Sometimes for-sale home listings are shared with an exclusive group of agents and hidden from the public instead of listed publicly through the Multiple Listing Service (MLS). These are sometimes called “pocket listings” or “private listing networks” (PLNs).
About half of agents (51%) report that their brokerage has a private listing network. A slightly smaller share, 44% of agents, report listing a home on a PLN during the last six months, and 48% say they showed a home on a PLN. Agents who view the current market as a buyer’s market were more likely to list and show homes on PLNs than agents who viewed it as a neutral or seller’s market.
More experienced agents were less likely to report listing a home on a PLN. For example, agents with at least 15 years of experience were half as likely to report listing a home on a PLN (27%) than were agents with less than five years of experience (56%).
What do agents think this means for customers? Similar shares of agents said that PLNs benefit buyers (61% benefit, 39% harm), sellers (64% benefit, 36% harm), and agents (64% benefit, 35% harm). One possible mechanism is financial: a majority of agents (56%) said that they believed PLNs increased the sales price of a home, though research is clear that homes not listed publicly typically sell for nearly $5,000 less.
Throughout this report, we use the term “agent” as shorthand for a real estate agent or broker ages 18 years or older who works primarily in real estate.
Results come from a nationally representative survey of residential real estate agents and brokers conducted by ZG Population Science. The Agent Trends Survey asked 1,002 residential real estate agents about their preferences and behaviors on a range of industry topics. The survey was fielded during December 2024 and January 2025. To achieve representativeness of the overall agent population, double regression with post-stratification was used, combining the survey data with microdata from the 2023 U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey. All results are robust to multiple other weighting approaches.