Electronic Realty Associates’s (ERA) origin story is right there in the name: Getting a listing in front of more buyers than the local competition could reach, and getting there faster. Can private exclusives do that?

I started in this business in 1979, when “faster” meant something specific and measurable. Listings reached member brokers through printed books, published every two weeks. Miss the deadline — a few days before the book went to press — and a new listing might not reach the rest of the market for close to a month.

The fastest a listing could realistically go from taken to published was about 17 days. Any network that could get word of a new listing to its own brokers before the next book came out had a real edge, and it was measured in the only currency that mattered: how many days before every other agent in town found out. ERA’s franchise network was built to win that race.

Fifty-some years later, ERA’s president describes the opposite as the best thing to happen to his agents in years.

What Vidal actually said

In a July 23 interview with HousingWire’s Brooklee Han, ERA president Alex Vidal called the brand’s integration with Compass an “absolute God send” — not because it delivers more buyers to a seller’s door, but because it lets ERA agents “premarket their coming soon listings” through the Redfin and Rocket private-listing pipeline Compass built, doing so “without losing leads to other agents.”

The most revealing part of the interview wasn’t the enthusiasm. It was the reason for the enthusiasm. Read that twice. The benefit he names isn’t exposure. It’s the ability to hold a listing back from wide exposure long enough that the agent, not a competing agent, ends up with the buyer.

Vidal makes a second case for the arrangement: sellers who get private feedback before formally listing become, in his words, more flexible negotiators — they “go to market with the right strategy.” Take that at face value and it still describes a seller who has learned, before a single competing buyer ever sees the home, to expect less. Vidal frames it as a benefit to the eventual buyer. It’s the same seller-side concession critics of private exclusives have been pointing to for two years. He’s just describing it from the other side of the table.

The case I’m not making

To be fair to Vidal, he’s told this story himself, in his own words, more than once. In a July 14 column on another real estate news site, under his own byline, he described selling his own home privately during his divorce, and was explicit about why: he wanted “a process that minimized disruption and created as much stability as possible” for his children during a hard chapter.

If every discussion of private exclusives began and ended with circumstances like these, there would be far less controversy. He got a full-price offer without ever going to market. That’s the legitimate use of the tool: a seller with a genuine, human reason for choosing a smaller pool on purpose, getting paid fairly for it. Nobody serious about this debate, including me, is arguing that case away.

The problem was never that private exclusives exist. It’s what happens when a narrow, defensible exception becomes the default marketing pitch for everyone else.

Convenience is a legitimate objective. Privacy is a legitimate objective. Stability during divorce is a legitimate objective. But once a brokerage recommends a strategy that intentionally limits market exposure, the question changes from whether the strategy is understandable to whether it is demonstrably in the client’s best interest — and what evidence was presented to the client before that recommendation was made.

Every profession manages this tension. Real estate barely does.

This tension isn’t unique to real estate. Financial advisors, attorneys, physicians — every profession built on a duty to a client has some interest that can diverge from the client’s best outcome: a bigger commission, a longer engagement, a treatment that pays more than the alternative. That’s not a scandal. It’s the reason these professions built informed-consent and disclosure rules in the first place — not to eliminate the tension, which isn’t possible, but to make sure the client sees it clearly before agreeing to anything.

The question was never whether that tension is allowed to exist. It’s whether the client understands it before deciding, and what protections exist for the ones least equipped to spot it on their own.

A financial advisor recommending a product that pays a higher commission has to disclose that conflict under fiduciary and suitability rules before the client signs anything. An attorney can’t take on a representation with a conflict of interest without disclosing it and getting informed, written consent. A physician can’t perform a procedure — even one that’s medically justified — without first walking the patient through the risks, the alternatives, and the odds, in terms the patient can actually weigh. None of these professions eliminate the underlying conflict. They require that the client see it clearly before consenting to anything.

Real estate has none of that architecture around private exclusives. There’s no equivalent informed-consent conversation required before a strategy that trades exposure for an agent’s convenience. There’s frequently no disclosed number at all — just a narrative about premarketing and “coming soon.” Measured against the professions that already require disclosure of exactly this kind of conflict, real estate’s standard is the weakest of the group, not the strongest — despite real estate agents being fiduciaries too.

Vidal’s own numbers make the case

Vidal told HousingWire that over 90% of Compass’s private exclusive listings eventually reach the open market anyway. What objective evidence demonstrates that the private phase improved those outcomes, rather than merely delaying broad exposure? Read that number the way an underwriter would, not the way a marketing deck wants it read.

If the small-pool pricing advantage — whatever it’s actually worth, and the research on that is genuinely contested — depends on the home selling inside the private pool, then it paid off for roughly one seller in 10, the ones whose homes sold before ever reaching the MLS. The other nine got the delay and the reduced early exposure, and still needed the full market to close the sale.

What didn’t change for any of them, sold private or not, is that the agent kept the lead. The edge Vidal is describing accrues to the brokerage on essentially every listing that runs through the private phase. The seller-side benefit he’s selling accrued, by his own figure, to about one in ten.

A defender of the strategy could push back here: even the nine sellers who end up on the open market might still benefit, because private feedback lets them recalibrate price before ever taking a public cut — avoiding the well-documented penalty for a visible price reduction. That’s a real dynamic, not an invented one.

A 2025 Journal of Housing Economics study of 670,000 Massachusetts MLS transactions found a 42-day median time on market for homes that sold on their first listing, against 155 days for homes that were relisted after sitting — the closest independent measurement of what a public repricing actually costs a seller, even if it isn’t a direct study of private-exclusive listings specifically.

But taken seriously, that argument cuts against the pitch, not for it. If the private phase’s real value is helping a seller avoid a pricing mistake, that’s an argument for better pricing advice up front, not for withholding exposure. A competent agent owes accurate pricing to every client regardless of which marketing strategy gets used — it isn’t a benefit unique to going private first, and dressing it up as one lets a pricing failure the agent should have prevented get relabeled as a feature of limiting the buyer pool.

Agents are entitled to their leads. Someone already solved this.

Here’s what makes the “agents deserve their own leads” argument frustrating rather than persuasive: it’s already been solved, honestly, by someone else. CoStar built Homes.com around a simple rule — every inquiry routes to the listing agent, whether or not that agent is a paying customer — precisely because Zillow‘s model, where a buyer’s click on a listing rarely reaches the agent who actually has it, was a problem worth fixing. That’s the legitimate version of what Vidal is describing: an agent’s real interest in keeping their own buyer leads, protected through a market mechanism the agent pays for.

HousingWire has reported agents paying real money for exactly that kind of lead protection — $1,000 a month or more under Zillow’s original Premier Agent model, or, in the markets Zillow has since converted to its invitation-only Preferred program, a success fee Zillow’s own published fee schedule sets at 15% to 40% of commission, depending on zip code and sale price, with a flat 40% on seller-originated connections. Realtor.com‘s ReadyConnect Concierge has reportedly run on a similar pay-at-closing model for years, though realtor.com doesn’t publish the percentage; it’s set broker-to-broker. Whichever portal, whichever model, there’s a real price attached.

Private exclusives let an agent capture a similar benefit for free. The cost hasn’t disappeared. It’s been moved off the agent’s marketing budget and onto the seller’s exposure.

The gap

Vidal has made the consumer-centered case in writing more than once: Understand the seller before proposing a strategy, don’t lead with a predetermined playbook, seller choice isn’t about power or control. He told HousingWire he tries to see the private-listing debate “as if they were truly in the seller’s shoes or the buyer’s shoes.” I’d take him at his word on all of it. It’s a good instinct, consistently held, and more executives should have it.

Vidal repeatedly talks about seeing things from the seller’s shoes. Who speaks for the buyers who never knew the home existed?

Which is what makes one quote, from one interview, worth sitting with. Describing the value of his company’s biggest recent deal, in a moment less rehearsed than a bylined op-ed, he defined it in terms of what it does for the agent’s lead sheet — not the seller’s outcome, not the buyer’s access to the market. That’s not the pattern. It’s the one place the pattern breaks, and it broke toward the institutional interest, not the client-centered one he’s written about consistently everywhere else.

ERA spent its first 50 years finding an edge by getting the word out faster than anyone else could. Its current president just told a trade publication, on the record, that the new edge is getting to keep the word in. That isn’t an evolution of the brand’s original idea. It’s the opposite of it. Sellers deserve to know which one they’re signing up for before they sign the listing agreement, not after.

The question was never whether private exclusives should exist, or whether seller choice deserves respect. Informed seller choice requires more than presenting alternatives — it requires helping owners understand what they may gain, what they may give up, and how much confidence exists behind each prediction. The debate isn’t about whether private exclusives should exist. It’s about whether the evidence supporting their use is as rigorous as the fiduciary duty owed to the client.

Bruce Ailion is an Atlanta-based real estate attorney and broker.

Disclosure: The author has no financial, employment, or contractual relationship with Compass, Anywhere Real Estate, ERA, Zillow, CoStar/Homes.com, realtor.com, or any individual named here. As a practicing broker, he competes generally in the residential market and has a general stake in how listing strategies evolve — disclosed rather than left for a reader to find. He holds no position favoring any single brokerage or portal in this debate.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of HousingWire’s editorial department and its owners.

To contact the editor responsible for this piece: tracey@hwmedia.com