As the debate over Clear Cooperation has hit a peak in recent weeks, the new study suggests that seller flexibility may not mean much when it comes to looking at hard numbers from MLS transactions in the last year.
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Large brokerages with much to potentially gain from the sunsetting of the National Association of Realtors’ Clear Cooperation Policy were left disappointed last week when the association decided to keep the policy in place while adding a new option for homesellers.
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Some of those brokerages argued throughout the great CCP debate that homesellers should have the right to choose exactly how their property is marketed, particularly if they have a concern for privacy, among other arguments in favor of abolishing it. However, getting rid of the policy also would have allowed brokerages with large internal networks the possible advantage of double-ending significantly more deals.
But a new report created by Bright MLS’s Chief Economist Lisa Sturtevant suggests that sellers receive “no benefits” when working with brokers who use office exclusive listings.
A growing share of the market
The report, which covered data on about 100,000 listings that sold between Sept. 2024 and Feb. 2025, showed that private listings have increased in Bright MLS’s service area over the years, even though they remain a relatively small portion of listings.
As recently as three to four years ago, private listings in the MLS’s Mid-Atlantic service area made up about 2 to 4 percent of properties. As of February 2025, nearly 8 percent of listings were private. And three Bright MLS brokerage members held at least 10 percent of their inventory as exclusives within the last six months.
“Of those three firms, only two also had a relatively significant overall volume of listings over the past six months,” the report said.
Most exclusives go public, take longer to sell
Another noteworthy finding from the report is that the vast majority of listings initially billed as private exclusives ultimately end up as public listings. Nearly 9 out of 10 homes that began as private listings were eventually marketed on the MLS. Just 13 percent of listings that started off privately closed as private listings as well.
These private listings also typically take much longer to sell than properties marketed on the MLS, Bright MLS found. The median time for standard listings to go under contract in the last six months was 20 days, whereas it took a median of 37 days for listings that at least started off as exclusives to go under contract.
There’s no sales price advantage
The study likewise found that pre-marketing properties as an “office exclusive” does nothing to help sellers get a better sales price on their home. To analyze this metric, Bright MLS limited data to brokerages with at least 300 office exclusives in the last six months and those where exclusives made up at least 10 percent of listings to ensure adequate data within brokerages for comparison purposes.
“After controlling for location and property characteristics, whether or not a home was pre-marketed as an office exclusive has no impact on the close price,” the report said.
“Instead, the primary drivers of price in the model were characteristics and location of the property,” the report continued. “In other words, when we examined similar homes in similar neighborhoods within brokerages, there is no price advantage when agents pre-market homes as an office exclusive.”
These findings are in direct contrast to a report that Compass released in February, which suggested sellers may make more money and receive offers more quickly if they pre-market their home as an office exclusive. The full findings of that report, which RealEstateNews.com covered, are not yet available.
Not surprisingly, Bright MLS’s study also found that private listings can exacerbate inventory shortages in a local market and negatively impact the market when homebuyers become frustrated over a lack of options and high competition among existing options, leading them to opt out of homebuying altogether.
“When brokerages withhold listings from the MLS, buyers bear that cost,” the report said. “In our analysis, there are some markets in the Bright MLS service area where inventory would be more than 20 percent higher if private listings were publicly available.”
A growing movement toward private office exclusives could lead to “a fragmented inventory system,” the study said, leading to more work and inefficiency for agents and homebuyers alike. And this data shows that it may not be the best thing for sellers either.
“The rise of office exclusives and private listing networks among some brokerages may simply be a response to current market conditions, but it could signal a systematic shift within the real estate industry to attempt to unravel the open and transparent housing marketplace facilitated by the MLS,” the study concluded.
“While it is important to give sellers options for how their homes are marketed, restricting exposure can delay offers and ultimately hurt sellers.”
Email Lillian Dickerson
