Off-Market Options

The distinction matters because sellers use the phrase off market to mean privacy, and the expensive version of privacy is the one that hides the home from other agents. Hiding it from Zillow while every agent in the county can see it costs you almost nothing and delivers most of what people are asking for.

Our own view: a true office exclusive is right for a small number of sellers with a specific reason, and wrong for most people who ask for it.

Competition is what produces a price above asking, and competition requires people knowing. A home shown to a handful of buyers through one brokerage will find a buyer; it is much less likely to find the one who was going to stretch. That difference does not show up as a failure, which is what makes it easy to underestimate: you get an offer, you accept it, and you never learn what the open market would have done.

There is also a documentation point worth knowing. Selling outside the multiple listing service means the sale may not report in the usual way, which affects the comparable record for your own neighbourhood and, occasionally, an appraisal on the buyer's side.

A Coming Soon listing is filed and visible to agents, so interest builds while you finish preparing, and it moves to Active automatically on day 22 or on the start date you chose. Because the days do not accumulate, a home that launches after three weeks in Coming Soon still launches as brand new.

What that buys you is preparation without penalty: photographs done properly, the disclosure packet finished, the association package ordered and received, and a launch timed for a weekend rather than whenever the paperwork happened to be ready. Used well it is the closest thing to a free option in a listing.

This is the answer for most sellers who arrive asking about going off market. Your neighbours do not see it, it does not appear on the portals, no photographs of your interior are circulating publicly, and yet every buyer's agent in the county knows it exists.

It has to be signed, it is not a default, and it is worth asking for explicitly. A listing agent who does not raise the option is not necessarily withholding it, but it is frequently just not offered.

This matters more than sellers realise, because days on market is the number every buyer's agent looks at and the one that quietly invites a lower offer. A listing showing sixty days reads as a problem whether or not it is one, and buyers price that perception in.

So the practical use of the off-market statuses is not really secrecy. It is protecting the freshness of the listing while you get everything else right, which is worth real money and costs nothing.

Public marketing is broader than sellers assume. A yard sign, a social media post, a flyer, an email to a list outside your brokerage, a website: any of it starts the clock. The rule exists so that a home cannot be quietly shopped to a favoured few while appearing unavailable to everyone else.

The practical consequence is that you cannot have both. A genuine office exclusive means no public marketing at all, which means no sign and no social post, and that is a real constraint most sellers have not thought through when they ask for one.

The legitimate cases we see: a seller whose situation should not be public, a home with a tenant where showings need to be tightly limited, an owner who is recognisable, and a seller who wants to know whether a particular number is achievable before committing to a public launch and a public price history.

The case that is usually a mistake: believing a quiet sale will produce a better price because the buyer will be more serious. It generally produces a faster sale at a lower number, and the seller never sees the comparison. If speed and discretion are worth more than the last few percent, that is a completely reasonable choice, but it should be made knowing that is the trade.

That sequence gets you the association package ordered and received, the disclosures finished, the photographs done in the right light rather than the available light, and agents already aware, all without a single day on market accruing. Then the home goes live to everyone on a Thursday, fresh, with everything ready.

If after all that you still want a fully private sale, we will run one properly and it will be a real process rather than a phone call to two people. What we will not do is let you choose it without knowing what it costs, because that is the version sellers regret.