For two decades, buying a home in the U.S. ran on one rule. The seller lists, Zillow shows the photos within hours, and every price drop hits the public record. Buyers used that data to push back. Sellers hated it. The system was at least fair.
Robert Reffkin, the CEO of Compass, has spent two years rewriting that rule. After his $1.6 billion all-stock buy of Anywhere Real Estate closed in January, his version of the housing market is now the version most Americans get.
Compass agents now roll out a home for sale in three phases. First, the home shows up only inside the Compass agent network as a "private exclusive." Then it moves to a "Coming Soon" listing on the Compass site and a few partner platforms. Only then does it hit the public MLS, the shared listing service every agent uses.
Inside the first two phases, the data buyers rely on most is gone. There is no days-on-market counter, no price-drop log, no sales history. About 94% of those private listings eventually reach the MLS, with internal Compass numbers showing the early window is closed.
Reffkin said days-on-market and price-drop history are "a killer of value." His pitch: "You can't buy days on market and you can't buy price drop history. You buy the attributes of the house."
The Anywhere Real Estate deal pulled Century 21, Coldwell Banker, Sotheby's International Realty, and Corcoran under the Compass umbrella. The merged company now has roughly 340,000 agents across 120 countries.
In Washington, D.C., Compass's market share jumped from about 22% to nearly 40% after the deal closed. In Boston the firm is at 32%, more than seven times the next-largest brokerage Keller Williams. Compass's 2026 revenue is expected to come in at $13.73 billion, a 97.3% jump driven mostly by the Anywhere deal.
In D.C., Compass is also "double-ending" more than 40% of its deals, where one brokerage represents both the buyer and the seller and collects commission from both sides. That is more than twice the rate of the next-most-active firm.
Critics see the math clearly. James Dwiggins, the CEO of NextHome, said this is "nothing more than companies trying to make more money under the guise of seller choice."
The market backdrop is brutal. Existing home sales fell to 4.06 million in 2025, the lowest annual total since 1995, with the median price climbing to $414,400. Buyers already have less leverage than they have had in 30 years, and the public data they used to push back is shrinking. The next data point is Compass's Q1 earnings on May 13.