BAM Key Details:
- Zillow analyzed more than 15 million transactions from 2023 to 2025 and found that sellers in dual agency transactions lost a combined $1.49 billion, while sellers who kept their homes off the MLS lost an additional $1.36 billion.
- The typical dual agency seller lost around $2,165 per home, while the typical off-MLS seller lost roughly $4,230.
- Both price penalties appeared in every year of the study, with sellers in communities of color and lower-priced homes taking the largest hits from private listings.
Home sellers who worked with a single agent representing both sides of the transaction lost a combined $1.49 billion over three years, according to new Zillow research.
Sellers who kept their listings off the MLS lost nearly as much.
Zillow analyzed more than 15 million transactions from 2023 to 2025 and found that both practices, dual agency and private listings, produced consistent price penalties for sellers in every year of the study.
Together, they account for an estimated $2.85 billion in losses for sellers who may not have fully understood what they were agreeing to.
The findings come at a moment when private listings have become a flashpoint in the real estate industry. Zillow released the data this week alongside pointed commentary from its chief economist, Mischa Fisher:
“Sellers deserve an agent whose only job is to get them the best possible price, and a listing that every buyer in the market can see. When either of those things is missing, the data keeps telling us that sellers lose. Buyers searching without the right connections never even see the homes they’re being shut out of.
“It’s a velvet rope system designed to enrich brokerages, and sellers are subsidizing it.”
Whether you see private listings as a legitimate seller strategy or a structural problem for the market, the data Zillow assembled raises questions that warrant a closer look.
Here’s what the data shows, starting with dual agency.
What Zillow Found About Dual Agency
Dual agency happens when one agent represents both the buyer and the seller in the same transaction. This is legal in many states, but not all. Dual agency deals made up 4.7% of the more than 6.8 million transactions Zillow analyzed for this part of the study.
The issue Zillow’s data points to isn’t the practice itself so much as the incentive structure behind it. An agent in that position earns significantly more by keeping both sides than by sharing a commission, and it can create pressure, conscious or not, to close with a buyer they already represent rather than hold out for a better offer from someone else’s client.
For sellers, that pressure has a measurable cost. Zillow found sellers in dual agency transactions lost an estimated $2,165 per home on average. Across three years of data, those losses added up:
- Combined seller losses from dual agency transactions: $1.49 billion (2023 to 2025)
- California sellers lost an estimated $533 million
- Florida sellers lost $217 million
- New York sellers lost $146 million
- New Jersey sellers lost $115 million
The price penalty appeared in every year Zillow studied, from 2023 through 2025, a period when rising inventory was giving buyers more options and making bidding wars less common.
Under normal circumstances, you’d expect that kind of market shift to shrink the penalty. It did not.
The same dynamic plays out differently when the issue is not who represents the buyer, but whether buyers can see the home at all.
What Zillow Found About Off-MLS and Private Listings
When a home isn’t listed on the MLS, fewer buyers can find it. That’s the basic mechanics of a private listing, and it’s also where Zillow’s data shows sellers running into trouble.
For this part of the study, Zillow focused on homes that were either marketed privately and submitted to the MLS only after a contract was already in place, or never listed publicly at all. Of the roughly 6.2 million transactions that met the inclusion criteria, private listings accounted for 1.9% of the sample.
The price penalty for sellers who went this route was consistent and measurable:
- Sellers who kept their homes off the MLS typically received 1.3% less than comparable MLS-listed sellers
- Combined seller losses from private listings: $1.36 billion over three years
- Typical loss per home: roughly $4,230
- Sellers of lower-priced homes were hit hardest, typically losing 2.2% compared to similar MLS-listed homes
Even more jarring was the penalty gap between sellers in white and non-white communities:
- Sellers in communities of color lost 1.9% on average compared to MLS-listed sellers in similar homes.
- In majority white neighborhoods, that figure was 1.1%.
Zillow didn’t offer a definitive explanation for the disparity, but the pattern was consistent across all three years of the study.
Chicago-based agent Cory Tanzer, who works with Option Premier, shared this insight from the buyer’s side of the table:
“I can’t tell you how many buyers I’ve worked with who see a privately-listed home only after it’s been sold, and tell me they would have paid tens of thousands of dollars more for that house.”
Like the dual agency findings, the off-MLS penalty didn’t spike in one year and level off. It showed up in 2023, 2024, and 2025, even as rising inventory gave buyers more choices and reduced the kind of bidding wars that typically drive prices up.
What Agents Should Take Away From This
Sellers are often drawn to the idea of a quieter, more convenient sale. Having data that shows what that convenience typically costs gives you and your clients the clarity to know which trade-offs are worth making.
A few points worth walking sellers through before they make a listing decision:
- Sellers in dual agency transactions lost an estimated $2,165 per home on average
- Sellers who kept their homes off the MLS typically lost around $4,230 per home
- The price penalties showed up consistently across 2023, 2024, and 2025, regardless of market conditions
- Lower-priced homes and homes in communities of color took the largest hits from off-MLS listings
The research also gives agents a way to address seller objections about exposure.
When a seller asks why it matters whether their home is on the MLS, or whether it’s really a problem if the listing agent brings the buyer, this data is a concrete answer.
None of this means every private listing or dual agency transaction produces a bad outcome for the seller. That depends on the situation.
What three years of data does suggest, though, is that the odds shift when the market is transparent and the seller has an agent working exclusively in their corner.
