Nicole Friedman

If this three-phase marketing strategy continues to catch on, buyers now have to go to more than one place.

They have to go to Zillow, to Compass, and maybe to other brokerage websites.

Maybe they have to look at five or six or seven different websites in order to get a complete picture of everything that's for sale.

Which is a more cumbersome process.

You're really shopping it around.

Yeah.

He is really passionate about this approach and this strategy, and he really believes that this is a positive thing for home sellers, for homeowners.

And he really called out the National Association of Realtors and Zillow.

And he said, NAR, this huge organization, one of the biggest lobbying groups in the country, and Zillow, that these two groups are trying to prevent us from implementing this strategy and that we need to fight back.

A jury decided that the system that had been in place for decades about how real estate agents got paid was a violation of antitrust rules.

Interesting.

And as part of this, there was a huge legal settlement and the rules were changed for how real estate agents got paid.

And a lot of the biggest brokerages, including Compass, had to pay large legal settlements in order to settle these lawsuits against them.

Robert Refkin came out in 2024 being very critical of NAR.

And he essentially said, this is a liability.

And so he started to criticize these other NAR rules that were aimed at limiting private listings.

And he said, NAR needs to get rid of those rules too.

And also, by the way, I don't think these rules are any good because I think that my private listing strategy is positive.

And so he was very critical of these NAR rules about private listings.

And it kind of started this huge debate.