Five major deals in five days. That’s what happened last week in real estate, and I don’t think anyone has fully processed what just happened.
Zillow Preview signed almost 30 brokerages. eXp signed deals with Realtor.com, Homes.com and ComeHome.com. Compass already had its Redfin partnership locked in. Zillow rewrote its listing standards to make the MLS optional. Compass sent an open letter asking seven MLSs to stop resisting pre marketing.
And Washington state signed a law making private listings an unfair practice, effective June 2026.
In one week, the industry built new infrastructure to keep listings off the MLS longer and a state legislature said that exact practice is illegal. That should tell you something.
What changed
There’s a fair housing problem here that nobody in the industry wants to talk about. Pocket listings may create conditions for disparate impact under the Fair Housing Act, whether anyone intends that or not. When access to a listing depends on which agent you know or which network you’re in, and those networks aren’t exactly diverse, some buyers never even get the chance to compete.
In April, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to eliminate the use of disparate impact in enforcement or supervision. Disparate impact refers to policies or practices that appear neutral but disproportionately and unintentionally affect protected groups, even without discriminatory intent. While this Administration isn’t necessarily enforcing disparate impact cases, it’s still important to adhere to Fair Housing rules.
That used to be one agent, one listing, one network. What happened last week is a different scale entirely. Now entire brokerages are routing listings through portal partnerships, and the buyer pool for each home gets shaped not by the market but by which portal the seller’s brokerage happens to have a deal with.
Reverse steering
Every agent learns about steering in pre-license class. An agent directs buyers away from certain neighborhoods based on protected characteristics. In the old system the agent is the bad actor. The buyer is the victim.
Reverse steering flips it. Instead of an agent deciding which neighborhoods a buyer can see, the seller’s brokerage decides which buyers can see the home. Not by looking at anyone’s skin color, but by choosing which portal gets the listing, and each portal has a different user base with different demographics and different income profiles.
One brokerage firm sends pre-market listings to Zillow. Another sends them to Redfin. The buyers who don’t use those specific platforms don’t see those homes.
Nobody intended to exclude anyone. But someone got excluded, and if you look at who, it breaks along familiar lines.
“That’s not illegal”
I hear this a lot. Technically, its correct. No court has ruled that exclusive pre marketing violates fair housing law.
But “no court has ruled on it” is not the same thing as “it’s legal.” It just means nobody’s brought the case yet. Nobody has applied existing law to this specific practice.
The law that would apply already exists. The Supreme Court ruled in 2015 that the Fair Housing Act covers disparate impact. You don’t have to prove anyone intended to discriminate. You just have to show that a practice produces discriminatory outcomes. Justice Kennedy wrote that this doctrine “permits plaintiffs to counteract unconscious prejudices and disguised animus.” That language matters. The Court was specifically thinking about systems that produce discriminatory results even when nobody is trying to discriminate. While the Trump Administration is rolling back disparate impact rules, it still matters.
I think about steering a lot when this comes up. Before 1968, steering was legal. Agents openly directed Black buyers away from white neighborhoods and nobody called it a fair housing issue because the Fair Housing Act didn’t exist yet. The practice was always wrong. The law just caught up.
I think we’re in that same window right now. In my opinion, the practice is already producing unequal outcomes. The legal framework to address it already exists. Nobody has connected the two yet.
The incentive problem
Here’s the part that really bothers me. Some of these portal partnerships come with financial incentives for agents. Bonuses for deals that close through the platform. Referral fees back to the brokerage. I’m not going to get into the specifics of who is paying what because the deals are still being announced, but the structure is clear enough.
An agent with a fiduciary duty to their seller is being financially rewarded for recommending a marketing strategy that limits the buyer pool to one portal’s user base. The seller thinks they’re getting expert advice. They’re getting a recommendation shaped by their agent’s compensation structure. I think that’s a conflict of interest, and I don’t know how else to describe it.
The data on what actually helps sellers is not ambiguous. Every study points the same direction. Broad exposure produces higher sale prices. Off-MLS listings sell for less. When we recommend less exposure, we should be honest about who that actually benefits.
Look, I could be wrong
I’m not a lawyer and this isn’t legal advice. I could be wrong about how courts would handle this. They might decide seller choice is a sufficient defense. They might find the statistical threshold isn’t met. I’m not pretending to know how that plays out.
But before 1968 steering was legal too. Before 1974, you could discriminate based on sex and it wasn’t a fair housing violation. Before 1988 disability wasn’t a protected class. The law has always trailed behind the principle, and the principle has always been the same. Everyone deserves a fair shot at buying a home.
When the broker of big luxury firm calls private listings a “gimmick” and warns that “exclusion is what kept so many minorities out of pursuing their dream of buying a home,” that’s not a fringe position. That’s a major brokerage leader saying what a lot of us have been thinking quietly.
We can call this seller choice. We can call it innovation. I call it reverse steering. And whether courts agree with me today or catch up to this ten years from now, I think the industry is going to have answer for what it built last week.
Ed Neuhaus is the broker of Neuhaus Realty Group in Austin, Texas.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of HousingWire’s editorial department and its owners.
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