This week Zillow Executive Errol Samuelson announced that homes not listed on the MLS within 24 hours of public marketing—won’t be published on Zillow “for the life of the listing.” Simply put, if your listing is not on Zillow within 24 hours, Zillow will retaliate against you and your homeowner by turning off your ability to list on Zillow. It is an incredible move of audacity and a pure power play of epic proportion.
Delayed IDX syndication is allowed under NAR rules. But Zillow is asserting that they, not NAR, not your brokerage, not you the listing agent—and not even the homeowner whose house it is and is paying the commission—should decide how a listing is marketed. This isn’t about protecting consumers. It’s about protecting Zillow’s ability to profit from your listings by selling your leads to competing agents.
Whether or not you support the Clear Cooperation Policy, it is never acceptable for a real estate portal to threaten agents this way. Real estate portals must remain neutral. Whether you’re a buyer’s agent, a listing agent, or both, we support all agents and believe you deserve better. And we believe every real estate professional deserves to be treated with fairness and respect—never bullied by a tech platform looking to control an industry.
Zillow’s lead-diversion model is anti-consumer and anti-agent. Just last week, I listened to focus groups with home sellers who believed that when a buyer clicks the “Contact Agent” button on their listings in Zillow, they’re contacting their listing agent. When they found out that wasn’t true—and that their home was being used as bait to funnel buyers to competing agents—they were outraged. One seller exclaimed, “Holy hell!” Another said, “What the…?”
Zillow’s lead diversion model hijacks your hard-earned listings to generate commission splits for them and grow their brand at your expense. As the listing agent you deserve clear, undisputed credit for your listings. When a buyer believes they are contacting the listing agent, that’s exactly who they should reach.
Homes.com is agent-friendly. We always show the listing agent—and only the listing agent—on listings. We follow the principle of Your Listing, Your Lead. That means we only display your name, your photo, your brokerage, and connect potential buyers only to you. We never take a commission split or sell leads to competing agents. Instead, we earn revenue by promoting your listing to thousands of additional buyers across the internet.
Yesterday, reader Jim repeated the common belief about the Compass 3-Phase Marketing Plan:
Compass isn’t going this route to protect sellers – they are trying to increase their dual agency transactions which will lead to more profits for a publicly traded company. In addition to hoarding inventory which numerous studies say will not increase the selling price for a seller, Compass is trying to force agents to join their brokerage or be left out of a portion of the inventory.
I’ll agree that the Compass messaging hasn’t been great.
It hasn’t acknowledged that selling homes before they go on the open market is a VERY sensitive topic. Observers are quick to assume that the money-grubbing agents only care about padding their wallets, and not what is best for consumers. It does appear that way, though a case can be made that in a soft market it might be better for the sellers to not risk a listing launch failure.
When the first phase of our 3-Phase Marketing Plan is called Private Exclusives and we publicly declare that’s where we ‘test pricing’ among other Compass agents only, it’s natural for outsiders to assume we’re making deals there.
But nobody within Compass is pushing it – in fact, there is no organized effort to arrange off-market sales. It’s the category where a new listing starts out on our platform, and most have no photos, descriptions, or showing instructions.
How is it working?
The graph above shows the monthly sales between January 1, 2024 and March 31, 2025.
There were 155 of the 2,234 sales (7%) that showed zero days on market, which is the universal sign of an off-market sale. There is a MLS rule that states all sales must be inputted into the MLS at some point, and the glee with which the listing agents display their off-market escapades is remarkable. I doubt I’m missing any.
Of the 155 off-market sales:
Compass agents had 37, or 24%
Three-quarters of all off-market sales are done by non-Compass agents!
All the complaining comes from industry veterans and the ivory-tower types. You won’t hear ANY agents on the street complain about round-tripping their listings off-market – they are proud of them!
The Compass NSDCC market share is ~30%, so the 24% sounds right.
Of the 37 Compass off-market sales:
Only 25 were sold to Compass buyers
So there it is – the off-market sales within the Compass brokerage amount to about 1% of the total sales. It’s hard to believe that another 12 were sold to outside agents, which shows that selling to other Compass agents isn’t a priority. Completing a sexy off-market sale with any agent is the goal!
Has Reffkin’s relentless battle against the CCP caused any changes?
It started soon after the NAR Settlement began on August 17th, so let’s compare (I stretched out the time period to Apr 15th to get about the same number of sales in each sample):
There hasn’t been any discernible change in the number of off-market sales between Compass agents.
This hot topic provides our competitors an opportunity to dogpile on Compass and Robert Reffkin, which is fine. We are taking a very public stance about the CCP.
You don’t hear ANYONE talking about eliminating off-market sales. NOBODY!
The Clear Cooperation Policy allows for off-market sales within a brokerage, and EVERY company is doing them.
If you ever hear industry leaders demanding a change regarding off-market sales – and not just beating the crap out of Compass – then you know their intentions are pure.
If living in the rural countryside is acceptable but being closer to San Diego is a must – maybe Anza might work for you! It’s only 65 miles from Carlsbad and a place where homes are in the $400,000 – $600,000 range!
The March new listings in the San Diego metro area look good with our 12.7% being one of the lowest national increases year-over-year (above).
But after a few months of this, the unsolds are starting to stack up:
Buyers don’t seem to mind, and for them it can only get better because a few sellers will run out of patience and lower their price. Wouldn’t it be a kick if most sellers dumped on price before the year is out!
Yesterday, Zillow released a statement….an excerpt:
Our standards are straightforward: If a listing is marketed directly to consumers without being listed on the MLS and made widely available where buyers search for homes, it will not be published on Zillow. These new standards will go into effect on Zillow and Trulia in May 2025.
Now we have NAR, the MLS, and Zillow putting restrictions on how sellers and their agents can market their homes. We’ll see what the DOJ says about it!
Our fearless leader, Robert Reffkin, says we’re not changing anything.
Zillow teamed up with eXp to make the announcement, and included a link to the eXp website, where you can find their eXp Exclusives. Either eXp has failed to alter/delete their Exclusives or Zillow is leaving room for the permitted intraoffice sales. Compass calls ours the Private Exclusives and I can set up a collection of them for a client to peruse.
If Zillow is fine with Private Exclusives – and how would they know about them – then I don’t mind being in full compliance. It eliminates the Coming Soon option which is a waste of time anyway.
If Zillow finagles a way to find out about our Private Exclusives and bans them too, then the war is on. Hopefully it will be a quick, one shot war and we can get on with the future of selling homes.
I think Compass would quit the NAR, MLS systems, and Zillow, and we make a deal with Homes.com to send them our listings exclusively. We will want to partner with a national search portal to appease our sellers and agents who want more coverage than what’s available with compass.com. Homes.com would love the boost!
Our Private Exclusives are registered with the MLS. If they rat us out and give our Private Exclusives to Zillow, then quitting all of them would be in order.
Let’s talk more about my two favorite topics this week:
Be Bold and Forge Ahead, in spite of the distractions.
Off-market sales.
If you are a potential home buyer or seller who is chuckling to yourself about my lame attempt to instill some hope into the marketplace, take a look at these.
All of these sales happened off-market, and none of them were listed by Compass agents. Reffkin is taking the heat these days, but off-market sales have been around for decades and there is a real chance that they will prevail as a popular choice for sellers.
Consider the pricing on these.
Because they aren’t on the open market, the buyers don’t have the usual test of the price: Are there other offers? It takes guts to pay all the money in this environment!
Almost $6,000,000 in Olivenhain? This isn’t Rancho Santa Fe, and it’s not even in the gated Wildflower Estates. Yet the buyer paid cash for the house (above) without a market test or obvious comps nearby. Gutsy!
The La Jolla home above was listed for $4,980,000 with one of the most successful La Jolla agents – but it didn’t sell. Being on the market between April and August of 2024 was a good test, so the only conclusion is that it wasn’t worth the $4,980,000 then. Yet a different agent takes the listing and finds a buyer who paid within 2% of the price that we know it wasn’t worth last year:
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The house below was a standard 1972 all-original tract house in Olde Carlsbad when it listed for $1,400,000 last April. Kudos to the listing agent who got it bid up to $1,625,000! The buyer and their agent completed a nice renovation and less than a year later they sell it off-market for almost $1,000,000 more!
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The sellers had been here for 40+ years and typically that means the house looked a lot like it did in 1977. The cash buyer was an LLC so it’s probably a flip and this is an area that can handle sales of $10,000,000 to $20,000,000 so I’m sure they know what they are doing. But they will need to add some square footage to get up to that level and the bigger views are across the street (the hill slopes up to right):
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The common denominators:
All sold for retail, or retail-plus.
Selling off-market was the first choice.
Agents marked them ‘sold off-market’ with pride. A badge of honor!
Off-market sales are happening in EVERY brokerage, and they are SEXY! They are pitched to buyers as a way to avoid a bidding war and finally get what they want – they just have to pay the seller’s price!
Compass isn’t trying too hard to sell listings off-market. Our push is more about avoiding future lawsuits and retaining the control of where and when the listing gets advertised.
But this is an ideal environment for off-market sales to flourish. There’s too much noise and distractions in the regular market and making quiet deals off-market sounds attractive to both sellers and buyers. It might be an easier place for buyers to have the guts!
And then there is this – the tail trying to wag the dog. What are they going to do? Send in James Bond to crack our security code and monitor our Private Exclusives? Or NAR or MLS rats us out? (our PE listings are registered with them)
It will be something like this that breaks down the whole system once and for all:
Let’s reflect on recent history, because it’s the only history that is relevant.
Flush with equity, how do home sellers react when faced with adverse uncertainty?
We have recent experience….Covid-19!
In the first couple of months after that drastic game-changing event began, the local real estate market froze up. Full paralysis.
I told Donna, “I don’t know if we’re going to sell another home this year!”
In 2008, the recent purchasers had little, if any, equity and felt deceived by their exotic financing choices. They hit the panic button in an effort to recoup any equity that was left!
There won’t be any panic today. Homeowners are more comfortable than they were in 2008 and 2020 – and they’re sitting on piles of equity. Some might give their house away, but not many. It’s too easy to wait until “it’s a better time to sell”!
Home sales will likely slow as sellers and agents wonder what to do.
But risk and reward ride the same elevator!
Be Bold. Take Action!
We are used to the chaos, and are numb to it by now. There will be more chaos tomorrow, next week, and for the next 90 days. Might as well get on with those plans for your life!
We are in Dallas for two days only and we’ll be back home tonight. We came to the inaugural Summit Event here last year and it was jammed packed with great speakers and information, and this year has been similar.
The CEO of the National Association of Realtors, Nykia Wright, was on stage yesterday, and you could hear a pin drop. Donna and I were both impressed with her humble demeanor and steadfast commitment to turning around the NAR and making it relevant. She admitted many mistakes were made, and that it will be a long-term project.
She made reference to the good things about the NAR, like being the ‘first voice of real estate’ by publishing market data, and advocating for realtors with the politicians, which I appreciate.
Towards the end, she made a baseball reference that summed it up.
“You won’t see us hitting home runs. We just want to hit singles every day”.
Baseballers know that when you’re behind, you just want to get men on base.
It’s a metaphor for the struggles ahead and that gaining the confidence of realtors will be the primary challenge.
What she didn’t mention was the Clear Cooperation Policy, which is ok because other speakers aren’t touching it either. The latest change by NAR that turned it into a four-headed snake is probably the best solution available as we wait for the Department of Justice and/or more lawsuits to dismantle it altogether.
Meanwhile, private exclusives are getting hotter as other brokerages go public:
I was chatting it up with some of the old guard and the disdain for Compass and Robert Reffkin was palpable. I tried to make three points:
The last lawsuit forced Compass to pay $52 million. Let’s avoid a repeat.
More lawsuits and/or DOJ action over the CCP are inevitable.
Buyer-agents are going extinct, so how relevant is the MLS?
Yes, we want to expose our listings to the public. The new change to the CCP allows brokerages to input their listings on their own websites prior to MLS input, so there you go.
The revised CCP policy tries to make everyone happy. But it won’t be enough for the DOJ, and when they say quit, brokerages will be tempted to cut a deal to upload listings direct to Zillow.
But there are 500+ MLS companies in America.
It will be up to the NAR to provide guidance on finding a solution.
Nykia – that’s your challenge ahead.
Whatever you do, don’t hire the same bozo attorneys that were on the last case!
Cutting-edge technology was once a de rigueur residential amenity for any eight-figure listing, along with elaborate home gyms, zero-edge swimming pools and 12-car garages. It’s becoming nearly impossible to find a fridge, toaster or LED light that isn’t Wi-Fi-enabled or voice-activated. But the fully loaded tech compound is suddenly falling from favor as high-end homeowners frantically reset the password to escape the $100 billion home-automation industry.
“Just like the arts-and-crafts movement was a reaction against industrialization, we’re now experiencing a reaction against the smart home. People are looking for more manual, less complicated places to live,” says interior designer Jamie Bush, who has worked on some of Los Angeles’ most iconic architectural residences for studio heads, celebrities and tech titans.
While celebrities like Sofía Vergara were once the smart home’s most vocal advocates — the Modern Family actress gushed about how she controlled her home’s security, appliance and media systems from her phone — the honeymoon period with digital domiciles is now facing the reality of unintelligible interfaces, endless updates and forgotten passwords.
“They could not find a single light switch in the entire home,” says Beverly Hills-based interior designer Carrie Livingston about a sprawling penthouse she was hired to renovate. Her clients had inherited the previous owner’s Crestron automation system, which controlled all overhead, wall and table lighting in response to movement within rooms. “The wife complained that every time she got up at night, her husband would see her path illuminated as she made her way from bed to bathroom,” says Livingston, who has worked with clients including Ralph Lauren, Gwyneth Paltrow and Dasha Zhukova. “Other times, she’d enter a darkened room where the lights wouldn’t go on no matter how much she flapped her arms.” Result: Livingston took out the entire system and installed manual switches throughout, an intricate overhaul that cost more than $100,000.
Similarly, Bush recounts a recent renovation involving “a kitchen with a built-in dining table that rises and lowers from counter to dining height with hydraulics. But to do so, you need a passcode. Otherwise, the table will not move.”
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Jim & Donna Klinge helped us sell our home of 30 years in Ocean Hills. We were very happy with their service and would HIGHLY recommend them to anyone looking for an Honest, Knowledgeable, Skilled, Informed Efficient realty team. Both Jim & Donna were so helpful in different ways and complemented each others skills. Please refer to a more detailed review that we wrote on YELP. Thank You Both for all your help!!!
Jesse O'Hara
June 12, 2025
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A+ thank you
Lisa Tuomi
June 11, 2025
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Many years ago, we purchased a home in Carlsbad, using a realtor that was recommended to us - Jim Klinge. Fast forward to 2025, we recently had the privilege of selling 2 homes in Carlsbad, CA and didn't hesitate to reach out to Jim and Donna Klinge of Klinge Realty Group to guide us through the sales. The transactions were very different, each with its own unique situation, opportunities and challenges. From start to finish, Donna and Jim helped navigate the pre-sale preparation, the listing, showing of the house, buyer negotiations, the final close and all of the paperwork and decisions in between. What stands out with both transactions is the professionalism of Jim and Donna (and their team), wonderful communication (timely, relevant, concise), their deep understanding of market dynamics (setting realistic expectations), their access to top-notch contractors, and last, their ability to guide us across the finish line successfully. We wouldn't hesitate to use Jim and Donna in the future and highly recommend them for anyone looking to buy or sell a property in North San Diego County.
Jerry Meyer
March 28, 2025
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We sold a home with Jim and Donna and from beginning to end they were consummate professionals. Their initial walk through the property resulted in a list of items to be repaired or updated. They supplied a list of vendors and job quotes to do the repairs and updates. We originally wanted to sell ‘as is’ and just get it over with. They gave us a selling price for ‘as is’ and options for doing a few updates/repairs to doing it all with the selling price for each option. We agreed to do all they suggested and we sold for the exact price they predicted. For every dollar spent we got back more than $2 back in the selling price. And they got that price in a rising interest rate environment! Donna and Jim are extremely detailed and guide you through ever aspect of the sale. There were no surprises thanks to their guidance. We couldn’t be more pleased with their representation.
Thank you Donna and Jim,
Jerry and Mary
Heather Quejada
March 27, 2025
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We have known Jim & Donna Klinge for over a dozen years, having met them in Carlsbad where our children went to the same school. As long time North County residents, it was a no- brainer for us to have the Klinges be our eyes and ears for San Diego real estate in general and North County in particular. As my military career caused our family to move all over the country and overseas to Asia, Europe and the Pacific, we trusted Jim and Donna to help keep our house in Carlsbad rented with reliable and respectful tenants for over 10 years.
Naturally, when the time came to sell our beloved Carlsbad home to pursue a rural lifestyle in retirement out of California, we could think of no better team to represent us than Jim and Donna. They immediately went to work to update our house built in 2004 to current-day standards and trends — in 2 short months they transformed it into a literal modern-day masterpiece. We trusted their judgement implicitly and followed 100% of their recommended changes. When our house finally came on the market, there was a blizzard of serious interest, we had multiple offers by the third day and it sold in just 5 days after a frenzied bidding war for 20% above our asking price! The investment we made in upgrades recommended by Jim and Donna yielded a 4-fold return, in the process setting a new high water mark for a house sold in our community.
In our view, there are no better real estate professionals in all of San Diego than Jim and Donna Klinge. Buying or selling, you must run and beg Jim and Donna Klinge to represent you! Our family will never forget Jim, Donna, and their whole team at Compass — we are forever grateful to them.
Lou F
March 27, 2025
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WeI had the pleasure of working with Klinge Realty Group to sell our home in Carmel Valley, and I cannot recommend them highly enough!
Jim and Donna demonstrated exceptional professionalism, offering expert guidance on market conditions and pricing strategy, which resulted in a quick and successful sale.
Communication was prompt and we were well-informed throughout the entire process.
For anyone looking for a dedicated and knowledgeable real estate team, look no further!
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William Sams
March 25, 2025
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Donna and Jim Klinge of Klinge Realty Group have our highest possible recommendation. From Donna and Jim’s first visit to our house through closing their advice and counsel was candid and honest in all dealings. They kept us fully informed throughout the process. The house sold less than three days after listing with a two-week closing. My wife and I have sold several houses during our lives. This was by far the best experience. Klinge Reality is a premium service realtor. You can’t make a better choice for someone to sell your home fast and for top dollar.
Emily Hernandez
December 29, 2024
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Donna and Jim provided exceptional support and professionalism throughout the entire process. We couldn't have been happier with their efforts. They made our house shine, and thanks to their expertise, it sold above the listing price in the very first weekend! Truly a fantastic experience from start to finish.
Jesus Adrian Sahagun
November 11, 2024
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This year has been difficult on our family, mainly due to having to sell our home. Thankfully we knew God had a plan for us and working with the Klinge team was a key part of it. It was an obvious decision to work with them again after such an amazing experience when purchasing the same home we needed to sell. The challenge was, how will we do this in so little time with so much going on? Jim and Donna held our hand every step of the way. Whenever an unexpected issue arose they found and provided a solution. Never once did we feel pressured to make a decision and the Klinges were always reassuring after providing the information that the decision was ours to make. Despite the curve balls, they never panicked and exemplified the “can do” attitude, making us feel optimistic and taken care of. Their expertise and professionalism was superb. But of all the reasons to work with the Klinges, the most impactful and valuable is their compassion and genuine care for their clients. We pray that we can one day purchase our forever home and you better believe that Jim and Donna will be representing us - as long as they will have us of course. Thank you again Klinge team! Your execution, experience, and care are unmatched.
SABIHA PASHA
July 23, 2024
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Jim and Donna were fantastic! Jim understanding my needs, recommending potential places, pointing out the pros and cons of each property was invaluable. Then when the offer was accepted Donna’s organized guidance through the inspections, paperwork etc made the whole process seem effortless.
So grateful that I had them on my side!
