Buying a Home About to Get Harder Than 1985 — The Howard Hanna Move No One Saw Coming

Howard Hanna — the largest independent brokerage in the United States — just launched its own private listing platform called HannaList. This is the move that could trigger an industry-wide domino effect, and every South Carolina real estate agent needs to understand what it means for how homes get bought and sold.

In this episode, Gary Pickren breaks down the HannaList launch, why it's a major escalation in the private listing network trend, and what happens to buyers, sellers, and agents when more inventory moves off the open MLS. If Compass started this fight, Howard Hanna just made it a war.

What's covered:

• What HannaList is and why Howard Hanna's entry into private listings is a bigger deal than Compass — and what comes next
• How private listing networks make buying a home harder than it's been since 1985 — particularly for buyers without insider access
• The domino effect: which major brokerages are likely to follow Howard Hanna's move and what it does to MLS relevance
• What South Carolina real estate agents and buyers' agents should be doing right now to protect their clients' access to inventory

When the largest independent brokerage in the country goes private, nothing about the home buying process stays the same. South Carolina agents need a plan.

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Gary

* Gary serves on the South Carolina Real Estate Commission as a Commissioner. The opinions expressed herein are his opinions and are not necessarily the opinions of the SC Real Estate Commission. This podcast is not to be considered legal advice. Please consult an attorney in your area.    

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

This is Dish and Dirt with Gary Pickering, South Carolina's only podcast dedicated to the real estate agent craft. And now the host of Dish and Dirt, Gary Picker. Another episode of Dish and Dirt. I'm your often opinionated but rarely wrong host, Gary Pickering, coming to you from the beautiful downtown Columbia, South Carolina offices of Blair, Cato, Pickering, Castellan, this, the third week of March 2026. So many topics I could have talked about today, whether it would be the Real Estate Affordability Act with the large investor ban that has been offered in past through the Senate by Tim Scott and Elizabeth Warren, which is an absolute terrible bill, which we need to talk about and dissect that later. We'll probably do that in a week or so. We also have a brand new lawsuit that's very much akin to the Waller versus Rocket Mortgage, which is about RESPA violations and paying for referrals and so forth. And this one is against Veterans United. And this one, like the other lawsuit, has been filed by the Sitzer Burnett and the Morel lawyers. So these guys are going back for another bite at the Apple. We also have the fact that NAR is bleeding membership that we need to talk about. And then actually something that might be kind of somewhat of a decent idea out of Robert Refkin, which is the idea of a national MLS. And so we have a lot of things that we need to be talking about today, but unfortunately, we got to go back again and talk about something we've already been talking about. And what we're talking about is how this industry is continuing to shoot itself in the foot and is absolutely hellbent on going back asswards 30 or 40 years in time, and is starting right now with this domino effect where other major brokerages are announcing now that they are going to create their own private listing network, very much akin to what Compass is doing. I mean, who could have possibly seen this coming other than, I don't know, your host, Gary Pickering, who actually said last week that Refkin was crazy if he thought that the only thing that was going to happen was that Compass and Anywhere would create their own private network and everybody else would just be left out of those listings and they wouldn't do their same thing. I predicted that a Keller Williams or an EXP or some other big brokerage would join up with somebody like a Zillow and create their own refkin rocket compass type agreement and cut him out. And lo and behold, we're already starting to see that already happening a little bit. And we believe this will continue to go. So let me start with a reminder, though, as I do this today. I don't dislike compass. I actually looked on YouTube the other day, and some agent was from Compass was on there whining about how I didn't give the compass side and I just didn't like compass. I don't even know a compass agent that I know of. Maybe I do know a compass agent. Compass isn't really even in South Carolina, so I don't even know that I know a compass agent. But even if I did, I don't care. I'm 100% brand agnostic. I don't follow brands. I follow real estate agents. You are the agent that you are today because of who you are, and not anything because of what brand you are associated with. I would hope that you would give yourself more credit than that and not think that your story has been written for you by some brokerage. Your story is being written by you. You control your own story. You're a small business owner, if you will, as a real estate agent. You own your own business, you own your own brand. So I care about you individually as an agent and how you can become the best agent. And I don't believe that you are who you are today for any other reason other than who you are. Nothing made you, no brokerage made you the agent you are today. I'm not here saying brokerages aren't good. We need brokerages, brokerages are necessary, but don't underestimate or not give yourself enough credit as to who you are and why you are successful. But let me begin today with a very, very simple question. What if I told you today that buying a house in 2026 might soon become harder than buying a house in 1986? Sounds crazy, doesn't it? But that's not because of interest rates or affordability issues or inventory or anything of that nature, but it might be because you might not be able to even find what houses are for sale. And let me paint you that picture. You drive through your favorite neighborhood and you find that house that you've been looking for, one that you fall in love with, and you call up your agent and say, hey, I want to go see this house. But your agent says, ooh, that's not actually on the multiple listing service. You're like, okay, well, what does that mean? Where it is? And they go, well, that one's being offered on the compass platform, and I'm not a compass agent. And uh, so yeah, you got to be a compass agent to see that property. And then you're like, well, how about the one next door? And your agent goes, Well, yeah, that's on a Howard Hannah network. And uh, I'm not a hobby Hannah agent, so yeah, we got to look at the next one. Well, the one down the street. Well, that one's on the Keller Williams private platform, so I can't help you there. Well, I just need to call. Well, I can't even, I'm your agent. You and I've signed agency, so you have to work with me now, but I can't show you those properties. I mean, we're heading that way, and all of a sudden, your consumers having to go to Compass, having to go to Hannah, Keller Williams, Remax, Redfin, Zillow, MLS, all these different places to try to find just what homes are for sale, and then have to decide can the agent that they are currently working with, the agent they have agency, can that agent even look at the property because it's not on the multiple listing? It's in a private listing network, and will that brokerage even allow them to look at? But why did all of a sudden we decide that trying to make it harder to find the houses in 2026 than it is in 200 in 2006 was a good idea. I mean, think about that. We all complained about the name situation for teams, how asinine it was that a real estate team could not tell, could not tell the public what it does. Um I couldn't say I was the Gary Picker real estate team and tell people, hey, I sell real estate. I had to say I was the Gary Picker team that sold improvements upon lands that it might be situated in and lying upon.com, because it was wrong for us to somehow tell people that I'm actually a real estate team. Well, we fixed that and said this is nonsense. We should be able to tell everybody what we do and be open about it. But now here we are with housing. Let's not tell everybody what houses are for sale. Let's just tell a certain number of people. Well, guys, that's what's happening now. So welcome to the world of private listing networks. Compass's CEO, Robert Refkin himself, said it on an earnings call last year. He clearly knows this. He says, and he said it proudly, by the way, Compassagents and Compass.com have more inventory than third-party sites, sending a strong signal to buyers that if you aren't working with Compass agents or aren't searching Compass website, you are not seeing all of the inventory. There it is, folks. Finally, the truth. This isn't at all about seller choice. It's all about inventory hoarding. And by hoarding the inventory, consumers have to use us. They can't use you, or who they want to use. And if this continues, the real estate industry may be about to take a massive step backwards, back into the way the real estate was back in the 1980s. Chris Kelly, who's the CEO of Home Services, said at Emman News, this is exactly like the streaming wars. Remember when Netflix had everything? You wanted to watch a movie, you went to Netflix. It was that simple. But then Disney came in and said, no, we want our own platform. And then Amazon came in and said, we want ours. And then Apple had one. And then HBO had Macs. And if you want to watch television, you cut the cord and got away from cable and you went to Hulu or YouTube TV, but none of it's bundled, so I got to have Hulu and I got to have, I have to have YouTube TV, and I got to have Netflix and Disney Plus and Amazon and Apple TV and HBO Max, and don't even get me started on ESPN and the BS that ESPN is turned into. And as Chris Kelly said, so all of us were extremely excited to cut that cable, right? And so you probably told your friends and family, I want to cut the cable. Well, now you have Apple TV and Disney Plus and Netflix and Paramount. And how many of you are now saying, couldn't someone just bundle all these things together? Bess Friedman, who's the CEO of Brown Harris Stevens, said, it's not for some greater good. It's not like Refkin's trying to help the world. He's trying to get as much money as he can. And that's where we are in the streaming service type scenario that real estate, in order to find all the listings, you're going to have to go to like how you do streaming services. You have to have an Amazon, an Apple, a Netflix, a Disney subscription. And so the same thing's going to happen here in real estate. Real estate is about to become the streaming wars of housing. And all without the bundling that we used to have in one simple place, the multiple listing service. So let's throw out the bundling, let's throw out the simplicity, throw out MLS, and let's go to basically, just like it is in TV, 20 different bundling services to try to find what we want. And why? No, I really want you to think about that. Why? Really? Why? Why are we doing this? Is it some big groundswell from the consumer saying, hey, we really wish that the multiple listing service would just go away and each one of you brokerages just had your own listing service and we got away from the multiple listing service because we really don't like being able to look for property all in one place. I mean, we hate Zillow because we hate how everything's at Zillow, which is why we made it the number one platform in the world for real estate, more than the other nine of the top ten combined. No, we don't want that as consumers. We don't want it all in one place. We don't like that. We want y'all to completely break it up, separate it, and put it everywhere else you can and make it as difficult for us to find it. Because that's what we, the consumer, want. That what we are, I mean, come on, man, is that really what we are? Was this for the benefit of the agents? Were the agents out there saying, you know what? I really hate my job being I hate being able to go to the multiple listing service and find every single piece of property for sale in this one neighborhood. No, I would really much prefer having to go to that brokerage website and this brokerage website and this brokerage platform and this app. So the consumers weren't demanding this, the clients weren't demanding this. Oh, that's right. This is about your brokerage. This is it. This is about the bottom line. There you go. It's about the brokerage having the opportunity to control inventory so they can record recruit more agents and that by having more inventory, they can try to get both sides of the listing. It does nothing to benefit the client, does nothing to benefit the agents. We're putting brokerages before agents, and we're putting brokerages before the consumer, and then we're gaslighting everyone about the real reason why. And the sad part is some of these team player real estate agents, and you know who I'm talking about, I know a lot of you guys that are just quote unquote team players on whatever your brokerage tells you you believe is true. A lot of these out there, these Kool-Aid drinking agents are buying this crap and repeating the same gaslighting lines that we hear out of Refkin. But I want you to think about what Refkin has said. Sending a strong signal to buyers that if you aren't working with Compass agents and you aren't searching Compass, you're not seeing all the inventory. Just think about that in relation to what I just said. How is that serving the consumer? Unless I work at Compass or unless I go to Compass's website as a consumer, I'm just going to get screwed. And before he started all this crap a year or so ago, before all this, which nobody asked for, I could see all the houses. I could use whatever agent I wanted to, I could go to the MLS and see all this. But because he did this, Refkin did this, now I can't. Now I'm forced to use his agent, or I'm forced to go to his website to see just a sliver of the houses that are even available that were on the MLS, but now I can't just go to one place. So when you all start getting up in arms as we continue to see the splintering of these brokerages off of the MLS and into their own private listing, I want you to remember this, guys, because you're going to be fed up with this system very quickly when you can't find homes for your clients and you're having to go to multiple platforms and your clients are calling you about houses you can't even see, you don't even know about, and you're looking foolish. I want you to remember how this all got started. And remember, it was Robert Refkin who did this. And again, I don't hate Robert Refkin. I just hate what he's doing here, and I hate how he's gaslighting everybody about it. You know, I would have more respect if he would just tell us the truth about why he's doing it. He's doing it to control inventory, which means he can recruit more agents and he can get both sides of the transaction. Chris Kelly said, we're running down this road, and they're thinking in the short term. What does that mean right now for my personal benefit if we were to do this? And then I'm the consumer staying in the middle of New York City or Omaha, Kansas City, Miami, or wherever. And now I have to go to 12 different places to see the listings that I think it may be for sale. Tell me, how is this putting the consumer first and how is this a good experience? It's not. You know it, I know it, and even Refkin knows it. But here's the best part this is about to blow up bigly in Refkin's face because he will not be the only one to have private listings. So his agents right now, who can take all the Compass listings and I guess at some point the Anywhere listings and put them on Redfin's website and exclude all of you from having access and seeing access and being able to show those properties. Well, guess what? At some point, he's going to probably be blocked out of 85% of the listings if we continue to go down this route. Because according to ChatGPT, Compass and Anywhere combined for about 216,000 eight. I don't know if these numbers are true. Go on what chat tells me. There's an estimate 2.2 million agents in the United States right now. Compass and Anywhere combined, they would only make up about 15% of all the agents. If everyone follows what Refkin is doing, which I believe they will, he will basically effectively cut out access for Compass and Anywhere agents to about 85% of the houses on the market, whereas right now they have access to 100% of the market. I don't know whether Refkin just doesn't think this far ahead or truly believes that no one else is going to do what he does. He's going to create this private listing network, which will exclude everybody else from it, all the other agents, and no one else is going to do it. And he's going to be able to show all of your listings, and his agents are going to benefit from all of your listings, and yet they're going to have their own private listings over here, which only they can benefit from. And he doesn't think you're going to do the exact same thing as well. Like somehow EXP, Keller Williams, Remax, you know, everybody else is going to sit there and go, oh, look at Refkin there. He's excluding us from 15% of the listings, but he can still see all of our listings, and that's just the way it is. No, they're going to do the same thing, exclude him from all of these listings, and effectively he's going to, in the short term, he's going to help his agents out. But in the long term, when everybody else does it, he's going to screw his agents over big time. Let me give you another little history lesson. I'm like going back in time and giving you a little history lesson these days. A friend and listener of mine named Jay reminded me of something this past week. He said when he started in 1978 as a real estate agent in Columbia, South Carolina, we didn't have the MLS system that we have today. In fact, what we had was two MLS systems. And I actually confirmed this with Craig Summerall. He said, Yeah, we actually did have two MLS systems. I barely remember it when I first got into business in the mid-90s that we actually did have two systems. And as Jay said, he said, let me tell you something. Agents hated it. Every week we were swapping MLS books. These were the actual printed books. If we if you were helping a buyer, I might check one, then another book, and then you call another office and you hope that hadn't already sold already. And you could literally help in a buyer and not even know a house existed. He said, brokers were getting fed up with the system, big companies like Russell Jeffcoat, Bob Cape Century 21, Tom Jenkins, which were the big names in Columbia back then, along with a bunch of the other smaller companies, just got fed up with it. And they basically said, fix this or we're getting out of this. And so the top agents were threatening to leave the industry, threatening to do something different. And finally, all of that pressure forced the industry to do something that it should have done all along. It consolidated into one multiple listing service. And suddenly things became easier. Agents could see every listing. Buyers had access to every listing. The market became transparent. Fair housing was paramount. Everyone had an opportunity to get at that look at the house, offering the house, regardless of where you are, who you are, where you came from, what you look like. And for 40 years, this industry moved in that one direction of more cooperation, more transparency, more shared data until now. And so you have to wonder now, as my good friend Rhea Smith, who's a former president of SER, said, are we going to go back to the real estate books at some point so we can just really keep it all secret? Are we going to be fighting over the books next? I mean, that's really where it seems we are going, is a complete step backwards. Now, even today, we're already seeing remnants of this same problem, even with the MLS system. If you look at the Greenville-Spartanburg market in the upstate, agents have to deal with a Spartanburg MLS, a Greenville MLS, a Western Upstate MLS, and a Canopy MLS system. It's four MLS systems that luckily share information amongst themselves, but agents still complain about it constantly, about how some things are in some MLSs and not in the other. The statistics don't make any sense because sometimes the statistics shows in the MLS and Spartanburg as well as the MLS and Greenville, but it's the same transaction. It's kind of a mess up there. In fact, many of the agents in the upstate have actually pushed for a statewide MLS. And why have they? Because they're frustrated with how the current system works. Too many places, too much time, too much wasted effort. It's costing agents money. It's costing them time. Time is money. They're missing properties because it's on one MLS and not the other, hurting their buyers, hurting their sellers. Everybody just wants things to be simplified. You would think in the day and the era of AI and all the technology that is simplifying life for us, why would we want to go in real estate to something that is less simplified? Some leaders in real estate are just simply trying to make this more complicated. Can you imagine how this will play out as a listing agent? How you list your seller's house on your private listing network and you sell the property. And then one of their neighbors approaches them and says, I didn't even know your home was for sale. I would have made an offer more than they paid for your house, but my agent never found your house on the market, and we tried to find it. And the reason they didn't find it was because you're on that private listing network. Can you imagine how that's going to go for you? It's not going to go well. So let me be the first today to give a hearty congratulations to Robert Refkin, the CEO of Compass, because he may have just taken single-handedly our entire industry backwards 40 years. As you know, Compass, I talked about this last week, entered into a deal with Redfin and with Rocket, remote listings before they hit the MLS. Their private exclusives are coming soon. These are the listings that are marketed internally before they shared broadly. And Refkin was even pushing research, claiming that allowing these pre-marketing stages would increase inventory. And what Refkin did was he got an economist to suggest that allowing his approach to the listings could add another 6 to 12% bump in listing annually. And the idea is that sellers can test the market first. But the problem with his argument is it relies on assumptions. And the assumptions were why people weren't listing their homes. And even according to Mene News, this is a quote, the economist created a model using a baseline assumption that there is a pool of homeowners who would consider selling their home and moving in the not too distant future if they knew they could price test their market, the market for their homes. Now, there's very little real world evidence supporting that, but when you're allowed to make up assumptions that there's a pool of homeowners who would sell their houses but for the fact they can't price test, then at that point you can make up the assumption as to what that number is, and then you can just make that number say what you want. So, I mean, think of that. There's a there's a baseline assumption that there's a pool of homeowners. Just an assumption. We don't we don't know that there's actually a pool of homeowners who would sell their house if they could price test it. We're just gonna assume that. And they don't even really, what do you mean by price testing it? We can price test it by putting it on the market. And how are you price testing it by putting it on the market for sale with his company? What does that make sense? It's still on the market. How is that a price testing? It's pure gaslighting, is what it is. But even if it was true, it creates a much bigger problem. Because if one brokerage does this, everyone else does. And thus, my congratulations to Refkin, because that is exactly what is happening now. Howard Hanna, CEO, Hobby Hannah, just announced the launch of a private listing network called Hanna's List. And Hannah said, this isn't about limiting exposure. It's about launching with strategy. We build momentum first and then amplify broadly. Yeah, I don't believe you. I don't believe you. Because sellers want their house sold tomorrow, not after we soft-launch it and build momentum. But what does that even mean? What does it mean we soft-launch it and build momentum? All I know is the longer a house is out there for sale, whether it's to a small group or a large group, the less momentum it has. I don't see how houses sitting longer and longer and longer builds momentum. Man, I see houses all the time. They come out priced too high and they sit on the market for a long period of time. But what does it even mean that we have a soft launch and then we're gonna build momentum by it, letting it sit on Hannah's list? What's the point of the soft launch? Are we trying to sell the property or are we just trying to get a bunch of opinions from other agents about the pricing? He never explains that, and no one ever does. But guess who else is connected to Howard Hannah? Alan Tate in South Carolina. So this means you're gonna start seeing this in South Carolina. Now, in addition to that, Douglas Element has now launched their black label listings. What they say, quote, with Elements private listings, we are reaffirming the commitment to our ultra high net worth clients who know that we understand their unique needs and circumstances. At the pivotal time in our industry, okay, well, you see that ultra high net worth clients. That's not an everyone, that's a very limited number, particularly here in South Carolina. I mean, high ultra ultra high net worth clients do you have? But that's not what Compass is doing. Compass has pushed 35% of their listings into their exclusives. Corcoran is also launching their own private listing network called Reserve. Once this starts, it ain't going to stop. Because if you think Keller Williams is going to sit on the sidelines and let everybody else have a private listing and not doing it, you're crazy. You think EXP is going to sit this one out after everybody else does it, they're going to do it. And then there'll be Remax. And then all the smaller agencies. They'll probably pull together somehow. And then, of course, you've got Zillow out there. Everyone is just simply going to build their own network. Now, recently on CNN, and I've talked about this before, we saw a real live situation about how this actually played out. The seller was working with a real estate agent she trusted from Compass, who suggested that she first list her house as a Compass private exclusive, which meant her home wouldn't immediately be publicly advertised on a home search website like Zillow or Redfin. Instead, the listing would be announced internally at Compass, meaning that only buyers represented by other Compass agents would know about the home being for sell. So the seller received two offers in this method. She got one for 2.1, which was $95,000 over her list price. That was her magic number, so she quickly accepted it. And first she seemed to be thrilled, but after she had time to think, she had a lot of unease about this. And what she told CNN is only two people had seen the home, and we seemed to be hitting our magic number already. But the longer I sat there, the more I felt like, well, two people saw it. What if 50 people saw it? The Compass Real Estate agent had told her that this would be a good way to test out listing her home above 2 million, since there were very few comps in that area. But in hindsight, she now believes accepting an offer before her home listing was available to the public was a huge mistake. When the initial private buyer fell through, this time listed it on the MLS and Zillow. And wouldn't you know, six days later, she had 60 showings on her house, multiple offers, and ultimately netted $100,000 more than she would have received had she stayed with that initial private offer. And this is what the seller said. I think that the off-market exclusive ultimately is bad for people, but good for compass. So let me sell you something here that a lot of people in this history don't want to say. And you know I don't care, I'll say it. Private listing networks are not about helping the consumer. They're not about helping the real estate agent. They're about the brokerage controlling inventory. Listings are power. If you control the listings, you control the market, you can recruit the agents, you can double in these deals, you capture more commissions. And here's a problem that Robert Refkin apparently didn't think through. The moment Compass started doing this, everyone else was going to do it too. Keller Williams isn't going to sit back, Remax isn't going to sit back, EXP is not going to sit back. They're all going to build their own networks, which means agents and buyers are going to be searching dozens of places just to see what homes are for sale. And if that happens, congratulations, the real estate industry will successfully have reinvented itself back to 1985. Just like Marty McFly. Back to the future, baby. So what happens next? Let me tell you what's going to happen next. Stage one, every brokerage is going to launch its own private listing network. Stage two, agents are going to start moving brokerages based on who has the most or the type of exclusive listings they want. Stage three, buyers will have to search everywhere, all over the place, 15 different places just to find out what they could find out right now in one place. Consumers are going to start complaining. Agents are going to start complaining. Regulators and legislatures will start paying attention, and something will happen in the industry. Maybe lawyers will start paying attention in step five or six and start filing lawsuits because housing markets work best when they're transparent and they're accessible. And systems that hide listings from the market simply raise questions, especially around fair housing. Now let me leave you with one final thought. Private listing networks are being sold as consumer choice, but let's be honest, this ain't about consumer choice. It's all about brokerage choice. Once one brokerage starts hoarding these listings, everyone else has to do it, which means we're soon going to be searching Compass's website, Howard Hanna, KW, EXP, Remax, MLS, Redfin, Zillow, Terrier Pigeons, Smoke Signals. At some point we're going to say, wait a minute, didn't we solve this problem in 1985? We did. So why are we going backwards? It was called the MLS. It worked pretty well. It's not perfect. It's just amazing that the real estate industry is going to spend the next five years or so reinventing a problem that we already solved. So if the goal is to make a home buying process harder for the buyer and the agent and for the seller to make less money, well, congratulations. That mission has been accomplished. For 40 years, this real estate industry has worked to make the housing market easier to navigate. Private listing networks are going to make it harder. And if that happens, buyers won't need a real estate agent. They're going to need a treasure map. And then they'll need a class action lawyer to sue every one of you. That's where we are. Compass has started it, and everyone else is going to follow us. Congratulations to Refkin, because either he wanted everybody to go to private listings and make it hard for everybody, or he didn't think through this and think that no one else would follow him. It's going to happen. It's starting right now with Howard Hannah. All right, that's all the time we have for our show this week. Hope you enjoyed it. Tell other agents about it. Come back and see us again next week for another episode of Dish and Dirk. Y'all take care and have a great weekend.