The private listings fight now has both chambers of Congress. It still stops one door short of the room where your income is decided.
For four months, the fight over private listings has bounced from a Chicago courtroom to federal regulators and back. In July it climbed the steps of the House. This week it crossed the Capitol to the Senate. And it still stops one door short of the room that actually decides your income. The seller’s living room.
What the House asked for
On July 22, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Administrative State, Regulatory Reform, and Antitrust sent letters to Compass CEO Robert Reffkin and MRED President and CEO Rebecca Jensen, requesting staff briefings by August 5 on their private listing network partnership. Signed by subcommittee chair Rep. Scott Fitzgerald, R-Wis., they say the panel is examining whether real estate companies use private listing networks “to insulate themselves from competition at the expense of consumers.”
Three concerns followed. Reduced transparency and fragmented inventory that can build velvet ropes around certain homes. Incentives that can push brokers toward dual agency and double-ended transactions, and captive buyer pipelines, where a listing brokerage converts an unrepresented buyer who found the home through a private network.
Then the Senate went further
On August 6, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, ranking member of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, sent her own letters to the same two executives, with a response deadline of August 21.
Her framing is blunter than the House version. The partnership, she writes, “threatens to create a two-tiered housing market where insiders pay for exclusive access to housing inventory and market data, while everyone else is shut out.”
She stacks four kinds of harm behind that sentence.
The money. She cites Zillow research finding that homes sold off the MLS between 2023 and 2024 sold for about $4,975 less, roughly $1 billion in lost seller equity nationwide. The state numbers are heavier. An average of $30,075 less in California, $20,171 less in Massachusetts, $13,749 less in New York.
The record itself. Days on market and price history are not just marketing details. Appraisers and underwriters use them. When a meaningful share of inventory goes dark, the shared record thins out for everyone, including agents who never listed a home privately in their lives. An appraiser working without days on market and price history is a physician reading half a chart.
The commissions. Warren notes that total commissions in 2026 are averaging 5.7%, up from 5.32% in 2024. Reform was supposed to push that number down.
Fair housing. This is the one that is new. MRED said it would be “honored to speak with Senator Warren and explain the important role of the MLS.” Compass declined to comment, and has publicly rejected the idea that double-ended transactions drive its private listing strategy.
The backdrop. The April agreement expanded MRED’s private listing network to Compass agents nationwide. Compass markets many of these homes as Private Exclusives, shown inside its own network before they reach the portals and local MLSs. It is the same relationship at the center of Zillow’s lawsuit against Compass and MRED.
Count the referees
A federal judge. The FTC and DOJ, petitioned by consumer advocates. A House subcommittee. Now a Senate committee. Four sources of pressure on one business model, inside four months. This is a serious moment for Compass and MRED. It is a much quieter moment for you, and that is the point.
Powerfact: The number of authorities investigating private listings keeps climbing. The number of them who will market your seller’s home stays exactly zero.
The paragraph every listing agent should read twice
Warren’s letter points to a Zillow case study of the Chicago market finding that homes in majority-white neighborhoods were “twice as likely to be listed privately” as homes in majority-non-white neighborhoods. She quotes the NAACP warning that if the model spreads, “public access to home listings could become a fallback rather than the default,” risking what it calls widespread inequity that harkens back to redlining.
Read that twice, because nobody is alleging that any individual agent set out to steer anybody. That is exactly what makes it worth your attention. Disparate impact does not require intent. It only requires a pattern.
So the question stops being about Compass and starts being about your own map. If the private launches in your market cluster in one set of neighborhoods and the public ones cluster in another, that pattern exists whether or not a single person meant it to. Patterns are what get examined.
Powerfact: If Washington is worried consumers cannot see enough, then full disclosure is not just ethics. It is your competitive moat.
Give Compass its credit here. It grew fast, it handed agents a genuine marketing tool, and it forced the industry into an honest conversation about who controls a listing. You can respect the build and still see the hazard in any system that narrows what a buyer gets to see. Both are true at once.
What agents should do now
Separate the corporate drama from your daily work, then sharpen the part that pays.
Give sellers the full menu. Public MLS and portals, your own buyer database, and private or pre-market options where they truly fit. Not the channel that advances your brokerage’s strategy. The one that serves this seller’s goal.
Make the tradeoff explicit and written. Private and coming-soon launches offer privacy and a controlled test of price, and they usually reduce exposure. Public launches maximize buyer attention, which usually protects price. Put both in the plan, get a signature, and follow NAR’s disclosure guidance every time. The agent who documented the conversation is the agent who is protected when the rules shift again, and they will shift again.
Then run a pattern check on your own book. Pull your last twenty-four months of listings, mark which launched privately and which launched publicly, and look at where they sit on the map. If the shape of that map cannot be explained by seller circumstance, fix it now, while it is still a business decision and not a complaint file.
And be ready to explain all of it out loud. When a seller asks why a home shows differently on two sites, answer in a sentence, with confidence. That clarity is worth more than any portal’s marketing budget.
Compass and MRED have until August 21. You do not have a deadline, because Washington cannot do your job. A subcommittee cannot price a home. A senator cannot calm a nervous seller or win a listing appointment. Those belong to you. And the tools that win them, honesty, full disclosure, and a written plan, have not changed while the headlines have.
Let the companies make their case in a hearing room. You make yours at the kitchen table, where listings are actually won.
Now, go create a Life Worth Smiling About!
Darryl Davis, CSP, is a national speaker, coach, and the bestselling McGraw-Hill author of How to Become a Power Agent® in Real Estate. Over four decades he has trained hundreds of thousands of real estate professionals, and he is the founder of the POWER AGENT® Coaching Program. His independent research on private listings and market transparency was cited by the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Administrative State, Regulatory Reform, and Antitrust in July 2026. The full body of that work is open to the public at PrivateListingsDebate.com. For more information, go to DarrylSpeaks.com.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of HousingWire’s editorial department and its owners.
To contact the editor responsible for this piece: tracey@hwmedia.com
