Robert Reffkin is changing the way Americans buy homes. Who do those changes help?

By Samantha Delouya, CNN

(CNN) — Home shoppers scrolling through real estate search engines like Zillow or Redfin this spring may notice some unusual listings: homes labeled “Coming Soon” or “Preview.”

They look like regular listings, with property photos and neighborhood details – but one key feature is missing: sales history, the information buyers use to see how long a home has been on the market or whether its price has been cut. The homes can still be purchased, even though they have not yet officially hit the market.

The new listing format is the brainchild of Robert Reffkin, the co-founder and chief executive of Compass. For nearly two years, Reffkin has pushed promoting new listings online before homes are technically for sale – a practice sometimes called pre-marketing – and other real estate firms are beginning to follow his lead.

Reffkin, who oversees the world’s largest real estate brokerage, is reshaping how homes are sold. Supporters say “Coming Soon” listings give sellers and real estate agents more control over how properties are marketed. Critics warn the approach could splinter the housing market, making it harder for buyers to know what homes are really worth; sellers could also struggle to test demand and get top dollar, they argue.

Traditional listings typically show a home’s price history and how long it has been on the market — information pulled from local Multiple Listing Services, the databases real estate agents use to share properties for sale. Reffkin has called that record a “killer of value,” arguing that buyers often treat that knowledge as an invitation to negotiate a lower price.

“I believe buyers have the right to know what attributes of the house are real and accurate. I don’t believe buyers have the right to know days on market and price drop history,” Reffkin said in an interview with CNN. “You can’t buy days on market and you can’t buy price drop history. You buy the attributes of the house.”

Reffkin’s strategy is rippling across the industry. Zillow once tried to block pre-market listings from its platform. Now Zillow has its own feature showcasing homes before they officially hit the market. Rival brokerages are experimenting with similar tactics.

In February, Redfin also partnered with Compass to exclusively showcase the brokerage’s “Coming Soon” listings. Varun Krishna, the interim CEO of Redfin, told CNN that he sees the partnership and Compass’s embrace of pre-marketed listings as a way to revive the country’s stalled housing market, which has been hampered by scarce inventory and high mortgage rates.

“No one can say that what’s happening today is working. It’s just not,” Krishna said. “There is a housing crisis today. We have no buyers, we have no sellers, and someone has got to do something to unlock that.”

Compass’s footprint grows

Reffkin calls Compass’s signature marketing approach the “3-Phase Marketing Strategy.” Instead of listing a home everywhere at once, Compass encourages agents to roll out listings gradually: first privately to a small network of agents and buyers, called a “private exclusive,” then as “coming soon” listings online, and finally as traditional public listings across real estate platforms.

“If buyers deserve to know days on market and price drop history, then sellers deserve to know how long the buyer has been searching on the portals and MLS, and how many offers they put in that fell through,” Reffkin said.

Many in the real estate industry initially balked at Compass’s marketing strategy. The method breaks with the long-standing norm that if a home is marketed anywhere, it should concurrently be marketed everywhere. Critics say the system could unfairly push home sellers to make deals with buyers represented by other Compass agents, resulting in the brokerage collecting commission from both sides of the transaction. Compass denies that claim.

Pre-marketing may appeal to sellers who want to avoid open houses and foot traffic, but it comes at the cost of broad exposure and may disadvantage buyers, said Tanya Monestier, a professor of law at the University of Buffalo School of Law.

“We’ve had this really open system, and now it may become a system where you almost have to check individual brokerage websites to see listings,” Monestier said. “A buyer would have to know to that, but no one even knows this is happening.”

Regardless of the criticism, Compass’s approach to marketing homes, including its push for “coming soon” listings, carries far more weight now that the brokerage has expanded dramatically.

In January, the company announced the largest acquisition of Reffkin’s career: Anywhere Real Estate, the parent company of major brokerage brands including Century 21, Coldwell Banker, Sotheby’s International Realty and Corcoran. The $1.6 billion all-stock deal created a brokerage with roughly 340,000 agents across 120 countries.

Despite a struggling real estate industry, Compass reported a record $7 billion in revenue last year, before the acquisition closed. Meanwhile, US home sales in 2025 remained at a 30-year low.

Pre-marketing fight lands in court

The fiercest pushback to Compass’s marketing strategy came from Zillow, the country’s largest home-search platform. Last year, the company said it would stop displaying listings that appeared on exclusively Compass’s website in the “private exclusive” or “coming soon” phase for more than 24 hours, in the name of transparency for buyers. Redfin, then under a different chief executive, soon followed with a similar rule.

Compass sued Zillow, accusing the company of trying to crush competition in the home-search market. But in February, a judge declined Compass’s request to block the policy while the suit played out, saying Compass did not show it was likely to win its antitrust claims.

At the same time, a wave of consolidation was reshaping the real estate industry. Last summer, Rocket Companies, one of the largest retail mortgage lenders in the US, bought Redfin in a $1.75 billion all-stock deal. Then Compass bought Anywhere.

As part of Redfin’s partnership with Compass, Rocket will pay Compass to integrate its mortgage application process into Compass’s technology.

“This isn’t really a change. I would call it an evolution,” Krishna said of Redfin’s embrace of Compass’s marketing strategy after the Rocket acquisition. “We have an inventory crisis, and if you don’t create more inventory, somehow, some way, nothing changes.”

Rivals test the playbook

Reffkin was raised in Berkeley, California, by a single mother who worked as a real estate agent. He has said that watching her career helped inform his philosophy at Compass, which he founded in 2012.

“The secret to Compass’s success is knowing that the real estate agent is the client,” Reffkin told CNN.

Even some of Reffkin’s former critics have taken note. Leo Pareja, the CEO of eXp Realty, another of the country’s largest brokerages, was a vocal opponent of private and pre-market listings – but in March, eXp announced that it would syndicate “coming soon” listings to three real estate search portals: Realtor.com, Homes.com and ComeHome.com.

“If a portion of inventory is removed and only shown to a small group of people, by definition, that’s an exclusionary behavior that’s going to hurt others,” Pareja told CNN last year.

Zillow has shifted its strategy, as well, recently announcing “Zillow Preview,” exclusively featuring pre-market home listings from more than two dozen partner brokerages, including Keller Williams and REMAX.

Compass dropped the lawsuit this spring after Zillow began allowing premarket listings on its site. Compass called it a victory.

Still, in a statement, Zillow said it remains skeptical of private listings that can only be viewed by select people.

“The underlying issue remains: Private listing networks are not in the best interests of consumers, and they never have been,” a company spokesperson said. “Restricting listings to hidden networks limits transparency, disadvantages buyers and sellers and undermines fair access to real estate information which is so critical in this housing affordability crisis.”

Critics agree.

“This is nothing more than companies trying to make more money under the guise of seller choice,” James Dwiggins, the CEO of real estate brokerage NextHome, told CNN. Dwiggins has been vocal about his opposition to the push to decentralize listings.

“I don’t know how limited exposure in a market where there’s already few buyers is a benefit to the seller,” he added.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.