An Intel survey suggests that a strong minority of sellers might take the real estate market somewhere most consumers don’t want it to go.
A flurry of new partnerships announced by brokerages in recent days may have kicked off a day of reckoning for “days on market.”
As Compass CEO Robert Reffkin argued in February when announcing his company’s partnership with Rocket and Redfin, “sellers should have the freedom to list their homes in the manner and method they choose without fear of misleading insights that damage [their home’s] value.”
But these potentially damaging insights, which often include records of price reductions and how long a home has been sitting on the open market without a sale, remain valued by a broad array of consumers — including most active homesellers who replied to January’s Inman-Dig Insights consumer survey.
But that’s not the whole story.
The same poll of 3,000 working U.S. adults suggests that despite this broad public support for a representative “days on market” metric, the new coming-soon platforms might still find an audience among a significant number of homeowner clients.
Read the details in the full report.
A popular metric
For months, Intel has directly asked working U.S. adults whether they thought their agent should be required to list all homes on the MLS.
Their responses in January were largely consistent with previous surveys.
Question: When selling a home, would you prefer to have the option to withhold your property listing from the Multiple Listing Service (MLS), or do you believe it should be required for your agent to list it on the MLS?
- 37 percent — I prefer to have the option to withhold my property from the MLS.
- 35 percent — I believe my agent should be required to list my property on the MLS.
- 29 percent — I’m not sure / I need more information.
While no consensus emerged on this particular question, it’s worth noting that many respondents didn’t feel informed enough to respond.
Renters and other non-owners who didn’t have plans to enter the market were particularly disengaged from this question, and only appeared to form opinions after beginning to look seriously into the homebuying process.
- Nearly half of renters who were not planning to buy soon said they were “not sure” whether they believed agents should be required to list homes on the MLS.
- That share dropped by half to 24 percent among renters who were actively shopping for a home.
When forced to pick a side between seller privacy and listing transparency, consumers leaned toward the interests of the buyer.
Question: Which of the following statements do you agree with more?
- 46 percent — Homesellers don’t have enough options to protect their privacy from buyers when listing a home for sale.
- 54 percent — Homebuyers don’t have access to enough information about a homeseller’s for-sale property.
Most homesellers are also buyers, and not all buyers are homeowners, so it’s not surprising that results would lean in that direction.
But in one area of this debate that’s connected to the recently announced coming-soon partnerships, there’s a surprisingly strong consensus among consumers.
Question: Which of the following statements do you agree with more?
- 38 percent — Homesellers should have the option to keep private how long their home has been sitting on the market unsold.
- 62 percent — Homebuyers should be able to look up how long a home for sale has been sitting on the market.
This principle — which underpins a property’s “days on market” — is at risk of being significantly disrupted by the new brokerage-portal initiatives.
Aside from the Compass-Rocket deal, most of the new partnerships advertise compliance with MLS rules, and in some cases require a simultaneous filing with the partner platform and the local MLS.
But MLSs are still figuring out what this means for how to report “days on market” once a coming-soon listing goes public. In some cases, the “clock” visible to buyers might not start ticking until a listing has exited the coming-soon phase of its marketing.
As homeowners in particular get closer to bringing their property to market, they become increasingly likely to say they prefer to have an option not to list on the MLS, and to hide their home’s days on market.
- 69 percent of homeowners who say they’re unlikely to move in the next year said they believe days on market should be public information.
- For active homesellers on the market in January (a smaller survey group consisting of 103 respondents), that share drops to 55 percent.
This illustrates one of the areas of greatest overall consensus among consumers: Even among groups such as homesellers, who have a partially vested interest in keeping days on market private, most potential clients side with calls for “days on market” transparency.
Among non-owners, the preference for a public days-on-market metric was even more persistent.
- 65 percent of renters who said they weren’t planning to buy soon said they wanted a listing’s days on market to be public.
- By comparison, the share of active homebuyers who were not listing a home in January and prefer public days on market held strong at 62 percent.
As brokerage companies increasingly roll out pre-MLS periods that delay or bypass the start of a property’s days on market, these survey results suggest they move the transparency of a key metric further away from what most consumers would like to see.
Still, the results suggest that a substantial minority of sellers may find the notion appealing enough to try with their own listing.
In the coming weeks, Intel will fill in the picture with surveys of real estate professionals and how they plan to use these new coming-soon platforms.
About the Inman-Dig Insights Consumer Survey
The Inman-Dig Insights consumer survey was conducted from Jan. 7-8 to gauge the opinions and behaviors of Americans related to homebuying.
The survey sampled a diverse group of 3,000 American adults, who ranged in age from 24 to 65 and were employed either full-time or part-time. The participants were selected to produce a broadly representative breakdown by gender and region.
Statistical rigor was maintained throughout the study, and the results should be largely representative of attitudes held by U.S. adults with full- or part-time jobs. Both Inman and Dig Insights are majority-owned by Toronto-based Beringer Capital.
