Robert Reffkin was in San Diego yesterday to talk Compass. He will be visting all the Compass regional offices to assure agents that we are on the right track.
We’re on the right track.
Private Exclusives are permitted in the Clear Cooperation Policy. Nobody disputes it, including Zillow who has already said that they won’t be blocking our Private Exclusives from their website.
Compass plays by the rules.
We hear a lot of noise from the ivory towers about Compass withholding properties in order to sell them off-market, but you saw in my recent blog post that we’re doing about the same number as we’ve always done (less than 1% of total sales) and other brokerages are doing about their same numbers too.
You won’t find any agents on the street who want to ban off-market sales. They are legal, within the rules, and we love them.
I have a new rule to fix it.
All off-market sales are forbidden to be on the MLS.
I’ve mentioned how it’s a badge of honor for agents to input their off-market sales after closing. They see other agents do it – many of them prominent – and their ego wants to join the party.
If the MLS police just stopped allowing off-market sales to be inputted, then the problem could solve itself. Agents who went a year or two without seeing off-market sales on the MLS would probably forget all about them.
Oh, you want to input for appraisal purposes? Appraisers have enough comps – and they will find yours on the tax rolls if they need it that badly. Oh, you want it on your sales count? Nobody cares about your sales count except you, and because we’re suspicious of anything off-market, sorry. No sale on the record for you.
It would help to eliminate the frivolous or shady off-market sales, which no one talks about or wants to change. People just use the topic to beat up on Compass because their knee-jerk reaction is that we’re up to something, when we’re not.
A month ago, Robert put this on his Insta account:
Corcoran, Douglas Elliman, Redfin, and eXp have now said publicly that they do exclusive listings. It’s rumored that every brokerage has them, and they should – they are legal and permitted.
If you don’t like it, then change the rule that permits them.
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Other tidbits from the meeting:
Of the real estate licensees nationally, 94% haven’t closed a sale this year.
Should Compass put up a big fight, or just go on our merry way? Robert is promoting our 3-Phase Marketing Plan that sounds really good to some home sellers. It’s within the existing rules, so let’s keep our head down and serve our clients the best we can. There’s nothing to fight about, really.
Lennar sold 800,000 homes last year, and HALF of them were off-market.
Several Compass agents agreed that they don’t use the MLS at all – everything they need is on our platform.
How about the people who aren’t used to being around other people these days? Today, there are people who get by without having a meaningful conversation with another human being – maybe they talk with their dogs and cats, but not much with other humans beyond the ‘how ya doing’ occasionally. We are cocooning as a society, and selling your home with minimal human interaction should be an option that many may prefer.
The market is softer and sellers might have a better chance to sell for their price off-market. Buyers are known for paying more for an exclusive offering, so it is a viable option for procuring a top-dollar sale. Sellers should at least have that choice available to them.
It’s a new day. Many, and probably most, listings aren’t getting any showings, let alone offers. The way it’s going, selling off-market will sound better and better.
From a buyers perspective this means you need to be working with agents from multiple brokerages and somehow have access to the MLS to review all homes available to buy.
Will agents require buyers to sign exclusives with them just to view what their brokerage has for sale? If this is the case how do buyers view what multiple brokerages have for sale?
What I can see is that this will make it hard for non insiders to buy investment properties.
Oh Jim – if off-market sales are legal, why would you forbid them from the MLS?
It’s a controversial subject. Giving them attention via the MLS glamorizes the practice, and makes more agents want to do them.
If realtors were experts on pricing, then they would know when an off-market sale was advantageous for the seller.
Like the one I did last year where my sellers and I agreed that the price offered before we went on the open market was so rich that we’d be crazy to pass it up. And my follow-up post a year later proved it to be true.
But most realtors aren’t experts on price, so when they do an off-market sale it can mean their sellers are leaving money on the table.
In a perfect world, those are the sales we’d want to prevent.
But it’s not a perfect world, so sellers should have the option to screw up. If they hire the wrong agent who talks them into a low sale, then that’s their choice.
It just happened in South Oceanside. Sellers hired a brand new agent and they sold their home for $400,000 under market value.
Whether it’s on the open market or not, sellers should have that right.
Will agents require buyers to sign exclusives with them just to view what their brokerage has for sale? If this is the case how do buyers view what multiple brokerages have for sale?
Yes, the required buyer-broker agreement screws this up.
It also came up in the meeting yesterday. The required buyer-broker agreement causes the buyer-agent and their client to be at odds, which never happened before. The commission gets in the way when it never did before.
Currently, buyers need to sign up with the buyer-agent they think gives them the best chance to buy the right house for the right price. Even though the off-market sales don’t make up a significant percentage of the total sales, they are so sexy that every buyer wants one.
Waiting for the day when “Not a member of the NAR” is a badge of honor.
Me too.
None of the realtors in NYC are a member of the NAR. They don’t have an MLS either.
Yet, they get along fine and do plenty of business.
They have an agent association because agents want to cooperate with one another. They made a deal with Zillow to provide a website and all agents use it to input their listings called StreetEasy.
It is the national solution, and it’s coming one of these days.
The CAR has $136,000,000 in the bank, and NAR has $363,000,000. Split it up between the agents and we’ll handle selling homes the way we want.
“Our standards say it’s okay to share office exclusives among agents within the same brokerage, or to have delayed marketing or coming soon listings that are entered into the MLS and available to all MLS participants,” Zillow Group’s listing standard reads. “And, of course, it’s okay to maintain a seller’s privacy when necessary by keeping a listing off the internet entirely. But when it’s time to market to buyers, that means all buyers.”