Residential real estate’s back-and-forth over private listings has mostly been a war of words, not numbers.
Those in favor of agents marketing listings off the Multiple Listing Service have cited the benefits of testing pricing without being penalized with a listing later showing price drops or days on market. Opponents have argued that sellers will lose out on an optimal price by limiting their listing’s exposure, and buyers will be stuck with an incomplete picture of the market.
Each side has released data claiming to support their causes, but the analyses have delivered mixed conclusions. A study from Compass, private listings’ ultimate hype man, showed that pre-marketed listings sold for more than those put directly on the MLS; a study from Bright MLS, a Mid-Atlantic MLS, showed the opposite.
Now, an independent source has joined the debate.
Darren Hayunga, a professor at the University of Georgia’s business school, analyzed sales data for homes in the Dallas-Fort Worth area from 2002 to 2022 in an effort to determine the relationship between private listings and home sale prices.
Hayunga defined a pocket listing as a home entered on the MLS with 0 days on the market. He used a novel econometric model to compare sale prices on homes by only including privately listed homes that had an equivalent publicly marketed home with similar characteristics.
The study, published in March, found that homes never put on the MLS sold for 1.7 percent more than comparable properties marketed through the MLS.
The result runs counter to a theory put forward by many in the industry that broad exposure can only help increase a home’s sale price. But Hayunga, who said the idea for the paper came after the National Association of Realtors implemented the Clear Cooperation Policy in 2020 in an effort to stem the tide of private listings, wasn’t surprised by the results.
“If this wasn’t good for the seller, no one’s holding a musket to their head, and so they don’t have to do it,” he said.
Instead, Hayunga said the premium comes from sellers being able to “hang on to their list price” rather than go through the downward negotiation process that tends to occur on the open market. “Under normal marketing, you probably increase your price by somewhere around 3 percent knowing that you’re going to negotiate,” he said.
But Hayunga also found that the price premium disappeared in 2020, when NAR introduced the CCP, which limited marketing off the MLS to 24 hours.
“It used to be that you could market it for two weeks, two months, that’s when we were seeing the premiums,” Hayunga said. Being able to broadly — but selectively — expose a listing still allowed agents and sellers to test out and even adjust the price of their home, but the CCP eliminated that possibility by limiting that time to 24 hours.
What the CCP did not eliminate, however, was the proliferation of pocket listings. In 2022, 3 percent of the sales in the DFW area were pocket listings, the highest yearly market share in the data. (In 2025, NAR substantially rolled back the policy by allowing local MLSes to determine the length of time listings could be marketed without being syndicated to home search platforms).
While Hayunga’s findings appear to be good news for private sellers, he also posited that buyers can benefit from the reduced negotiation process for a home on the open market, even if it comes at a small premium.
“If they can stop searching and they know they want that [house], would you pay 1 percent more? Would you pay 2 percent more?” he said.
The findings come as the industry reckons with how to market listings, and the gap between each side of the private listing debate has also closed considerably.
Compass has touted that 94 percent of its pre-market listings sell on the open market. And last month, Zillow announced a partnership with dozens of brokerages that will allow them to list their homes on its platform without putting them on the MLS.
Hayunga sees it as a win-win: sellers get a better price, and buyers pay a small premium to not have to deal with the rigmarole of shopping on the open market.
“I think it’s a benefit to everyone and the premium is not hugely expensive,” Hayunga said.
All told, it would only make sense for Hayunga to list his next home using a pocket listing.
“I would go with a pocket listing,” he said after a pause. “On average, it’s beneficial.”
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