The person bringing the money to the transaction keeps getting left out of the off-MLS conversation. That should bother everyone.
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I’ve spent my career on both sides of the glass — as CEO of Zoocasa, building the portal that shows people homes, and now as CTO of eXp Realty, leading the brokerage that represents the people buying and selling them. I’ve watched the current debate over off-MLS marketing with a particular interest. And a growing concern.
Not all ‘pre-marketing’ is problematic
Here’s what I’ll concede up front: Much of what gets labeled “pre-marketing” is completely legitimate:
- A coming-soon campaign that builds awareness
- Time to make repairs before the photos are taken
- Staging a proper launch instead of fumbling a listing live
- An office conversation about which buyers are looking for what’s about to come to market
All of these are above board and in the interest of homeowners. Good agents have always prepared a property and timed its debut, and they should. Sellers have every right to present their home in its best light.
If the question were simply whether sellers should be able to market thoughtfully, there would be no debate. We’d all say yes.
But that isn’t the question anymore. Somewhere along the way, the conversation quietly shifted from “How do we market homes well?” to “Should private marketplaces that the rest of the market, and the buying public, cannot easily access exist?” Those are very different questions.
The arguments filling the trade press lately, however well-constructed, are mostly in service of the second one while sounding like the first.
Which brings me back to the buyer
The buyer is the person who brings the money to the transaction. Every dollar that closes a deal comes from their side of the table. You would think that in a debate about how homes get marketed, the buyer’s ability to make an informed decision would be near the center of the discussion. Instead, it has been almost entirely absent.
Consider what a buyer actually needs to make a sound offer on the largest purchase of their life.
- Has this home been listed before? When? At what prices?
- Was it withdrawn and relisted to reset the clock?
- How long has it really been available?
These aren’t trivia. They are the facts and data that tell a buyer whether a price is reasonable, where they have room to negotiate and whether a “new” listing is actually new. That information is material to every offer.
Here is the part of the current debate that should give everyone pause. In one of the recent op-eds defending off-portal marketing, the objection to buyers seeing days on market and price history was stated plainly: It “arms them against the seller.”
Read that again.
The discomfort isn’t really with any one portal’s business model. It’s with buyers having information at all.
I understand the frustration with portals. I’ve built one and competed for traffic and attention. They are for-profit companies, not neutral referees, and the critique that they monetize listings and route leads is a fair one worth having.
However, you cannot answer “this portal isn’t perfectly transparent” with “so let’s build a marketplace that’s transparent to almost no one.” The fix for imperfect openness is not enclosure.
That’s my real concern with private, brokerage-owned listing inventory marketed, and sometimes transacted, inside a single company’s walls. When a home can be sold to a curated audience before the broader market ever sees it, several things happen at once.
Buyers outside that network never get a fair shot. Sellers may never learn what the full market would have paid. And the transaction, the price, the terms, the real story never enters the shared record that appraisers, lenders and the next buyer down the street all depend on.
Hidden deals don’t just disadvantage one buyer. They quietly degrade the data that the entire market uses to know what anything is worth.
How the market works
A marketplace works because both sides can see clearly enough to meet at a fair price. Tilt the information badly toward one side, and it stops being a marketplace. It becomes closer to a private club with a public-relations budget.
I’m not arguing that sellers should give anything away, or that agents should surrender the craft of marketing a home. I’m arguing for a simple principle that I think most people in this industry actually share when it’s stated directly: The person bringing the money deserves to see the same basic facts about a home that the people selling it already know.
So as the op-eds keep coming, I’d ask everyone reading them to notice who keeps getting left out of the conversation. The seller’s case is being made loudly and well. The buyer’s voice is barely being heard at all.
Someone should listen. So I will.
Carrie Lysenko is Chief Technology Officer of eXp Realty and former CEO of Zoocasa. You can connect with her on LinkedIn and Instagram.
