Compass Chief Economist: You’re looking at off-MLS marketing all wrong
Nearly 1.4 million homes will be removed from the MLS by 2025. Not sold, withdrawn. Taken off the market, postponed for days, weeks or months and then relisted as if it were new.
I have been following this practice for twenty years. I first started measuring it at my company, Altos Research, in 2006, when a potential venture capital investor bluntly told me, “This market is a racket. All new listings are fake.”
He was shopping for a house in Silicon Valley at the beginning of the end of the housing bubble. Demand started to weaken, but sellers still expected bubble prices. If their homes weren’t sold within 30 days, their agents took the properties off the market so they didn’t look like damaged goods. And then immediately relist them as ‘new’ listings.
As soon as I started following this, I discovered that the VC’s instincts were right, and it was happening everywhere. This practice proved so widespread that Altos began using the “Relist Rate” as a reliable indicator of housing market demand: when demand weakens, sellers need alternative marketing strategies, and withdrawals and relistings increase.
The pattern was so consistent that nearly every MLS in the country eventually adopted formal rules, typically requiring 30 to 90 days off the market before a relisted home could be called “new” and the number of days on the market reset to zero.
I tell you this story to point out that the current debate over structured pre-market listings, things like coming-soon programs, and Compass’ three-phase marketing strategy, has the story right backwards. It took an industry outsider to point this out to me.
The argument we keep hearing is that these marketing strategies “hide ads from buyers.” What no one is talking about are the 1.4 million listings that demonstrate how often sellers seek periods of limited exposure during the sales process.
It turns out that every real estate agent in America is already helping home sellers limit their exposure during the selling process. This practice is so common, so integrated into the typical real estate marketing experience, that no one on the inside even notices they’re doing it. We were genuinely surprised when Compass built a structured process to meet market demand.
And the data makes it clear that millions of home sellers are demanding a structured marketing process that doesn’t happen “all the time, all at once.”
The real policy question is not whether every offer should be immediately shown to every buyer at all times. The real question is whether sellers should have a transparent, time-limited way to orchestrate a launch before wide distribution, rather than forcing them into total invisibility through inclusion rules.
The system already forces sellers underground
Let me show you what I mean.
Home sellers pull public marketing ads every day for reasons that are completely rational and completely human. In 2025, we counted 1.4 million cases in the 37 states served by Compass.
Withdrawals occur because the seller often has to reset their days on the market before the number gets high enough to signal desperation. Some want to change their “original” list price because too many cuts can make a seller look desperate and the agent look bad.
It is very common to take the house away for the holidays and rent it again in the spring. Or maybe they need two weeks to repaint the kitchen. Perhaps they tested an ambitious price point, failed to gain traction and want to relaunch with a sharper number and a fresh start.
Sellers love the marketing boost that comes only with a “new listing,” and many view the negative signal of an extended DOM as more damaging than a temporary period of no market exposure.
None of these motivations are nefarious. They are all legitimate sellers trying to get the best result for the largest financial transaction of their lives. Every agent in America is already helping their clients through these off-market periods, when limited exposure is the right marketing strategy.
Unfortunately, instead of simply allowing for a structured marketing process to test the market or market rigorously over a period of time, the rules dictate that the listing must be withdrawn entirely. Sellers demand nuance in marketing, but the system dictates binary – on or off. As a result, the system forces real estate agents and sellers to pretend the house is not for sale – to hide it from the market.
The lesson here is that the system that critics say private listings undermine already forces sellers to become completely invisible 1.4 million times a year.
The motivations for these efforts to limit exposure are fine. The problem is that the status quo method of doing this is unstructured, opaque, and has real, negative consequences for home sellers and buyers.
Days off market: the number no one keeps track of
I recently looked at a “new” apartment listing in downtown San Francisco. When I dug into the history, I discovered that it had been withdrawn and relisted three times in a sixteen-month period, each time with a price reduction.
During these three withdrawal periods (two of which were exactly 31 days, the third a longer period during the holiday period), the property had spent 122 days of the market.
During these periods the house was not officially for sale. It was invisible to buyers and locked out by MLS rules. That’s almost 25 percent of the total elapsed time wasted. This house was of course for sale during these periods when there was no market; it was simply hidden from buyers because the status quo gave them no other choice.
To better understand this phenomenon, I started tracking a new market metric, days off from the market. (Let’s call this “DOFF.”) Like Days on Market (DOM), the DOFF measures the duration between listing and relisting, requiring sellers to have limited exposure and forcing properties to remain completely hidden from buyers.
MLSs all have rules that enforce longer hidden periods, often 30 or 60 days, some as long as 180. Some MLSs have “hold” periods to pause the accumulation of DOM during periods of limited visibility. In many situations, when the property is withdrawn, marketing is not allowed at all. The property is completely hidden from potential buyers.
Looking at the data, the negative DOFF implications become clear.
The rules for out-of-market time vary, but every MLS faces the same challenge. For example, in Phoenix, ARMLS rules require a home to be off the market for 45 days before it can be relaunched as a “new” listing. When we analyzed the free time that listings spend in Phoenix, we found a notable jump of 45 days.
This tells me that there are sellers who have to hide from the market for longer than they want to because there is no structured marketing alternative.
San Francisco tells the same story under a different line, and the data is even more prominent. SFAR requires a 30-day off-market period, which is exactly where DOFF distribution peaks.
Sellers don’t withdraw randomly. They remain hidden long enough to reach the reset window and then restart. The current system lacks any mechanism for pre-marketing, price testing, or other nuanced marketing solutions, and the MLS rules simply dictate how long properties must remain hidden from buyers. As a result, sellers actually have a longer total market time.
In San Francisco, re-ads are taking an average of almost 60 extra days to burn because they didn’t have a structured pre-marketing solution.
This is the data the industry has missed in its haste to condemn the new marketing strategies and defend the status quo. The status quo is failing home sellers. And it happens so often that we don’t even notice it.
The problem isn’t that some agents market homes before they hit the MLS; it is that the existing rules already keep more than a hundred thousand homes completely invisible to buyers every month.
The data makes visible the costs of the status quo. Now let’s look at what the critics are actually defending.
This is the market that demands a solution
The critics of structured pre-marketing have been loud and consistent. And they ask the right questions. A fragmented market where buyers don’t know what’s for sale is bad for everyone. Data integrity, comparisons, assessments: the entire ecosystem depends on it.
What the critics don’t realize is that the market they defend is already guilty of the very outcome they fear. The MLS has never been 100 percent of the market. Even the most ardent defenders recognize this. In practice, 1.4 million salespeople per year live without infrastructure or transparency for part of their sales lifecycle.
That is a powerful market signal. The industry had to come up with rules for extended wait times of several months precisely because agents had hacked a solution to customer demands. The rules followed the need.
The only entries that are actually hidden are the entries without a solution
I should say this clearly: I work for Compass, and you should consider that as you read this piece. But I’ve been tracking this data since 2006, and the pattern has been consistent for 20 years. Only the solution is new.
I’ve been at this for so long that I have to admit that I previously shared the same status quo intuition as much of the industry. It took me almost a year of watching smart Compass agents execute structured pre-marketing strategies for their clients to realize how and why my previous data was wrong.
Here’s what I know from the data: An upcoming listing on Compass.com is more visible to buyers than a withdrawn listing on zero websites. A three-phase marketing program that gives sellers a structured way to test prices, prepare their properties, and time their launch is more transparent than a system that requires them to pretend their home won’t be on the market for 30 or 90 days.
Compass has not created out-of-market sales. It created the first innovative, structured alternative to something the industry was already doing at scale, quietly, inefficiently and without any benefit to the buyers who were waiting.
The market has been asking for this for decades. There just wasn’t a name for it yet.
Mike Simonsen is chief economist at Compass International Holdings and founder of Altos Research.
