Redfin veteran Joe Russ, now with parent company Rocket, said his company “helps sellers make choices about how to market their properties.”
One of the nation’s largest brokerages has asked its local multiple listing service to join other major MLSs in allowing agents to list with a coming-to-market status before listing.
Most of the country’s largest multiple listing services allow you to start pre-marketing soon. However, there are two exceptions: Seattle-based Northwest MLS and Utah Real Estate.
That should change, Joe Rath, Rocket’s director of industry relations, said in a Thursday op-ed aimed specifically at NWMLS.
“Redfin helps sellers choose how to market their properties, including pre-marketing to test price and demand,” Russ wrote. “But home sellers in Seattle don’t have this option because the region’s multiple listing service, Northwest MLS (NWMLS), currently prohibits all pre-marketing.”
Russ called on NWMLS to change its policy and allow agents to pre-sell properties.
The call to action was at the center of a heated debate involving several major real estate companies over how properties are sold.
The debate came to a boil when Compass, which owns Redfin, and Rocket announced a partnership. The partnership means Compass’ upcoming listings will be prominently displayed on Redfin’s platform. Redfin agents also sell upcoming listings on marketplace platforms that allow that status.
The partnership gives Compass agents the option to move forward with pre-marketing listings despite the threat of being banned from viewing on Zillow, the nation’s largest real estate search portal.
Within weeks, Zillow, Realtor.com, and Homes.com each rolled out their own partnerships that included premarketing listings.
Meanwhile, various states are passing new laws requiring widespread public sales of real estate properties. Washington state recently enacted its own law, which goes into effect on June 1st.
Rath wrote that Redfin believes the platform’s policies comply with the new law, as listings on the site will soon be available to the tens of millions of consumers who view the platform each month.
“At Redfin, we believe the law clearly supports pre-marketing as long as the property is publicly sold and the seller consents. This means homes can be shared on publicly available platforms like Redfin.com, where they are freely viewable by any buyer or agent.”
This will leave NWMLS as the remaining failure blocking agent in the region on the upcoming pre-market listing.
NWMLS declined to comment for this story. However, NWMLS CEO Justin Haag made his views clear in a recent interview with Inman.
“We don’t have instant-show status. We never have,” Hague told Inman in a recent interview. “Coming Soon is definitely a misrepresentation. It’s definitely a misrepresentation because it’s telling the consumer that this home will be on the market soon, when in fact it can be purchased today. So instead of coming right away, it’s already on the market.”
“With all your properties in one place, you can see all your comps, previous sales, and current listings, and our experts have a complete database to advise you on how to price that property,” Hague added. “That’s the best way.”
NWMLS is an outlier
Inman used Claude AI to scrutinize the policies of MLSs that serve more than 1 million real estate professionals in the United States.
This finding indicates that most MLSs allow some type of coming soon status. Each MLS sets its own policies that cover things like whether agents can show homes, how long a listing will remain in that status, and whether public marketing is allowed.
UtahRealEstate.com, an MLS that covers most of Utah outside of Park City, has an active no-show status that allows properties to sell for one day before being added to the MLS. However, MLS told Inman that it will soon introduce a new upcoming status for agents.
“Our new Coming Soon status will not show the DOM until the listing is active and ready for showings,” Daron Holloway, chief marketing officer at Utah Real Estate, told Inman.
Once this change takes effect, NWMLS will be left on an island.
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