Thousands of real estate agents across the US opened their email Saturday night to find an unexpected message from Andy Florance, the CEO of CoStar Group and Homes.com. As the top executive for one of real estate’s largest search websites, Florance had a lot on his mind. For months, the industry has been embroiled in a fight over “exclusive inventory” — homes marketed for sale by real estate agents but purposely kept off public search portals like Homes.com or Realtor.com. Florance wasn’t writing to complain about this practice, though. He’d set his sights on another target: his company’s chief rival, Zillow.
Two days earlier, Zillow had unveiled a new rule threatening to blacklist scores of homes from its well-trafficked website. The surprise announcement took direct aim at exclusive inventory, also known as secret or hidden home listings. A growing number of agents at large brokerages, most notably the national power player Compass, had been hoarding listings and testing the waters by advertising them on their own websites before sharing the homes widely across the internet. Zillow said it would permanently ban from its site any listing that had gone through this preview period. If you’re going to market a home somewhere, the company argued, you have to market it everywhere.
Zillow, by far the most popular destination for online home shoppers, framed the move as a defense of consumers: “Fragmented listing access — in which a home is available on one platform but not another, or shared with some agents but not others — creates frustration and distrust,” the company said in its announcement. But Florance wasn’t having it. He lambasted Zillow’s new rule as “an incredible move of audacity and a pure power play of epic proportions.” Homes.com, Florance told the agents, would happily welcome any listings scorned by Zillow.
This is the messy state of play in real estate: With sales stuck in a protracted malaise, agent commissions under pressure, and the rules of the game in flux, everyone is scrambling to protect their share of the homebuying pie. Zillow’s declaration adds yet another twist, marking an explosive turning point in the long-simmering dispute over exclusive inventory and hidden home listings. The company is flexing its considerable muscle, presenting agents with a daunting choice: Either share your listing with Zillow and everyone else as soon as you so much as stake a sign in the front yard, or explain to your client why their home will never appear on the website that’s become synonymous with real estate.
“That’s the spark,” says Mike DelPrete, a tech strategist and scholar-in-residence at the University of Colorado Boulder. “And now everybody, whether they like it or not, they have to have a position. They have to make some decisions, and they need to act.”
Many agents don’t bother with exclusive inventory. As soon as they agree to market a home on behalf of…
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