A Warning From Across the Atlantic
Sometimes the clearest warning about where an industry is headed comes from someone who has already lived through it. For eXp Realty CEO Leo Pareja, that warning came at an event in France, delivered by one of his own agents — a Southern California transplant who had recently experienced firsthand what it means to work in a fragmented real estate market.
The agent pulled Pareja aside and described her new reality: searching across eight different portals, cycling through listings on platforms like SeLoger, then separately checking inventory from REMAX, Keller Williams, eXp, and still only reaching about 60% of available properties. The rest required cold-calling local offices that may or may not return her calls. Her verdict was unsparing: "It feels like 100 years compared to what we have in the U.S."
For Pareja and NextHome CEO James Dwiggins, that story is not just an interesting anecdote from abroad. It is a preview of what the American real estate market could become if current trends around private listings, industry consolidation, and data fragmentation are allowed to continue unchecked.
The eXp and NextHome Acquisition Is About More Than a Deal
When eXp Realty announced its acquisition of NextHome, industry observers focused on the usual metrics — agent count, market reach, and operational synergies. But when Pareja and Dwiggins appeared together on the RealTrending podcast to discuss the deal, the conversation quickly moved beyond mechanics and into something more consequential: the future structure of the real estate industry itself.
To both executives, the tie-up is part of a broader strategic response to forces that are quietly reshaping how listings are discovered, shared, and ultimately controlled. The two leaders share a conviction that the fight over private listings is not a hypothetical future scenario. It is happening now, and the stakes — for consumers, agents, and independent brokerages alike — are enormous.
What Are Private Listings and Why Do They Matter?
Private listings, sometimes called office exclusives or pocket listings, are properties that are marketed and sold outside of the Multiple Listing Service (MLS). Rather than being made available to all agents and buyers through a shared, transparent database, these listings circulate within a single brokerage's network — or through select invite-only platforms — before ever reaching the open market.
Proponents of private listings argue they offer sellers privacy, flexibility, and the ability to test pricing before going public. But critics, including Pareja and Dwiggins, argue that the practice fundamentally undermines the consumer's best interests by restricting access to inventory and reducing competition among buyers.
- Sellers may receive fewer offers and lower sale prices when their home isn't exposed to the full market.
- Buyers are cut off from a portion of available inventory unless they happen to work with the right brokerage.
- Independent agents and smaller brokerages are disadvantaged when large firms use private listings as a competitive moat, giving their own agents privileged access to inventory.
- Market transparency erodes, making it harder for consumers to make informed decisions based on accurate, complete data.
The Consolidation Factor: Why Big Brokerages Have an Incentive to Fragment the Market
Understanding the private listings debate requires understanding the accelerating consolidation happening across the real estate industry. As large brokerages and tech-driven platforms grow their market share, they increasingly have both the scale and the incentive to keep listings within their own ecosystems.
A brokerage with tens of thousands of agents in a given market can theoretically match buyers and sellers internally without ever touching the MLS. That may be efficient for the brokerage — it doubles its commission on the transaction — but it is far less likely to produce the best outcome for the consumer. The more inventory a large firm can hold privately, the more it can argue that buyers and sellers alike need to work within its walls to get access to the full picture.
This is precisely the fragmented, portal-hopping reality that Pareja's agent described in France, and it is the trajectory that both eXp and NextHome say the U.S. market is trending toward if the industry does not actively defend the principle of open, shared listing data.
The MLS System: An Imperfect but Vital Infrastructure
The Multiple Listing Service has its critics. It is often described as outdated, inconsistent across regions, and slow to modernize. But the core principle it represents — that listing data should be broadly shared among cooperating brokers so that all buyers have access to all available inventory — has been one of the defining features of the American real estate market for decades.
That principle is what makes the U.S. experience so different from the fragmented European markets that Pareja's agent described. It is also what is now under meaningful pressure as private listing platforms expand, some large brokerages push the boundaries of MLS cooperation rules, and consolidation reduces the number of independent players who have a vested interest in keeping the system open.
What the Industry Needs to Do Now
For Dwiggins and Pareja, the response to the private listings war is not simply to complain about it. It is to build and support structures — including strategic partnerships like the eXp and NextHome combination — that give independent agents and their clients the scale to compete with inventory-hoarding mega-brokerages without replicating those same anti-consumer behaviors.
The argument is essentially this: if the future of real estate is consolidation, then the question becomes who is consolidating and why. Consolidation in service of consumer access and agent empowerment looks very different from consolidation in service of proprietary data control and double-sided commissions.
The Bottom Line for Buyers, Sellers, and Agents
The private listings war has real consequences for everyday participants in the housing market. For buyers, it means potentially missing out on homes that were sold before they ever had a chance to make an offer. For sellers, it may mean leaving money on the table by limiting buyer competition. For agents at independent or smaller brokerages, it means competing on an increasingly uneven playing field.
What Pareja and Dwiggins are signaling is that the real estate industry stands at an inflection point. The systems and norms that have made American real estate relatively transparent and consumer-friendly are not permanent. They require active defense — through policy, through industry cooperation, and through the kinds of strategic alignments that keep independent alternatives viable in a consolidating market.
The woman in France thought she was sharing a frustrating story about European real estate. She was actually describing a warning that American industry leaders would be wise to take seriously before the market she described becomes the market we all have to navigate.