Nicole Friedman

I think the general experience for home buyers is that it's stressful.

That's our colleague, Nicole Friedman.

She covers real estate.

It's very expensive to buy a home, especially these days.

Home prices are high.

Mortgage rates are high.

And in a lot of parts of the country, there are still not enough homes to choose from.

The inventory is lower than it was before the pandemic.

And so they're really kind of glued to the listing sites, you know, waiting for a new home to pop up, hoping that this could be the one.

I think for a lot of buyers, that's where they start the process.

If they're thinking about buying a home, even just casually like, oh, is this the year maybe we should buy?

They go to one of these portals.

They set up, you know, search alerts for their neighborhood or their budget.

And so looking at home listings is often the very first step.

So Compass is trying to promote essentially a different strategy for selling your home.

Compass is telling sellers, you know, widely advertising your home for sale immediately is not the best strategy for everybody.

This is a really contentious issue, and agents are very passionate on both sides.

Brokerages are very passionate on both sides.

This is a huge debate going on in the industry about really what is the right way to sell a home, and how open and transparent should the market be, and who is speaking for consumers.

I mean, in D.C., all the time.