes private brokerage networks attractive in the first place.

These three changes make the open market more attractive than the closed one. No brokerage gains an inventory advantage over smaller competitors. No buyer is locked out. The MLS survives — not as a mandate, but as the obvious best option for everyone at the table.

I have spent more than three decades speaking to real estate professionals around the world. The MLS is not just a database — it is the most sophisticated, consumer-protective and competitively fair listing system ever built, the envy of every real estate market I have visited in the world.

In other countries, agents fight over listing data like a private asset, and buyers have no reliable way to know what is for sale. I come home from those trips grateful for what we built here.

What is at stake is whether we dismantle that system piece by piece — dressed up in the language of choice and innovation — until we do not notice what we have lost. I am not willing to let that happen without saying something. And I hope, after reading this, you are not either.