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You’re supposed to be able to find a home anywhere.
But thanks to Compass’ acquisition of Anywhere Real Estate, you can only do that if you hire one of the conglomerate’s agents.
The country’s largest independent real estate brokerage is using its weight — controlling 21.6% of the market nationwide, and up to 80% in major markets — to keep private listings off public databases, leaving clueless buyers out in the cold.
“When a consumer sits down and uses a website like Streeteasy [in New York City], they don’t know if they’re getting all the listings,” Jonathan Miller, a housing analyst at StreetMatrix, told The Post. “And when you have the largest brokerage firm in the world putting a large amount of listings behind a paywall you’re forced to go through an agent of a particular company rather than anybody you want. This is a major setback in the homebuying process to the 1950s.”
Compass’ three-stage marketing pitch promises big gains for sellers. Listings start in-house with Compass’ 340,000 agents as a “Private Exclusive,” to test the market confidentially, move to a “Coming Soon” preview on select sites, and then go fully public. According to Compass, skipping the immediate public launch helps homes sell 34% faster and fetch 4.6% more money.
Compass, which declined to comment, markets the approach as a seller’s choice, providing a disclosure form about informed consent to wait to post their home on a Multiple Listing Service.
But critics say the promise is a farce.
“You cannot determine what a home is worth unless you expose it to the broader market,” James Dwiggins, CEO of Compass rival NextHome, told The Post.
Also, Miller said, “Consumers don’t understand what a private listing is, what an MLS is. It’s just somebody you work with that says, ‘just do this.’”
The practice — which some say allows Compass to “double-dip” by collecting a commission from both the buyer and the seller — carries massive implications in major metros where Compass dominates.
Fueled by its $1.6 billion Anywhere merger, Compass controls 60-plus% of transactions in Redwood City, California; San Francisco; and San Mateo, California — far surpassing the 30% threshold that invites federal antitrust scrutiny.
In Manhattan, that concentration jumps to a staggering 80%, meaning buyers relying on standard portals miss out on the lion’s share of inventory while the homes are hidden.
When Caitlin Bigelow and her husband decided to sell their 1,690-square-foot two-bedroom, two-bathroom San Francisco condominium in 2025, they had “a magic number in mind.”
At their agent’s suggestion, the couple posted the Cole Valley listing as a Compass Private Exclusive, Bigelow wrote on LinkedIn.
After two private showings they got their target number.
“SF real estate is a strange beast,” Bigelow wrote in the responses section of her post. “I think [the agent] truly believed that us hitting our magic number was basically impossible. So when that happened in the off market I think he was happy for us and excited we were getting what we hoped for.”
But Bigelow, CMO at artificial intelligence-backed content platform Blazel, grew uneasy, wondering if a public listing would have yielded higher offers. When the buyer backed out, the couple listed the condo on the regional MLS — a cooperative database where competing agents share information about properties for sale with each other — and Zillow.
Six days later they got an offer for $100,000 above their hoped-for price, selling the home for $2.15 million in April 2025, she confirmed to The Post.
“A free and open market is what allowed us to get top dollar and ultimately, walk away with a much bigger win,” Bigelow wrote, later saying, “I would not recommend private exclusives.”
Buyers are feeling the heat, too.
Even Dwiggins, despite running a national real estate franchise, is struggling while searching for a primary residence with his wife in Northern California.
Stalled by sparse public inventory, he was forced to leverage personal connections at Compass just to view the full gamut of all available properties — something the average house hunter could not do.
Seymen Usta, founder and CEO of Modern Chandelier in St. Petersburg, Florida, spent weeks searching for a home in December. Driving around, he finally stumbled upon a Craftsman house on a corner lot on Beach Drive with a coveted porch swing, only to be told it was a “Compass Coming Soon” listing that was “not officially on the market yet.”
“I was calling listing agents directly, thinking I was being efficient,” Usta told The Post. “What I didn’t realize was that without an agent plugged into Compass’ internal network, I was invisible to their ‘Coming Soon’ inventory.”
It took him three weeks to find the home on Zillow, where he could only view a photograph before it was snatched up.
“The house sold for $40,000 less than I would’ve paid,” Usta said.
States are beginning to crack down on private listings, with legislatures in Washington, Wisconsin and Connecticut moving to ban or restrict off-market listings, and similar measures are pending in New York, Illinois and Hawaii.
In New York, the Attorney General’s antitrust division launched an investigation into Compass’ footprint, which is still ongoing, her office confirmed.
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