Imagine this: After years or even decades of saving, you’re finally beginning your long-awaited search for a new home. You’ve connected with an agent to guide you to your dream home, and you hop into bed at the end of a long day as you finally get a chance to review the new listings in your favorite neighborhood.
But there’s a problem—one that you wouldn’t have encountered a year earlier. You and your agent can’t see all of the new homes for sale… you only have access to a portion of the market.
It sounds like an inconvenience, but it’s actually much worse than that. The reality is that there are companies that are actively hiding new homes for sale from buyers like you, for the sole reason that you’re not working with one of their real estate agents. And, they have no intention of making the property available to you unless you ditch your agent to come work with them.
This same company will tell their own clients that they’re better off keeping their property away from the broader public market—made up of buyers like you. They’ll self-servingly try to convince sellers that exposure to fewer people will actually help them secure the right value for their home (they’re hoping those clients haven’t heard about the concept of supply and demand). The reasoning behind all of this is simple—to grow their business regardless of how it may harm buyers and sellers.
This isn’t a doomsday scenario—it’s something that’s starting to occur today in housing markets throughout the U.S., though it’s stayed under the radar. Industry policymakers are debating a little-known rule, commonly referred to as Clear Cooperation, which requires a home to be posted publicly within 24 hours of the homeowner marketing the property for sale if they’re using a licensed real estate agent.
This framework serves a few purposes. Most crucially, it offers buyers and sellers a transparent and near-total view of the market, while ensuring that listings are not quietly marketed to select groups or demographics. You might think of it like searching for a hotel, a flight, or a new car—when you conduct your search, you can be reasonably assured that you have the best possible view of your options.
There could not be a worse time to restrict access to new homes. The challenges aspiring buyers face today are complex: home prices are at all-time highs in many markets, mortgage rates are at their highest levels in 30 years, the supply of new and existing homes for sale is low, and Americans are still struggling under the persistent weight of inflation—making the journey to homeownership a daunting one.
To be clear, there are valid reasons some sellers might want to start by marketing to a smaller group of buyers. Perhaps a home is unique enough that it has no real comparisons to consider—the value of a home bowling alley or a private golf course is highly subjective and may only lie in the eye of the potential purchaser.
In other cases, personal privacy may be paramount. A beloved local football coach or a high-profile public figure, for instance, may be considering a move and would like to list without controversy, even if they end up settling for less at closing.
Many in real estate, including Coldwell Banker Realty and our parent company Anywhere, are advocating for the rule to be revised, rather than repealed, to account for these specific circumstances. This would allow some flexibility in marketing strategy, while maintaining the guardrails that have protected consumers for decades.
Unfortunately, other players in our industry continue to push for the rule’s full removal—an outcome that would push the industry toward a system under which nearly all homes are marketed privately and made viewable only to agents from their company. It’s a strategy that presents very clear winners and losers, helping these companies consolidate power while sacrificing the broad transparency and choice many Americans rely on to enter the ranks of homeownership.
Despite a mountain of obstacles in their way, aspiring homeowners are undeterred in their pursuit of the American dream. A survey published by the Wall Street Journal last year found that 89 percent of people considered owning a home either essential or important to their vision of the future.
Millions of Americans every year put their faith in a real estate agent to help guide them through this process, with the hope that it will result in one of the most significant transactions of their lives.
In a market that is facing nearly unprecedented challenges, it’s paramount that policymakers and the real estate industry itself put these consumers first. Instead of creating more barriers, we should be fighting to make homeownership more accessible, more transparent, and more competitive for all.
Kamini Lane is the President & CEO of Coldwell Banker Realty, one of the nation’s largest real estate brokerages.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
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