It’s a hot topic among real estate agents, but how widespread are the off-market sales?
We saw that in the last blog post that 155 NSDCC homes that have gone pending this year have already closed escrow. But let’s back it up to get a bigger sample and look at all of the 257 NSDCC sales in 2025 – including those that went pending last year.
Of the 257 sales, only 21 of them were sold off market, or 8% of the total number of sales.
Of the 21, only EIGHT were Compass listings. We’re not the only one!
Here is the crazy stat: Of the 21 off-market sales, TEN were sold to an outside brokerage!
It’s going to be rare when an agent takes a listing and just happens to have a buyer for it. Some of these double-enders are going to be the reverse – when an agent has a buyer and solicits sellers in the buyers’ desired area and gets lucky to find a deal. Most agents will input that sale as representing both parties even if they didn’t have a formal listing agreement with the seller – which is supposed to be required for MLS input (nobody checks them).
When representing a seller, I’m still not a fan of doing an off-market sale.
The only one we did was a year ago when the sellers agreed with me that this price may never happen again because it was based on another off-market pending sale of the same model (we closed first):
I wouldn’t want to be trying to sell for $2,175,000 in there today!
While there may be an occasional good reason to sell off-market, it’s not a big segment of the total sales. Reffkin said yesterday that 94% of Compass listings sell from open-market exposure via the MLS, and that will probably continue.
But it’s a sexy topic!
The NAR/MLS rules are the problem. In the near future, Compass and other brokerages will likely break away from NAR/MLS restrictions and use our website to expose our listings to the market – and/or we make a deal to share our listings with a national entity like homes.com.
For the purposes of this blog post, ‘off-market’ sales are determined by those that have 0 days on market. There were probably others that were marked as one or two days.
“hey Jim, how about yours being marked as 2 days?”
Out of curiosity, I left mine as active for two days to see if there were any other buyers out there. The other two that went pending before mine had created a very hot environment, and because all three agents were friends, my listing was mentioned as an alternative to a cash buyer who had gotten left out.
The two days that mine was left active? No calls, no inquiries.