A new study says private listings beat the MLS. Here’s what it left out

Let me be straight with you.

A research report is floating around out there from the University of Georgia, and some people in our industry are using it to make the case that private listings, homes sold off the MLS without full public exposure, actually get sellers a better price.

The report is 56 pages long. It is loaded with terms like “coarsened exact matching,” “hedonic price equations,” and “quasi-natural experiments.” I have been in real estate for over 40 years, and I will tell you honestly; I needed my AI to translate it for me.

So that is exactly what I did. I fed the whole thing to my AI, had it walk me through what the researchers actually found, and then asked it to flag every place where the report’s headline number does not tell the full story.

What I found surprised me. Not because the research is bad; it is actually pretty sophisticated. What surprised me is how much the report itself contradicts the conclusion people are drawing from it.

Here is what I mean.

First, what does the report actually claim?

The researchers looked at over 700,000 home sales in the Dallas and Fort Worth area over a 20-year period. They identified homes that were sold privately, meaning the deal was done before the home ever went on the MLS, and compared those sale prices to homes that went through the normal MLS process.

Their finding: the private sales commanded about a 1.7% higher price on average.

On a $300,000 home, that is roughly $5,100.

Sounds like good news for private listings, right? Here is where it gets interesting.

Six problems with that headline number

Problem #1: That premium does not exist anymore

What the report claims:

Private listings get sellers more money.

Here’s what that actually means:

Buried deep in the report is a finding that changes everything. After the National Association of REALTORS® implemented the Clear Cooperation Policy in May 2020, which requires listings to hit the MLS within one business day of public marketing, the researchers re-ran their numbers.

The 1.7% advantage? Gone. The report’s own authors say it dropped to a level that, in statistical language, is “indistinguishable from zero.” That means they cannot prove any advantage exists at all after 2020.

And remember; that was before Zillow banned private listings from its platform. Before a federal court upheld Zillow’s right to do so in February 2026. The window that made private listings occasionally work has been closing fast, and this report’s data did not even catch the full effect.

Problem #2: The report says most smart sellers already choose the MLS

What the report claims:

Private listings are a better strategy, especially for higher-end homes.

Here’s what that actually means:

Here is something the report found that almost nobody is talking about. When the researchers looked at who actually uses private listings, it turns out the more expensive the home, the less likely sellers are to go private.

Sellers with the most money on the line, the ones who can afford to be strategic, are choosing full MLS exposure. The private listing approach is more common at the lower end of the market.

If private listings were truly superior, would not the sellers with the highest stakes be using them most? The data says they are not.

Problem #3: The report only counted the success stories

What the report claims:

The data proves private listings outperform the MLS.

Here’s what that actually means:

This is the one my AI called “survivorship bias,” and once you understand it, you cannot unsee it.

Those sellers end up in the MLS column, pulling that average down. Not because the MLS failed them, but because the private listing experiment failed them first.

Problem #4: We don’t actually know how those buyers found the home

What the report claims:

Private listings connect sellers with qualified buyers without the MLS.

Here’s what that actually means:

Here is a question the report cannot answer. When a so-called private listing sold to a buyer represented by an outside agent from a completely different brokerage, how did that agent know the home was available?

Did the listing agent quietly call 20 buyer’s agents and say ‘I’ve got something coming, bring your clients’? Was that really a private sale; or was it informal pre-marketing that happened to close before hitting the MLS?

The report has no way to tell the difference. The MLS data just shows the deal closed with zero days on market. What happened before that, how many agents were called and how many buyers knew, is completely invisible.

Here’s the kicker. If those private sales were actually generating interest by tapping into agent networks, that is not a private listing strategy. That is a Coming Soon strategy. Which is exactly what I have been teaching agents to do, combined with full MLS exposure.

Problem #5: Dallas and Fort Worth in a 20-year boom is not every market

What the report claims:

This research applies to sellers everywhere.

Here’s what that actually means:

Every single transaction in this study happened in one of the hottest, fastest-growing metro areas in America, during one of the longest sustained seller’s markets in modern history.

What happens to private listing premiums in a balanced market? In a buyer’s market? In markets with normal inventory? The report cannot tell us. Neither can anyone using this study to justify pulling homes off the MLS in your market today.

Problem #6: This report has not been checked by other researchers yet

What the report claims:

Academic research confirms private listings produce better outcomes.

Here’s what that actually means:

I want to be fair here. The research methods are genuinely impressive. But on every single page of this document, there is a watermark that reads: “This preprint research paper has not been peer reviewed.”

That means no independent academic experts have yet examined the math, tested the methods, or verified the conclusions. It is a working paper; a draft. Citing it as definitive proof of anything is getting ahead of the science.

What the researchers are warning us about

The most important thing in this entire report might be the last page. After 55 pages of complex analysis, here is what the researchers wrote about where the private listing market is actually heading: They said, in their own words, that the strategy is being regulated away by both policy and private platforms.

It is a little like a doctor publishing research that a certain medication worked well in the 1990s, then adding a footnote at the end that the medication was pulled from the market in 2020. The headline sounds promising. The footnote tells you the real story.

The scientists who built the case for private listings ended their own study by telling us the case no longer holds.

That is worth knowing before anyone uses this report to justify pulling your seller’s home off the MLS.

The bottom line for you and your sellers

I am not writing this to pile on any company or any agent who has used private listings. I am writing it because your sellers deserve the full story; not a headline lifted from a 56-page academic report that most people will never read past the abstract.

When you read the whole thing, here is what the data actually tells us:

Your job is to serve your sellers with honesty and strategy. That means giving them the full picture, even when the full picture is more complicated than a single statistic.

Especially then.

Darryl Davis, CSP, has spoken to, trained, and coached more than 600,000 real estate professionals around the globe. He is a bestselling author for McGraw-Hill Publishing, and his book, How to Become a Power Agent in Real Estate, tops Amazon’s charts for most sold book to real estate agents.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of HousingWire’s editorial department and its owners.

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