Selling Your House Off-Market: Is It Right for You?
If you’ve decided you’ll be selling your house, going off-market may have crossed your mind. Learn about the benefits and drawbacks of selling a house off-market compared to a traditional sale, and why it isn’t the best option for every situation. Let’s take a closer look to see if selling your house off-market could be a good move that meets your needs.
Selling your home on the open market
There are two ways you can sell your home: publicly on the open market or privately as an off-market sale. If you’ve sold a home through a Realtor®, you likely remember your agent entering details about your property into the Multiple Listing Service (MLS), a database that provides public access to the largest pool of properties for sale in the marketplace.
Your agent posted photos and information about your listing to market your property that included:
Your asking price
Your address
Your listing agent
Exterior and interior photos of your property
Your home’s square footage
Number of bedrooms and bathrooms
Features and amenities
Property taxes
Number of days on the market
These and other details about your property then make their way onto every real estate website, where interested buyers get their first peek at your home.
Selling a house off-market
In contrast to the open market, the other option is to sell your house off-market. In an off-market sale, the seller doesn’t list their home on the MLS. Instead, they sell directly to a buyer. This can be done without an agent, such as requesting an all-cash offer from a house-buying company, or by working with a real estate agent to share the listing with a private network of buyers as an office exclusive. This differs greatly from the conventional way of marketing a property publicly on the MLS where it’s easily accessible to any broker, agent or the general public.
Prior to 2020, off-market listings — called “pocket listings” or “quiet listings” — were a more regular practice among agents, though they could be somewhat controversial due to their lack of transparency. The mindset was, “This is my listing; I’m not going to give anybody else access to it,” says real estate agent Jim Griffin, a top real estate agent in Johnson City, Tennessee.
