Both sides say they are acting in the interest of consumers as the two real estate giants are expanding the war over how they should be listed to sell their homes online.
Both sides are also standing to make a lot of money if they win.
The issue was reinforced at the end of 2024 when Compass, the country’s largest brokerage company by sales volume, began advising sellers to use a three-stage marketing approach. Make your home visible as a “private” listing only to Compass agents and clients, ensuring the option to be visible only through Compass.com and later exposed in popular locations like Redfin and Zillow.
In the real estate industry, the list is currency. Zillow was faced with the disappearance of thousands of people from the site.
The Seattle-based company will be blocking previous private lists from appearing on the site from the end of June. This hopes to put an end to the compass practice of selectively sharing listings before they appear in the Big Search Portal. Redfin will continue with a similar ban in September.
Each of these players pitch themselves as a consumer parent brand. Compass says its selective marketing approach provides privacy and control to sellers. Some sellers want to sell to more exclusive groups before their homes appear on larger listed sites. It features details such as day-to-day markets and price cuts.
Zillow and Redfin say they are for market transparency. This is good for both home buyers and sellers. The only way they claim the true price of a home is to promote it as widely as possible.
But Brian Boero, CEO of 1000watt, a marketing agent for residential real estate companies, says their parent tumor posture is primarily merely messaging.
“These companies use consumers like the human shield here to protect their business interests,” Boero said. “They may believe these things in good faith, but this is first and foremost about rational self-interest.”
If the Compass wins a private listing war, it overturns the homelist paradigm that buyers have become accustomed to over the past 20 years.
When Zillow and Redfin arrived in the mid-2000s, they promised to democratize their home search, and to pull back the curtains in a market where agents and the local databases they ran were controlled by local databases called multiple listing services. For buyers, the experience changed overnight. A house that was once buried in classified ads, or hidden in books that could only be viewed with brokers, suddenly clicked.
The seller’s agents were pleased at first – they didn’t have to work hard to promote their properties, and it was free to list them on the site.
But someone was paying: the buyer’s agent. When a prospect clicks the “Contact an Agent” button on your listing, Zillow or Redfin will sell the inquiry to a paid agent. It also costs 40% of the agent’s committee if the agent ends the sale. Brokerage companies like Compass have been breaking for a long time with sudden fees.
But as home sales dragged for the third year in a row, Compass is about to change the game. Cut out referral intermediaries by publishing the list only to Compass.com.
“Organized real estate implements rules that strip homeowners and agents of flexibility and choice,” Rory Gorod, president of Compass growth and communications, said in an interview. “They are trying to monopolize where the stock goes and how people sell.”
Of course, Redfin and Zillow have their own interests to protect. It is also a model that has become a modern home buying experience.
“This isn’t just Zillow and Redfin. The Internet has improved home searches where all buyers can access all inventory,” said Joe Rath, Redfin’s industry leader. “All forms of gatekeeping are the opposite of the internet.”
Zillow spokesman Matt Kreamer said transparency is at the heart of Zillow’s philosophy. “We believe that the household list that is available to some buyers should be available to all buyers,” he said.
Their call for openness also happens to keep their business: more listings, more traffic, more fees.
Ultimately, Marketing Chief Boero believes Zillow’s market power will force a blink on the compass.
“Zillow is the most powerful brand in the history of housing,” says Boero. “You can’t imagine Zillow not having a home as a home seller. It sounds stupid to happen.”
However, others believe that the compass has the opportunity to bring traffic directly to the site.
“Southwest Airlines hasn’t sold tickets on online aggregators for many years, but they’re doing great,” said real estate technology consultant Mike Delprete. “People look at multiple sources.”
The dispute appears to be heading towards a compromise that will allow both compasses and listing aggregators to maintain their business model rather than a buyer- or seller-centered solution.
Joe Rath of Redfin said his company is open to hiding certain data, such as days in the market and price drops. “We rather give grounds and have a list,” he said.
All of these companies are paid a percentage of the final selling price of the home, so both brokerages and search portals benefit from keeping buyers in the dark for details that could lead to lower prices. The fight for transparency seems to have limitations.
Whether Compass or the search portal wins, both wins remain unshakable in real estate. A 2% to 3% fee for buyer agents. A groundbreaking legal settlement earlier this year threatened the fee structure paradigm, but so far, while traditional models have been held, several flat cooking institutions have broken the mold.
So why is the rules governing a list of homes determined by two major companies that support profiting from making prices as high as possible?
“There are questions about how important housing is to our economy, society and individuals, why information on housing for sale is not federally regulated,” Boero said.
However, government intervention in home sales is unlikely to occur at the federal level under President Donald Trump, who promoted deregulation and free markets.
The California Department of Real Estate, a state regulator, lacks legal authority to rule on private lists that tilt the scale towards either a compass or a Girow. But, for example, you could enforce laws requiring agents to give sellers appropriate warnings about the financial impact of not appearing on major home listing sites, said Summer Golalik, a former investigator in the department who now works as a compliance consultant for a broker.
“They will need to explore whether the broker is violating the fiduciary’s obligations to the seller,” Golalik said. “Do they provide all the information that sellers need to make an informed decision about what they personally list?”
For her, Golalik doesn’t think pushing private sales and putting listing back in the hands of brokerages would help buyers and sellers.
“The wider campaign on the private list seems to be doing more harm than good,” she said. “I think we’ll go back in time. I’m for the future.”
Original issue: June 17, 2025, 1:46pm EDT
