For more than 40 years, one of the most powerful tools I have carried into any conversation about the value of professional representation is the data on for sale by owner. The numbers have always told the same story: Sellers who bypass the multiple listing service consistently walk away with less money. Not a little less. Significantly less.
What the FSBO data has always shown
The evidence isn’t new. It’s decades deep and remarkably consistent.
Over the past year, the median price for a FSBO sale was $360,000, versus $425,000 for agent-assisted sales, according to NAR’s data — an 18 percent gap in favor of agent-listed homes.
But perhaps the most telling data points aren’t the statistics. They’re the stories about people who built entire businesses around the idea that sellers don’t need agents — and then hired one when it was their own home on the line.
The Wall Street Journal reported in August 2011 that Colby Sambrotto, founder and former CEO of ForSaleByOwner.com, tried selling his New York condo through FSBO channels for six months. He eventually hired a broker. The result: multiple offers, closing at $150,000 over his original asking price.
In May 2014, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported that Al Bennati — CEO of BuyOwner.com, a company built on helping people sell without a Realtor — hired a Coldwell Banker agent to list his own Florida estate at $3.78 million.
The founders of two major FSBO platforms chose professional representation and the open market when it was their own money on the line. That is not an anecdote. That is a data point about what people who understand the system actually do when the stakes are real.
The MLS: The engine that makes the price
Here is the metaphor I keep coming back to. A FSBO is like opening a restaurant with a hand-lettered sign in the window and hoping the right customers walk by. The MLS is listing on every delivery app, every review site, every map platform at once — so every hungry buyer in the city finds you simultaneously.
That simultaneousness is not just convenient. It’s the competitive mechanism that drives prices up. Multiple buyers discovering the same home on the same day, knowing others are looking, creates urgency and competing offers.
Remove that, and you haven’t just changed the marketing channel. You have dismantled the pricing structure that works in the seller’s favor. This is precisely why FSBO homes have consistently underperformed agent-assisted sales for 30 years running.
The new category we’ve created
Which brings me to what I’m watching happen right now — and why I think naming it clearly is the most honest thing our industry can do.
Private listings and coming-soon strategies are being presented to sellers as sophisticated marketing approaches. I want to be clear: I am pro-seller’s choice.
A seller who understands the trade-offs and chooses a private or pre-market strategy has every right to make that decision. Privacy is a legitimate concern. Controlling foot traffic is a legitimate concern. For the right seller in the right situation, those are real benefits.
What I can’t support is presenting a private or coming-soon strategy as financially superior to the open MLS — because that claim runs directly into decades of consistent data. And it has created something that deserves its own name: the company FSBO.
A traditional FSBO limits a home’s exposure to whoever happens to drive by. The seller restricts their buyer pool, often knowingly. A company FSBO does the same thing with a different wrapper — limiting exposure to buyers working with agents at one brokerage or one portal’s pre-market feed. The significant difference between the two is transparency.
A FSBO seller knows what they’re signing up for. A seller entering a company FSBO arrangement is often told the opposite — that restricting the buyer pool will produce a better outcome. The data does not support that claim.
To be fair, at least one company claims its private-first approach sells homes for nearly 3 percent more. But here’s what they’re not telling the homeowner: That 3 percent isn’t compared to the full open market. It’s compared to their own company’s MLS listings. And when you look at how its MLS listings perform against everyone else’s, they’re already coming in lower.
So, they’re basically saying, “We do better than our own below-average results.” That’s not a win for the seller. That’s a stat that only looks good if you don’t ask the next question.
A FSBO limits your buyer pool to whoever drives by. A company FSBO limits it to whoever works with that company. Both reduce competition. The seller deserves to know that before they sign.
The argument with no good answer
The data is not complicated. Zillow’s analysis of 2.72 million transactions shows sellers who limit pre-market exposure can see a difference of 1.5 to 3.7 percent in their final sale price. Bright MLS’s empirical study confirms pre-market listings take 17 more days to sell with no price advantage. One direction. Every time.
So, here’s the question I want every agent and brokerage leader to sit with. If limiting a listing to one brokerage’s network genuinely produced higher prices than the open MLS, we’d have a fiduciary obligation to abolish the MLS entirely.
Why would any agent who owes a duty to their seller ever use a system that — by this logic — actively hurts them?
The answer is: We wouldn’t. And we don’t argue for abolishing the MLS because deep down, we all know the truth. Maximum exposure to the maximum number of buyers produces the best outcome for sellers.
The FSBO data proved it decades ago. The MLS was built on it. A company FSBO, dressed up in the language of seller choice, is still a restricted buyer pool. And we’ve known for a long time what restricted buyer pools produce.
Darryl Davis is the CEO of Darryl Davis Seminars. Connect with him on Facebook or YouTube.
