Dishin' Dirt on What's Really in the Compass Private Exclusives. It will Amaze You!

I have spent a lot of time lamenting over the destruction of Clear Cooperation.  The biggest threat to CCP is Robert Reffkin, CEO of Compass. With a possible Anywhere merger at hand, many in the industry fear that he will push the policy over all Anywhere brand platforms. 

Today, I have a copy of the advertisement Compass uses to sell clients on the Compass Private Exclusives and boy is it bad. It is pure propaganda that tries to convince a seller to go against what is best for him by promising better offers by limiting the exposure of the house. Pure non-sense.

Come look at the document with me.

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Gary

* Gary serves on the South Carolina Real Estate Commission as a Commissioner. The opinions expressed herein are his opinions and are not necessarily the opinions of the SC Real Estate Commission. This podcast is not to be considered legal advice. Please consult an attorney in your area.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:01

This is Dish and Dirt with Gary Pickering, South Carolina's only podcast dedicated to the real estate agent craft. And now the host of Dish and Dirt, Gary Picker. This, the third week of October, 2025. I think I've got a very interesting show for you today because in my right hand, I am holding Compass's private exclusive advertisement piece from February 25th, 2025. This was their website advertisement. I do believe it has changed at least a little bit on their website, but I like going back to their original back here in February because this is what they were pushing out to all their consumers, all the sellers saying it is a good idea for you to limit the number of people to see your house that you're selling. It let's limit that number by about 70%. And somehow we're going to maximize demand for your house. So the idea is that we show it to less people and we create more demand. Now, that is some third-level, not my ninja type stuff that I'm apparently not smart enough to understand, but man, that's what they say here. Basically, by limiting who can see your property, you're going to maximize demand and get a best offer. Now, in a word, I think it's crock shit. And I think you're going to find it as crocod shit too as we go through this. And that's what we're going to do today. We're going to go through this advertisement and let you look at it and let you decide if these comments and these claims that are being made in this advertisement are in the slightest bit true, or are they just completely outrageous? I find this whole thing to be completely outrageous, particularly when we get to the end, when they try to talk you into buying through their private exclusives, how it actually contradicts itself. And it's going to be rather hilarious in the end when you get to look at it. But before we begin going through COMPAS's private exclusives, I do want to remind everyone, I am 100% brand agnostic. I don't care who you work for. Your brokerages don't mean anything to me. I don't care about more brokerage brands. It just doesn't matter to me. All I care about is you as a real estate agent as an individual, making sure that you're doing things the proper way so you don't wind up before us in the real estate commission and to make sure that you're selling to the maximum capacity that you have so that we can do more closings for you here at Blair Cato. So stay out of the real estate commission room, but stay in the closing room at Blair Cato. That's what we're looking for. But I'm going to call balls and strike some companies, particularly when I see that they're full of crap. And what they're trying to do is going to erode consumer protections for seller. It's going to devastate small brokerages, and it is absolutely going to erode fair housing protections. And here in 2025, I think the last thing that anybody in our market needs to be doing is promoting something that is going to erode fair housing protections. And I think that's what it is. And it kind of irritates me. We have people like Leo Perea and James Dwiggins who are standing up and saying these things. Everybody in the market should be saying these things. That getting rid of clear cooperation and going to private exclusives is a step toward ending fair housing protections. It just simply is. This isn't hyperbole. This isn't exaggeration. These are simple facts. That when one brokerage can hold 30 to 40% of the listings in a community, particularly when a lot of those listings are going to come from a particular neighborhood or section of town, if they don't have enough minority agents in their fold, then how are the minority clients going to get a hold of those listings to see them? And it's just going to create fair housing. I've had never had anybody argue with me on this. No one comes to me and says, no, you're fooled of it, Gary. It won't have anything to do with fair housing. Everybody just shakes their head. They all know it's true. Now, before we get into this and going over this listing, what I do want to do is remind everyone that in the upstate coming up here on October 23rd in our Maldon office park parking lot, we are having our annual Tailgate event. It's always a great time. Kelly's been working very hard to put it together. We've got another great event with barbecue, games, music, giveaways, and of course your favorite libation. So come on out, have some beer with us, have some barbecue, and enjoy your night and try to win some prizes. So if you want to see this Compass Private Exclusive, you can go to compass.com slash private exclusive or just go to their website. This piece of propaganda you can find at the top of the website. Just click a button and there it is. But there's really no other word to describe just a piece of propaganda trying to convince sellers that somehow they're going to make more money by limiting the number of people who sue their house. And normally I don't care about this. Normally these advertising pieces are just what they are. They don't do anything one way or the other for me. They're not going to affect the market. They're basically benign. This is very different, though, because what Compass is trying to do here, and by extension, the with the possible merger of anywhere, is trying to do is prevent listings from leaving their brokerage brands. And so they can get both sides of the commission. And when you look at this, the numbers would be staggering of the potential listings that would be only viewable at Compass and Anywhere. It's a pure money grab. That's all it is. There's no other reasonable explanation for it. And when you ask for the reasonable explanation for it, all they say is consumer choice. And we all know that not to be true. There's only one truthful explanation. And if Robert Refkin, the CEO of Compass, would be honest with everybody and just tell us that it really is about getting both sides of the of the commission, then I think people would have more respect for him. But what most people in this industry think is that he will try to implement this program across all of the Anywhere brands if he is to acquire them. What that would mean is over 300,000 real estate agents across the country would be out trying to convince their seller clients that they need to market the property internally to their limited number of agents, and that that is better somehow for the seller than it is to actively market the property to the entire 3 million active licensees in the country. We pass it off to 10% of the market to create more money versus showing it to 100%. That is a brilliant marketing strategy. Only show what you're trying to sell to 10% of the people, why show it to everybody? We have this saying in the practice of law, if it doesn't pass the giggle test, then you probably shouldn't say it. I don't know anyone who can say without laughing or giggling that it is in the best interest of the seller to limit exposure of the property. All y'all all talk about is how do we get the maximum exposure. In fact, when your clients list a property within minutes, they want to know, is it on Zillow? Is it on Zillow? Why is it not on Zillow? Why are we not getting exposure? So it doesn't pass the giggle test. Nobody with a straight face can actually sit here and say, absolutely limiting the number of people that can see this house on the MLS or in Zillow or whatever. It's great for my seller. It's in the best interest of my seller to get less people to look at our house so we can get less offers and make less money. Anecdotally, I have asked many agents, including many anywhere brand agents. I like agents all over all brands. It doesn't matter to me where they work. I like a lot of the Anywhere brands. And I've talked to their agents and I've talked to a lot of the brokers, and everyone says the same thing. They all say it's a bunch of BS. Everybody knows what Refkin is doing, it's trying to capture both sides. This has nothing to do with consumer choice. It's plain and simple. It's both sides. Now, whether or not this merger will actually go through, that's still in question. Compass may not want to assume a ton of debt. And when we mean a ton of debt, we mean billions of dollars of debt that anywhere has. So it might not be worth it to Compass when they get in here and start looking at the numbers to assume billions of dollars of debt. Just two billion alone from Century 21. But on the other hand, it might be worth it to Compass if he can get 25% of a market share so that he can use the number of agents and the number of sides that he has to try to force change at NAR by ending clear cooperation, which they've already said they're not going to comply with. So if it's that what he, if that's what he's looking for, if he's looking for change, then this is certainly the way to do it. Again, it's still questionable whether it goes through, but I don't think it's questionable that he would implement this system across all the brands. In fact, Daniel Houston of M News thinks he will as well. In a September 23rd article, Houston says acquisition gives CEO Robert Refkin more leverage and an even bigger megaphone in his efforts to bring about changes to long-standing industry policy on private listings and beyond. Look, I love change. I love change in the marketplace. I'm one of the few people that think the change that was brought on by Sister Burnett was actually more good than bad. I think it is good that we are not marketing commissions in the multiple listing service, and that you can't go to the multiple listing service and sort by commission amounts. I think it is great that it's not guaranteed that you have to negotiate that as part of the transaction. That's the way it should have always been. No other industry ever did that or would even think of doing that. So change is good. In fact, I think the real estate market needs even more changes. If it's going to survive artificial intelligence, it's going to have to continue to change. If you're going to survive the next lawsuit, you're going to have to continue to change. For people who think that Michael Ketchmark is going to make half a billion dollars in attorney fees and all the other lawyers are going to say, Shucks, I missed my opportunity. You're crazy. There's going to be more lawsuits. And that's why if Refkin would use his bully pulpit to get rid of things in the industry that are going to put you at danger, like broker-to-broker comp, that would be worthwhile. Get rid of buyer agent incentives. Incentives belong to the buyers, not to the buyer agents. I mean, have you ever had one of your clients saying, well, I'm having a hard time choosing between these two houses, but since you get a bonus on this house, I'm going to buy that house where you get a bonus. No, they don't. They only buy houses based on what's good for them. I'll buy that house because they're offering a buyer incentive, such as closing costs or add-ons or upgrades. I'm not going to buy a house because my agent gets some bonus that they didn't even write into my my agreement with them. It's commission steering 101. So use your bully pulpit, Revkin, to argue against commission steering. See, those are the problems that we are facing more today than ever before. Broker broker compensation, commission steering, and this is what's going to happen. And they're in some ways a byproduct, in my opinion, of the private listing scheme that campus has going here. Because, see, the problem is as long as you have broker to broker comp, then it's easy to convince your seller to sell in-house so that you get both sides of the transaction. If there's no guaranteed comp, if you're not telling the buyer side that we'll pay you comp through proper to broker, then it wouldn't matter about doing these house-in-house listings because there'd be no guarantee your buyer side would get paid a commission from this seller. But when you're doing broker-to-broker comp, it makes this process work even better. And I'm not the only one who sees what Refkin's doing here. Russ Cafano, who is the former CEO of Calabria Technologies, he knows this merger is going to result in more private listings. He said, I can't imagine Robert Refkin not wanting to push that across all of the brands. James Dwiggins, our friend over at Nexthome, who's been on Dishen Dirk multiple times, he said it might be too enticing for Compass leadership to pass this up. Of course it is. That's why they're doing the merger. Dwiggins also said, I think it's bad for sellers and for buyers, and it harms a consumer, and that's sad. Yes, it is sad, James. It's very sad. It's sad that Compass's brokerage has a business model that sucks so bad that they have to push this stuff as being good for the consumer. When everybody knows that they were just being honest, would say it. The reason you're trying to do this is to capture both sides of the listing. You know, when your business model is so crappy that the only way you can make it work is to make more money off of your seller against the fiduciary duty you owe to the seller, what does that say? It's not good. I mean, it's like these brokerages now, and Compass is one of them that try to push their mortgage, try to push their title, try to push their homeowner's insurance. Again, if your primary business is representing buyers and sellers in the buy and selling of real estate, and you can't make money doing that, so you have to get into mortgage, your business model sucks. So all of your brokerages that are doing this because your brokerage model sucks. I'm sorry, there's no other way around it. Blair Cato isn't getting into selling real estate because we aren't making money doing closings. Why do we need to get into selling real estate? We have a primary goal and function here is to do title and do real estate closings, and we do it correctly, we do it efficiently, we make money at it. So I don't need to get into mortgage lending or real estate sales. But apparently a lot of brokerages do because they can't make money. So let's take a look here at this program because it's very eye-opening. Now, again, they've made some changes to this language on their website, which, as you know, all this language lasts forever. Once you put something on the internet, it's out there forever. And plaintiffs, lawyers, I guarantee you, will go back to this language from February and use this against them, as I will predict here later. But let's look at this headline: maximize demand for your most valuable asset. Because nothing says maximizing demand for your house, like not telling 75% of the market about it. I mean, I know again, this is some third-level genius stuff. This is like ninja level learning. But apparently, the best way to sell your house is to tell no one about it. I mean, that is some really third-level marketing genius and stuff there, apparently. I don't understand it. Maybe I'm not capable of understanding it, but that statement right there, I just love it. Just like many companies, test products with a smaller audience before launch, listing your home as a compass private exclusive allows you to test price. All right, first of all, companies that test products have products, not product. You have a product, you have one, one house to sell. That's it. As a seller, you're not selling products. You're selling a house, one singular. So why would I be testing my product when I only have one product? I'm going to sell my product. Companies that test their products are companies that make millions and millions of units. So they're going to test the one or you know, a few products and then they'll put out the main product. But they're not selling one product, they've been testing it to a small audience. That's a complete nonsense statement. And it's completely disingenuous. You know what actually tests the price the most is getting multiple offers. That's what tests your price, the marketplace. Putting the property out there and getting multiple offers, multiple buyers interested, or even not interested in your property, that will set the market for you. Not one agent in one office who's got one buyer. And it certainly reminds me of that article I read a couple of weeks ago where one journalist had listed a property through one of these private exclusives and within hours got her listing under, was very excited. And then that contract fell through. And then she went to the real market and got an offer within a day for$100,000 more. So did you really test the market by keeping it internally? It sounds like to me you suppressed the market. So I think this is complete disingenuous nonsense. Now it says you can also gain critical insights because that's what sellers want. Nobody wants a contract, nobody wants to get their house sold quickly. They want critical insight because I know every time you meet with a seller, their first issue isn't really I need to sell my house quickly, I want to get an offering quickly because I have another house. It's they want to take their time, take 30, 60, 90, 120 days just to gain that critical insight that you should have already done in a CMA, and you should be able to do as any real estate agent should be able to look at the market and what houses are selling in that neighborhood. But somehow they're gonna get more critical insight by doing that. And then you're gonna create early demand. What does that even mean? Early demand? Demand from who? Who are we creating this early demand? By only showing the house to compass agents, that's gonna create more demand quicker than it would if I showed it to all the agents in the market? How is that even possible? I mean, it's complete nonsense. At what price? Sure, I can generate offers earlier if I have a crappy low price, but putting it to the widest market, that's what creates the largest amount of demand, not limiting to just a few people. And then it says, and extend your marketing runway. What they really mean there is extend how long it's going to take you to sell the house all before going public. This is complete gobbledygook. It's nonsense, and everybody knows it. Now let's look at this next section. I like this section just as much here. Compass private exclusives are properties that are accessible to 34,000. I think now they say 37,000. Compass agents and they're serious buyers. Okay, well, let's talk about this. 34, 37 compass agents, whatever it is. That's across the country. What do you care about an agent in Nebraska, whether they look at your property in some private exclusive website? I don't care. I only would care if people are interested in my market. So I'm much, much more concerned about agents in Columbia than I am about agents all across the country. And this is 34,000 agents across the country, not in your market. And now let's be honest about that number too. What is it? 76% of real estate agents didn't sell a single house last year. So only about 25%, 26%, 25% of this 34,000 are even actively selling something. So we talk 10 or 12,000 agents across the country if they're serious buyers? What makes their buyers any more serious than any other buyer on the market? Nothing. They're not more serious buyers than Keller Williams or EXP's or anybody's. So how are they saying that that their buyers are serious? This means you can market your home without the risk of accumulating days on market or price drop history. Well, let's talk about that. Because if you are foolish to think that days on market don't start the day they start marketing that property, you're foolish. Now, it may not be days on the MLS, but you are on the market. Once you put this private exclusive out there to other agents, that is days on market. And for you to try to allege otherwise, it's flat out a lie, and that is actionable under South Carolina law. So please understand days on market is the second you offer that property to anybody, that's on the market. That's not just whether you offer it in-house or out-house. That is days on market. When you work with a compass agent, listing as a private exclusive is the first stage of our three-phase marketing strategy. Well, I've already loved their first part. Their first part is so wonderful. So let's look at what their three-stage marketing strategy is. Well, first of all, we're going to do a soft launch to an exclusive audience. Again, this audience is no more exclusive than anybody else. It should say soft launch to a limited audience. We're going to make it available to our nationwide network of 34,000 and their millions of clients. Okay, whatever. None of that, all that is nonsense. We've already talked about that. And then we're going to showcase before being market ready, pre-market your home to buyers before investing time or effort into preparing it for the public. Because, you know, if we don't do all those things, I'm sure we're going to get such a great offer internally as we would externally. I'm going to put my house, market it internally in your brokerage before I get it ready to sell to the public. And that somehow is going to work for me getting a good offer. We know that's not going to happen. That's just completely not true. Generate early demand. Again, I don't know how we're generating earlier demand than if I just put it on the market. If I put it on the market, that would generate demand too. Test your price. Know how buyers are engaging with your listing. Putting it on the market, I can see how people are engaging with my listing. I put it on the market. How many times did it get shown? Who did it get shown to? I can call the other agents and ask them, what did you think about our house? What did you not like about the house? What do you think about the price? So I can get that information going on the market. It's no different than putting on the MLS. These insights are available only before your home goes live on other websites, helping you adjust to your pricing? Are you basically tacitly admitting, COMPAS, that you cannot effectively price houses? I mean, that's essentially what it says is that we need to adjust the house after we try to sell it to our internal agents. Well, if you knew how to price a house right in the first place, you wouldn't have to do that. Attract competitive offers. Now, this is the part that I love the most because I've yet to figure out this how this works. You can get competitive offers from buyers who are willing to pay a premium for certainty and reduce stress. Again, what are you talking about? How are you going to get more competitive offers by limiting the number of people to see the house versus showing it to an entire market? And certainly, how are they going to pay a premium? Why would they be paying a premium? I thought you were testing the market. You were actually low putting a lower price, apparently, because you were going to adjust the price up here because the market was going to allow you to adjust your price, presumably higher. So, what premium offers are buyers that are represented by compass agents going to make? And I'll show you in a minute that this completely contradicts what they tell buyers that they'll get a better deal by going through the deal. So I don't know how you can get a premium price for your seller and get a better deal for the buyer all at the same time. But that is the magic of a compass listing here. It's beautiful how they can do this. Now, the next part is you can maintain your privacy. Your privacy is valuable photos and floor plans, and homes are only visible to compass agents. But they just told you that was 34,000 agents. Nationwide. So are we keeping it private or not? Is 34,000 agents nationwide not via is that privacy somehow? I don't know. I thought if I showed it to 34,000 people that that's really not very private, not private at all. So it doesn't keep it private, it just keeps it off the MLS where other agents can see it. And they said they had millions of clients, so it's 34,000 agents and millions of clients. Just another ploy to try to get you to list a property. And it says, and their serious clients. What makes their clients serious? Why are their clients more serious than any brokerage in town? What test do we have here to make sure their clients are more serious? They're not. They're not. Now, here's where this stuff gets really funny. Now, what they have is looking to buy in this competitive market, work with an agent from the number one brokerage in the U.S., grant you access to private listings before the competition. Why do I need access before the competition, right? Why do I need that? Well, they're going to tell us here why we need that. Check this out. This basically undoes the entire thing that they have been arguing about. Access inventory only available at compass. Discover properties that are not publicly advertised, a critical advantage in inventory-constrained market. Well, actually, you are publicly advertising. You might not be on the MLS, but you're advertising to 34,000 compass agents and they're millions of clients. Okay, so that's not true. We're going to craft the most competitive offer. Now, I want y'all really to concentrate on this statement right here. This is for a buyer. Maximize your chance of beating out the competition and potentially avoiding bidding wars before your future home hits the public market. Is that not the most incredible statement? Because you know who likes bidding wars? Sellers. You know why sellers like bidding wars? Because it ups their price, right? How do you get a bidding war? Getting more people to look at your property, having more than one person interested in your property so that we can create the largest offers for the seller. So on the one hand, they sit here and tell a seller you'll get competitive offers from people who are willing to pay a premium. And then one page later, they say you can avoid bidding wars. So you can beat up the competition. This right here tells you all you need to know. You can't have it both ways. You can't tell me this is great for sellers. They're going to maximize their profit. They're going to get competitive offers from people who are absolutely motivated, serious buyers, and then turn around here and say to the buyers, hey, buy our exclusives because you could avoid competition. Well, why do you want to avoid competition? There's only one reason to avoid the competition, because competition raises the price. When you got multiple people competing for one house, it raises the offer. When you have nobody competing for the house, it doesn't raise the offers. Any moron who's ever studied business at all knows that. Heck, I don't even think you had to be studying, I think just living, you know that. This right here undercuts their end program. And then it says preserve your privacy. Again, buying a compass private exclusive helps safeguard your privacy by keeping your home photo off of third-party sites, like publicly marketed properties. Well, it's not your home. It's not even your home. What are you talking about? You're a buyer, not a seller. So I don't even know what you're talking about. But I guess they're talking about maybe it'll be on Zillow a year later. Guess what? It's still going to be on Zillow anyway. It utterly amazes me that this is the stuff that they're putting out there. What I like about this is that this is what plaintive lawyers love because they're going to find this stuff on the internet. They're going to save it just because they know whenever they file a class action lawsuit against COMPAS for these, for these, this program, they can pull this back up and they're going to show the exercise the jury exactly how they acknowledge that the prices get driven up when the property is on the open market. It's their admission. They have it right there in their own document, and they're going to take it and they're going to shove it so far up, you know what? They're going to show that right there, they are admitting that they can avoid costly bidding wars by going and buying properties from these exclusives, but at the same time, they're telling these sellers that they'll get premium offers on their property. Can't be both ways. This whole clear cooperation thing came out of this, guys. This is what happened in California, out near San Francisco, when a bunch of properties were sold. They were sold internally, they were not put on the open market. And then the consumers got together and said, you know what? I think we would have made more money had we gone on the open market versus selling this property in-house. And they won. And that's why clear cooperation came. And I just find this to be fascinating in a lot of sense. If we continue down this route and Compass does this and convince, and they buy anywhere and convince all the anywhere brands to do that, that is what we're going to be looking at. And how this simply works is you're going to have a listing, you're going to convince your seller to sell it in-house so your brokerage can make both sides. Again, it doesn't do anything for you, it just helps your brokerage. But you're going to do it in-house, convince it to be sold in-house. And then when your buyer moves in and the neighbor finds out that they only paid$400,000 for the house and they never sell the house on the market because their brother would have bought it for$500,000. They're going to tell the seller and say, wow, I didn't know you even put the house on the market. You sold it for$400. My brother told me he had paid you$500,$100,000 lawsuit. Times up by every single one of these. So hopefully this isn't going to happen. I'm afraid that it is. I don't think that there's any backing away at this point. I think Refkin's moving headstrong on this. He's already saying he's not going to comply with clear cooperation. I don't know what MLS or NAR's power is to push them into doing that. But if they do this and continue to go along this route and they bring anywhere along with them, y'all can expect the fireworks to fly. And you can expect the lawsuits to fly as well. Then there'll be antitrust lawsuits. I think there'll be fair housing lawsuits. All of these organizations ought to be out there going and fighting against this. So we'll see where it goes. But I just thought it was very interesting what Compass puts out there in their marketing piece trying to convince people that this is the way to go for your listings. All right. Well, I hope that is a lot of good information for you today. If you'll come back again next week and follow us as always, subscribe to us, share us, and tell all the other agents all about Dish and Dirt. We'll see you again next week. Hope you all have a wonderful week. Take care.