Truth at the Listing Table: What Sellers Need to Hear
An open letter warning agents that misleading statistics about MLS success can distort truth, urging full transparency and fiduciary integrity at the listing table.
Over the course of my career, I made a deliberate choice. I chose to serve agents, not brokers, executives, or corporate leaders. That wasn’t an accident. It came from a clear-eyed recognition that agents and the people who run real estate organizations, at every level, are operating under fundamentally different pressures with fundamentally different goals.
Think about it this way. Whether a broker runs a franchise with thousands of agents, an independent firm has twenty salespeople, or a publicly traded company has hundreds of thousands of affiliated agents, the company’s agenda is shaped by organizational survival and growth. Brokers need to recruit agents, retain agents, grow market share, and protect the brand. Publicly traded companies, such as franchisors and publicly traded large firms, add another layer: They answer to shareholders, quarterly earnings, and stock prices. Independent brokers also answer to their bottom line, including rent, staff, training, marketing and technology costs. Franchise owners add a layer of royalty structures and brand compliance pressures. The specifics differ, but the underlying reality is the same:
A brokerage organization’s needs and an individual agent’s needs are sometimes aligned, but not the same.
That is not a criticism of our industry structure. It is simply how things work in housing. A broker who builds a tool, program, or marketing strategy seeks to serve the brokerage’s goals. When it also serves agents and their clients, that’s a genuine win. But when there is a conflict between what is good for the organization and what is good for the client sitting across from an agent at the kitchen table, the organization’s communications will not always express that conflict clearly. It is not in their interest to do so.
I believe, and this is the foundation of everything I do, that real estate agents are committed to making a difference in the world. They have chosen real estate as the vehicle to express that commitment. Agents don’t choose this profession because it’s the easiest path to a paycheck. At their core, agents want to make a difference in people’s lives. That shows up most clearly, not in marketing, production numbers, or awards on the wall, but in the belly-to-belly conversations at kitchen tables. That’s where a real human being decides to trust you with one of the biggest decisions of their life. That is where agents live.
And it’s a very different starting point than some of today’s most contentious corporate communication.
This difference is exactly why I coach agents and not brokers. I believe agents need a voice that is not tied to those organizational interests. It’s why I write this open letter, because right now, some agents are being given talking points that do not hold up to scrutiny. If you use them on a listing appointment, you will be misleading the very person you are committed to helping.
That’s why I cannot remain quiet.
The Statistic You May Have Been Given
Specifically, there’s a claim that many agents have been given that might be seriously misleading to their clients. Here is the claim, quoted directly from materials currently circulating in the industry. I am deliberately leaving out the company name, because my point isn’t about one company or another. It is about what happens when this talking point reaches a seller’s kitchen table through you:
“94 percent of [COMPANY] sold homes were sold on the MLS, including [COMPANY] Private Exclusives and [COMPANY] Coming Soons.”
Read quickly, this sounds like a powerful commitment to MLS exposure. It sounds like the private listing phase (Coming Soon properties, off-market windows, and exclusive periods) is simply a brief stop on the way to MLS, where the home was always headed anyway.
It attempts to reassure the seller: Don’t worry! Almost everything ends up on the MLS.
It also sends a message to the industry: “We’re committed to the MLS. Our process works. Our pre-marketing phase leads to successful MLS sales.”
But that is not what the statistic actually proves.
And this is where the numbers begin to mislead.
The Math You Don’t See
That problem is the 94%. That figure is not calculated from all listings. It is calculated from sold listings only. That leads to two very different statistics. And that difference is everything.
Let me illustrate with an analogy:
Suppose a weight loss program enrolls 100 people in their program.
- 80 lose weight
- 20 drop out or see no results
Of the 80 who lost weight, 94% then proceed to join a gym. Now say the company’s marketing department makes this claim: “94% of our successful clients continued their healthy habits.” That statement is technically true, but it quietly ignores the full picture.
The trouble is the misleading statement “of our successful clients” because while it makes the 94% look great, it’s not a transparent way to report results. Out of the original 100 people enrolled, only 75 actually succeeded and continued forward. But the other 25 people?
They’re not in the headline. They’re not in the statistic. They’re simply gone.
This is what’s happening in real estate right now. Some companies are saying: “94% of sold homes were sold on the MLS.” It sounds good, but it’s not the full transparent picture. You aren’t being told what happened to all the homes that didn’t sell. The marketers cherry-picked a statistic that excludes:
- Listings that expired or withdrawn during the pre-MSL period
- Homes that were tested privately but never generated an acceptable offer
- Sellers who waited weeks or months off market, with no results
Those listings are not counted in the figure. Not in the numerator. Not in the denominator. Those homes simply disappear.
To make this even clearer, look at what a transparent claim would say: If the brokerage had taken 100 listings with the following results:
- Only 50 make it to the MLS
- Of those 50, 94% sell
That equals 47 MLS sales. And while the brokerage can truthfully say: “94% of our sold homes were sold on the MLS,” here is what the statement would look like if they included all listings they took at that same time:
Of 100 listings taken, 47 entered MLS and sold. That’s 47%. Not 94%.
Same data. Very different story.
The Question No One Is Answering
Here is the question some executives are not answering (and the one you should ask before you repeat it to a seller):
Of every listing your brokerage signed last year, sold or unsold, what percentage made it to the MLS?
Not just sold homes. All homes. What happened to every signed listing agreement?
Because that number reveals something the 94% statistic never will:
Whether the MLS is truly the winning strategy, or just a fallback to other schemes.
That’s the number that tells a seller, and the industry, how committed a brokerage really is to full market exposure. And it’s the one number no one is reporting and talking about. I have asked for it from some companies many times. I have never received an answer.
At some point, the absence of the number becomes the message.
Why This Matters at the Kitchen Table
You are not a shareholder meeting. You are not a quarterly earnings call. You are not a recruitment pitch or a franchise marketing presentation. You are a licensed fiduciary sitting across from a family who is likely making the largest financial transaction of their lives. They are trusting you, specifically you, to give them an honest and transparent picture of how their home will be successfully marketed. They expect you to use all the data, not just the cherry-picked data. Your fiduciary responsibility is to that person sitting across from you, not to the shareholders of your parent company.
When you share a statistic that sounds transparent but is built on a filtered subset of the data, you are not serving them. You may not even realize you’re doing it! The talking points given to you by the people who believe in their model, whom you trust. But that is exactly the conflict I mentioned earlier: The gap between your commitment and that of an executive or corporate marketer. Should you repeat those talking points from a brochure or training manual, you may not have realized the mistake. Good faith is not the same as due diligence, and your client deserves due diligence.
The data on full market exposure is not ambiguous. Listings presented to the broadest pool of qualified buyers, immediately, from day one, on the MLS, consistently produce more competitive offers, faster sales, and stronger prices than listings run through a phased private funnel. If you are recommending a different approach, your client deserves to hear about the tradeoff using full and transparent numbers, not a percentage calculated from listings that succeeded separately.
That is what fiduciary duty truly looks like. Not a version that supports a marketing narrative. A version that protects the person who trusts you with their home sale.
Recommended reading: Off-MLS Home Sellers Left More Than $1 Billion on the Table the Past Two Years
A Final Word
I am not writing this to criticize any particular brokerage; some form of this problem exists at many organizations right now. Each has its own pressures and agenda. That’s not inherently wrong. It is the nature of organizations.
But you, the agent, are not an organization.
You are a licensed professional. You chose this path to genuinely make a difference in people’s lives. Your industry is the vehicle. The client across the table is the whole point.
The gap between what comes from certain leadership—some of whom have never done what you do or earned a living as an agent—is worth noting. The conversations you commit to having at those kitchen tables are real. They exist at every brokerage, in every market.
Your job—the part no broker, no franchise, and no corporate talking point can do for you—is to know the difference. To ask hard questions about the marketing tools and programs you’re given before you put them in front of sellers. To make sure that what you say to a client is something you can stand behind—not because someone approved it in a corporate boardroom, but because it is true.
Because you operate from a moral standard of integrity.
And in a time when so much feels uncertain, that becomes your greatest advantage.
Your sellers don’t need more noise. They need someone they can trust.
Be that agent.
Recommended reading: The Private Listing Fix
Recommended reading: Zillow Preview Isn’t the Answer
Darryl Davis is an award-winning international speaker, real estate and business coach, and best-selling author of three books, all published by McGraw Hill Publishers.
For more than 35 years, Darryl has spoken to and trained more than 100,000 sales professionals around the globe to more than double their production year after year. His book, How to Become a Power Agent in Real Estate, tops Amazon’s charts for one of the most sold books to real estate agents.
He was awarded the Certified Speaking Professional (CSP) designation by the National Speaker’s Association, which is given to less than 2% of all speakers worldwide.
Whether from a stage or Zooming into a virtual room, Darryl’s extraordinary humor, relatability, and natural gift for teaching real-world, results-producing skills and mindsets to audiences have made him a client favorite throughout his career.
Audiences will laugh, learn, and ultimately walk away better prepared for a changing world, with the tools, skills, and training they need to build their businesses with more ease and less stress and to design lives and careers worth smiling about.
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