Over the summer, I was talking with some of our top agents in New York City about August — traditionally one of the quietest stretches of the real estate calendar.
Anyone who knows this market knows the rhythm. Buyers travel, sellers travel, and activity slows in August. But the clock on a listing doesn’t. Days on market keep adding up, and those numbers can influence perception long after summer ends. That sparked a bigger conversation about timing and, more importantly, choice.
For some sellers, staying fully marketed through August is the right move. For others, it’s smart to pull back and relaunch after Labor Day, when the fall market comes back to life. Neither approach is inherently better, and yet, our industry is still being told that there is only one acceptable way to bring a home to market: put it everywhere, immediately, and keep it there.
Buying and selling is personal
A home is not just a piece of inventory; it’s a personal expression of who people are and how they live. For most people, buying or selling one is among the most personal and consequential financial decisions they will ever make.
At Corcoran, we have always believed this is a fundamentally human business. Technology, data and distribution matter enormously, but they should serve people and their real lives, not dictate them.
We should be clear-eyed about why some of the strongest opposition to marketing listings off of the portals comes from consumer portals themselves. Many, like Zillow and its New York City portal StreetEasy, require listings to appear on their platforms within 24 hours of going live elsewhere or risk exclusion from their sites.
That is not a transparency standard meant to help consumers; it is a business model designed to ensure they capture listings, traffic and seller leads.
Buyers are equally important to the equation — a healthy market requires meaningful access to inventory and strong collaboration among agents. But when this debate is framed as though a property is either visible to everyone or hidden from everyone, don’t fall for it.
The companies that benefit from monetizing agents’ listings are the ones that make the argument that not using those websites is detrimental to the process. That should be a dead giveaway.
3 important facts for the private listings debate
Let’s ground this debate in a few important facts:
- A home doesn’t “disappear from the market” when a seller chooses not to advertise on every consumer website. In New York City, those listings can be made available to any agent in many ways, including through REBNY’s Participant Only Network, where any member agent can view them and share them with their qualified buyers.
- REBNY’s IDX feed (the Internet Data Exchange) lets brokerages share listing data with one another and display each other’s listings on their own websites. That means that if the listing is on one brokerage’s website in New York City, it is shared with other brokerage sites. What changes is whether that listing is automatically distributed to consumer portals whose business models depend on aggregating listing data and profiting off of buyer and seller leads.
- The reason that some listings don’t appear on the portal sites is that those portals have chosen to ban them. This is not a legal requirement or a mandate from REBNY; most of these listings would have eventually been published on those portals when the time was right for the seller.
There’s a bit of irony in hearing collaboration used as an argument against giving sellers more flexibility, because New York City real estate didn’t always operate with the level of cooperation we take for granted today.
In the 1980s, many firms were reluctant to share their listings with competitors at all. Corcoran took a very different position. We were early advocates for co-broking because we believed a more open and collaborative marketplace ultimately served consumers better.
We even built a campaign around that idea: the market worked better when more people were invited in, not shut out. That belief hasn’t changed. What has changed is the technology surrounding the transaction and the number of businesses that now sit between a listing and a consumer.
Seller choice and buyer access are not opposing ideas. They can, and should, coexist. The question shouldn’t be whether every property appears everywhere at every moment. It should be whether buyers and sellers have the access, information, professional guidance and flexibility they need to make the right decision for them. I believe they should.
Pamela Liebman is President and Chief Executive Officer of The Corcoran Group.
