Zillow, Compass Lawsuit Over Real Estate Listings Has Homebuyers Stuck

Jennifer Knoll got the first email from Zillow shortly after 5 p.m. on a Wednesday in late May. The next day, she received another. By the time the weekend arrived, she had three warnings from the home-search giant sitting in her inbox.

Knoll has been helping people buy and sell houses in the Washington, DC, area for roughly two decades, the last six of which she’s spent as an agent with the real estate brokerage Compass. But with the flurry of messages from Zillow, she found herself in unfamiliar territory: The most popular real estate website in the country was threatening to ban her clients’ listings from its search portal.

In each instance, the emails said, Knoll had marketed a home for sale without quickly sharing the listing with Zillow. Knoll tells me the homes weren’t ready to debut on the search portal, which tracks price cuts and how long the house has been on the market — instead, she and her clients opted to tease them on the Compass site first, where they could freely test prices and gauge interest before sharing more widely. Those decisions now leave Knoll on thin ice: Starting June 30, any of her listings that follow a similar path will be denied from Zillow.

“I’m not going to let them bully me into doing things that are detrimental to my clients,” Knoll tells me.

The war over “hidden” home listings is getting ugly. At the core of the dispute is who gets to see houses for sale in America, and where buyers will have to go to find those listings. The bitter feud features two of the real estate industry’s true behemoths. In one corner is Compass, the nation’s largest real estate brokerage by sales volume, which argues that sellers should have more control over who gets access to their listings. In the other is Zillow, the ubiquitous home of the Zestimate and an essential repository for both buyers and sellers, which counters that to make the market fair, most home listings should be available as widely as possible.

On Monday, Compass sued Zillow in federal court, claiming the company’s threats to ban certain listings violated antitrust laws. So here we are, with real estate’s power players duking it out on social media, in email blasts, and now in the judicial system. Compass and Zillow may be the faces of this fight, but pretty much everyone in the industry has a financial stake in the outcome.

While the battle has mostly caught the eye of real estate wonks who live and breathe this stuff, everyday consumers can’t afford to ignore it any longer. And though Zillow says it’s trying to snuff out hidden home listings, its policy could actually end up pushing more properties into the shadows. Buyers and sellers are stuck in the middle — the changes could mean they risk inadvertently passing over their dream home if listings get tougher to find, or they may wind up tied to an agent who can show them only a fraction of the market. In the most extreme cases, sellers may find that their home has been blacklisted from the top destination for America’s house hunters.

Compass’s gregarious CEO, Robert Reffkin, has incensed much of the industry by fashioning his company’s website into a VIP room where buyers can get a first look at homes for sale before they show up anywhere else online. Some of this “exclusive inventory” is advertised for anyone to see (well, if they click to Compass dot-com), while other homes are even more secretive — posted in an internal database that only Compass agents and their clients can access. I’ve written a lot about why Reffkin is chasing this model, but suffice it to say that it’s good for business. In the first quarter of 2025, almost half of sellers represented by Compass agents started out by listing their home as a “private exclusive” in the company’s internal system. Compass can then use that trove of exclusive listings to lure more agents and clients who are eager to get a look inside that private garden.

Zillow hates all this — listings are the lifeblood of real estate, and search portals like Zillow want them as soon as possible. The company also brings in a big chunk of its revenue by selling leads: If a buyer signals interest in a listing, Zillow will typically pass along their contact information to an agent who pays for access to its broad user base. But Zillow argues the stakes extend well beyond its own bottom line. The company says that Compass’ moves undermine the fairness and transparency of the entire housing market. When a house is marketed publicly to buyers, Zillow says, it should be available everywhere. By holding back some listings for itself, the theory goes, Compass is gatekeeping for its own gain at the expense of sellers. In an effort to fight back, Zillow will start banning listings that run afoul of the openness mantra on June 30. If you don’t share your listing with Zillow almost as soon as it’s available for the public to see, you can’t share it with Zillow later. The company has spent the past month warning agents like Knoll of the impending blockade by flagging listings that violate the policy.

This is simply right versus wrong.Robert Reffkin, Compass CEO

Compass’s lawsuit against Zillow, filed a week before enforcement of that ban was set to begin, accuses the real estate behemoth of using its “monopoly power” to force people to advertise their homes on its website. Reffkin has framed it as a matter of “choice versus control”: In his telling, the so-called Zillow Ban isn’t a moralistic stand — it’s a power grab. Sellers, he says, should be able to advertise their homes wherever and however they want, and they have valid reasons for doing so off Zillow. Compass’ lawsuit is hardly a surprise. Reffkin has been picking a fight over home listings for almost a year at this point, and he’s shown no signs of backing down since Zillow announced the coming ban back in April. At a companywide retreat in early June, Reffkin continued his crusade from atop the stage at a convention center in Denver.

Looking out at the crowd of Compass agents, Reffkin outlined the debate in clear terms: “This is simply right versus wrong.”

It’s easy to forget, though, that Reffkin’s original target wasn’t Zillow. In the precursor to the current fracas, the CEO set his sights on the embattled National Association of Realtors and an obscure rule known as the clear cooperation policy.

The NAR is one of America’s most influential trade groups. It oversees more than 1.5 million members and effectively controls the vast majority of the country’s multiple listing services, local databases where details on homes for sale are shared widely among real estate agents. The MLSes also feed this info to search portals like Zillow, which then compile the data to give both serious buyers and casual lurkers a clear view of the market, free of charge. In 2019, NAR unveiled the clear cooperation policy, which required agents to put their homes in the MLS within one business day of publicly marketing them. A sign in the front yard, an email to clients, or a Facebook post would all trigger the rule. The policy is supposed to prevent firms like Compass from advertising home listings on their own websites without quickly sharing them to the MLS and participants like Zillow.

Listing a home on Zillow may sound like a no-brainer. Just show your house to as many people as possible, then wait for the offers to roll in. Reffkin, however, argues that a one-size-fits-all approach isn’t best for sellers. The MLSes, and by extension, Zillow, show how long a house has been on the market and how many times the seller has cut the price. Zillow also displays a heap of information that sellers may not want tied to their listing: a Zestimate with questionable accuracy, a climate-risk assessment that highlights the chances of flooding, a running tab of all the times a deal fell through. That kind of info, Reffkin says, gives buyers leverage and hurts the seller (others in the industry tell me that price drops can signal a seller is ready to make a deal, and that this info could actually draw more attention to a property). Compass agents instead advise sellers to adopt a “3-phased marketing strategy” that allows them to test the waters within the safe confines of the brokerage, then display it on the Compass website, and finally share it widely on the MLS and everywhere else (94% of Compass private exclusives last year eventually made it on the MLS, Zillow, and everywhere else). By the time a listing is plastered online, Compass says, the seller has already had the chance to tinker with the price and gauge its reception.

That sort of model technically violated the NAR’s clear cooperation policy, though enforcement was spotty at best. Local MLSes were left to act as the cops, but they either weren’t always on top of it or simply chose to ignore violations. The answer, Reffkin argued for months, was for the NAR to simply get rid of it altogether. In April, after months of debate and speculation, the organization…punted. It released an attempt at a compromise that satisfied nobody, keeping the policy mostly intact and once again leaving local MLSes to sort out some of the finer details. With NAR dodging the issue and home-search portals still facing an existential threat from the growing number of hidden listings, Zillow stepped in as the judge, jury, and enforcer.

Limiting visibility hurts buyers and sellers, disadvantages smaller brokerages, and undermines an open market.Zillow spokesperson

In a surprise announcement in early April, the company said it would start banning homes that didn’t adhere to the basic tenet of clear cooperation: sharing a listing in the MLS within one business day of marketing it to the public. The search giant has since clarified a few things. Agents get two warnings before getting hit with a ban on their third non-compliant listing. Once a house is banned, it’s on the blacklist as long as the seller stays with that brokerage — the client of a Compass agent, for example, would have to ditch Compass entirely if they wanted to get back in Zillow’s good graces. And even agents who have gotten hit with a ban in the past can have future listings appear on Zillow, as long as they follow the prescribed path.

That ban is now at the center of Compass’ lawsuit against Zillow. Compass’ filings in the case refer to the policy as “a mandate that only a monopolist would adopt,” sacrificing some listings in the short term to maintain its market dominance.

“Imagine if Amazon banned a seller for offering a product on their own website first. That’s what Zillow is doing in real estate,” Reffkin said in a statement Monday, shortly after the lawsuit was filed. “Consumers should have the right to choose how they sell their homes.”

A Zillow spokesperson said in a statement that the company believes the claims in the lawsuit are unfounded and will vigorously defend against them. According to Zillow, the listing standards are designed to “ensure transparency, equal opportunity, and broad visibility for everyone,” helping sellers get the best price and providing buyers with access to all the homes available for sale.

“Limiting visibility hurts buyers and sellers, disadvantages smaller brokerages, and undermines an open market,” the spokesperson said. “Our focus remains on creating a level playing field that serves the best interests of everyone in the homebuying and selling journey.”

Here’s what the ban doesn’t do: Get rid of all hidden listings. The semi-public homes advertised only on a single site may be blocked, but Zillow’s policy, like the NAR’s clear cooperation rule, allows agents to use that more secretive option of sharing a home with other agents in their brokerage — without putting the listing in the MLS or Zillow. The walls around the gardens may change somewhat, but they are still intact. And while Compass is probably the loudest company doing this, it’s far from the only one. Howard Hanna has “Find It First.” Douglas Elliman has “Black Label” private listings. Corcoran has “Corcoran Reserve.” The 10 largest brokerage brands handled roughly 60% of US home sales last year, according to data from T3 Sixty, a consulting firm for residential real estate brokerages. As I’ve written before, if even a few big companies lean heavily into hidden listings, they could trigger a domino effect across the industry.

The situation is even thornier for homes marketed on Compass’ website but not entered into the MLS. Zillow is unequivocal here, but it’s hard to argue that a house listed on Compass’ website is really hidden — it may not be in the MLS data feeds or Zillow, but anyone can see it by visiting Compass dot-com. By discouraging agents from sharing homes for anyone to see, Zillow may actually end up forcing agents to lean more heavily on the secret “office exclusives.”

“The unintended effect of that is actually pushing these listings deeper and deeper into the shadows, making them harder for people to find,” says Mike DelPrete, a tech strategist and scholar-in-residence at the University of Colorado Boulder.

A Zillow spokesperson tells me they believe the policy will have the opposite effect. And while it’ll take some time to see how things play out, I do think it’s safe to say that buyers want to be able to see all the listings in one place. Sure, you could hop around the websites of all the big brokerages and maybe piece together the market that way. But wouldn’t it be nicer to cruise to one website and scroll through everything that’s available? Glenn Kelman, the CEO of Redfin, another home-search portal that has instituted a policy similar to Zillow’s, certainly thinks so.

“You shouldn’t have to go to 10 different websites to see 10 different sets of inventory,” Kelman told me back in April. “That will be a challenge for consumers.”

The fantasy I just described, though, has never really existed. Pocket listings have always been a part of real estate, and buyers have always relied on agents to unearth the homes they couldn’t find on their own. Hidden home listings aren’t new. But we’re about to find out just how much more prevalent they could become.

James Rodriguez is a senior reporter on Business Insider’s Discourse team.