By 2025, nearly 1.4 million homes will be removed from MLS. Unsold and withdrawn. It was pulled from the market, put on hold for days, weeks, or months, and then relisted like new.
I’ve been tracking this habit for 20 years. When I first started measuring this at my company, Altos Research, in 2006, a potential venture capital investor bluntly told me, “This market is a racket. All new public offerings are fake.”
He had bought a house in Silicon Valley at the beginning of the end of the housing bubble. Demand was starting to weaken, but sellers were still counting on bubble prices. If the home didn’t sell within 30 days, the agent pulled the property off the market so it wouldn’t appear as damaged goods. We will then immediately relist it as a “new” listing.
As soon as we started tracking this, we realized that VC’s intuition was right and it was happening everywhere. This practice proved so prevalent that Altos began using the “relisting rate” as a reliable indicator of housing market demand. As demand weakens, sellers need alternative marketing strategies and withdrawals and relistings increase.
This pattern was consistent enough that nearly every MLS in the country eventually adopted a formal rule, typically requiring relisted homes to be referred to as “new construction” and take 30 to 90 days off the market before the number of days on market resets to zero.
I tell this story to point out that the current discussion about structured pre-market listings, such as Coming Soon and Compass’ three-tier marketing strategy, is completely backwards. It took an outsider to the industry to point that out to me.
The argument we constantly hear is that these marketing strategies are “hiding the listing from the buyer.” What no one is talking about is the 1.4 million listings that show how often sellers seek a limited exposure period during the sales process.
It turns out that every agent in America is already helping home sellers limit their exposure during the sales process. This practice is so common and built into the typical real estate marketing experience that no one on the inside even realizes they’re doing it. We were really surprised when Compass created a structured process to meet market demands.
And data reveals that millions of home sellers want a structured marketing process that isn’t “always, everywhere, all at once.”
The real policy question is not whether every listing must be immediately available to every buyer at every moment. The real question is whether sellers should have a transparent, time-limited way to phase in their launches before widespread distribution, rather than forcing them to become completely invisible through withdrawal rules.
This system is already driving sellers underground.
Please tell me what I mean.
Home sellers withdraw listings from public marketing every day for perfectly reasonable and completely human reasons. In fact, in 2025, Compass counted 1.4 million outbreaks in the 37 states it serves.
Withdrawals often occur because sellers need to reset their days on the market before the numbers get high enough to indicate desperation. Some people like to change the “original” list price because too much of a discount can make the seller look desperate or the agent look bad.
It’s common for homes to be away for the holidays in order to relist in the spring. Or maybe it takes two weeks to repaint your kitchen. Perhaps they tested an aggressive price, didn’t find traction, and want to start over with sharper numbers and a fresh start.
Sellers like the marketing effect that only a “new listing” can bring, and many find the negative signals from an extended DOM to be more harmful than a temporary period of no market exposure.
None of these motives are sinister. Each one is a legitimate seller, trying to get the best outcome for the biggest financial transaction of your life. Every agent in America is already helping clients survive off-market periods where limited exposure is a good marketing strategy.
Unfortunately, rather than simply allowing a structured marketing process to test the market or bring it to market for a limited period of time, the regulations dictate that the listing must be withdrawn entirely. Sellers demand nuance from marketing, but the system dictates an either-or or off-the-box. As a result, the system forces agents and sellers to pretend that the home is not for sale, and thus hide it from the market.
The lesson here is that the system, which critics say is undermined by private listings, already forces sellers to become completely invisible 1.4 million times each year.
The motives for these attempts to limit exposure are perfectly fine. The problem is that the status quo is unstructured and opaque, with real negative outcomes for home sellers and buyers.
Days off the market: The numbers no one is tracking
I recently saw a listing for a “new” condo in downtown San Francisco. Looking into its history, I found that it had been withdrawn and relisted three times in a 16-month period, each time at a lower price.
During these three withdrawal periods (two of which were exactly 31 days and the third was a longer period with a vacation period in between), the property was off the market for 122 days.
During this period, the house was not officially listed for sale. It was locked out of the system by MLS rules and was invisible to buyers. This is almost 25% of the total elapsed time wasted. This house was apparently on the market during an off-market period. It was simply hidden from buyers because there was no other option at the moment.
To better understand this phenomenon, I started tracking new market statistics on market off days. (This is called “DOFF.”) Similar to Days On Market (DOM), DOFF measures the period between exit and relisting. In this case, the seller requires limited exposure and the property must be completely hidden from the buyer.
All MLSs have rules that enforce long hiding periods (often 30 or 60 days, up to 180 days, etc.). Some MLSs have “hold” periods that pause DOM accumulation during periods of limited visibility. Often, once a property is withdrawn, no marketing is allowed at all. This property is completely hidden from potential buyers.
A look at the data reveals the negative impact of DOFF.
Although the rules for off-market periods vary, all MLSs have the same challenges. For example, in Phoenix, ARMLS rules require a home to be off the market for 45 days before it can be reopened as a “new” listing. An analysis of the vacation market spent by public companies in Phoenix found a notable increase of 45 days.
This tells me that there are sellers who are forced to hide from the market longer than they would like due to the lack of structured marketing alternatives.
In San Francisco, the same story is being told under different rules, and the data are even more striking. SFAR requires a 30-day market break, and that’s exactly where the DOFF distribution spikes.
Sellers do not withdraw randomly. They will remain hidden until the reset window is reached, after which they will be restarted. The current system has no mechanisms for pre-marketing, price testing, or other subtle marketing solutions, and MLS rules simply dictate how long a property must be hidden from buyers. As a result, sellers actually spend more time in the market overall.
In San Francisco, relisting takes nearly 60 extra days on average due to the lack of a structured pre-marketing solution.
This is data that the industry has missed in its rush to decry new marketing strategies and defend the status quo. Currently, home sellers are failing. And it’s so common that we don’t notice it.
The problem isn’t that some brokers are selling homes before entering the MLS. That means existing rules prevent more than 100,000 homes from being seen by buyers at all every month.
Data provides visibility into current costs. Now let’s take a look at what the critics are actually defending.
This is a market looking for solutions
Criticisms of structured premarketing have been consistently vocal. And they’re asking the right questions. A fragmented market where buyers don’t know what’s on sale isn’t good for anyone. Data integrity, comps, and ratings – the entire ecosystem depends on it.
What the critics fail to realize is that the markets they are defending are already suffering the very consequences they fear. MLS has never been 100% of the market. Even the most ardent defenders admit this. In fact, 1.4 million sellers each year live without infrastructure or transparency in some part of their sales lifecycle.
That’s a strong market signal. The industry had to come up with exactly this extended multi-month waiting period rule as agents hacked solutions to client requirements. Rules were created based on necessity.
The only thing that is actually hidden is the list without a solution
Just to be clear, I work for Compass, so please take that into consideration when reading this article. But I’ve been tracking this data since 2006, and the pattern has been consistent for 20 years. Only the solution is new.
I’ve been at this for a long time, so I confess that I used to share the same status quo intuition as many people in the industry. It took me nearly a year of watching smart Compass agents implement structured pre-marketing strategies for their clients before I realized how and why my pre-marketing explanations were wrong.
Here’s what I know from the data: Upcoming listings on Compass.com are more likely to be seen by buyers than listings that are taken down on zero websites. A three-step marketing program that provides a systematic way for sellers to test pricing, prepare a property, and decide when to put it on the market is more transparent than a system that requires them to pretend their home isn’t on the market for 30 or 90 days.
Compass did not create off-market sales. This created the first innovative, structured alternative to what the industry was already doing at scale, quietly, inefficiently, and with no benefit to the buyers who waited.
The market has been demanding this for decades. It just didn’t have a name yet.
Mike Simonsen is chief economist at Compass International Holdings and founder of Altos Research.
