HousingWireHousingWire
Compass has taken its fight against the Clear Cooperation Policy (CCP) to another level.
The brokerage is giving agents at all brokerages access to Coming Soon, which houses its exclusive listings. Compass says that the listings “protect home sellers against negative insights, such as days on market.”
In a news release, Compass CEO Robert Reffkin appeared to openly taunt the National Association of Realtors (NAR), whose CCP rule requires a Realtor to put a home for sale on the local NAR-affiliated multiple listing service (MLS) within a day of marketing a listing.
“At Compass we are advocating for homeowners to have control over how their listings are marketed,” Reffkin said in a statement. “We are working to ensure that NAR and the MLS no longer force homeowners to market their properties in ways that disadvantage them.”
Coming Soon is part of Compass’s three-phase marketing plan for homes. It begins with Exclusive Listings, which appear in search results on the Compass site but are not directly advertised.
Coming Soon is next. Those listings appear on the site before they appear on an MLS, but only for about a day. The third phase is the listing going live on all platforms, including the MLS and aggregators like Zillow.
In the invite to outside brokers and agents to use Coming Soon, Reffkin states that CCP-related mandates prevent Compass agents from sharing Private Exclusives with agents outside of Compass.
According to the company, one of the benefits of Compass’s marketing plan is that it hides metrics like days on market and price drop history that tend to negatively impact interest in a given home listing.
Coming Soon listings operate in a type of grey area with regard to CCP. Depending who you talk to — and the individual rules of a Realtor-affiliated MLS — you get different answers on whether the listings violate the CCP.
Regardless, the three-phase market plan is building an inventory of listings that Compass can use for true exclusives should it succeed in its quest to topple NAR’s CCP.
According to data from industry consultant and academic Mike DelPrete, Compass’s Private Exclusive listings have risen dramatically in the last six months and now make up 30% of all Compass listings, and the roughly 1,400 Coming Soon listings take that number to 35%.
Compass has gotten more and more vocal about not only its opposition to the CPP, but its intention to build an inventory of truly exclusive listings in the event that the rule is rescinded. The debate has gotten increasingly heated, with feuds over it on LinkedIn have gotten more frequent and at times vitriolic.
Where players in real estate stand on the issue is predictably tied to their business interests. Zillow — which would lose listings if the CCP went away — published a study last week which concluded that so-called “pocket listings” sold for roughly $5,000 less, equating to a 1.5% decrease on the national median sale price.
NAR appears to be waffling on the issue. The trade group held a meeting on the rule at the end of 2024 but did not make a decision on whether it will remove it.
