'Coming soon' was a good idea. What we’ve done to it isn’t

“Coming soon” was, in the right hands, a genuinely useful tool. A home that isn’t ready to show — repairs in progress, staging not done — benefits from a short window of awareness before it goes live. Buyers know something is coming. The moment it’s ready, it goes active.

That was the idea. And it was a good one.

What the industry has done with it since is a different story. “Coming soon” has gone from a practical tool for homes that genuinely aren’t ready, to a default pre-marketing strategy used on homes that are completely ready — and it’s being sold to sellers as something that benefits them. In most cases, it does the opposite.

Before I go further

I’m pro-seller’s choice. There are real benefits to keeping a listing in-house — less foot traffic, more privacy, fewer strangers through your home, leads going to one trusted agent. For the right seller in the right situation, those benefits genuinely matter, and I fully support them.

What sellers deserve is the full picture — both benefits and trade-offs. The trade-off with a “coming soon” or pre-market strategy is that limiting your buyer pool may affect your final price. It may not. But that conversation belongs at the listing table, not after the fact.

What the private listing war has created is something I’m calling the “company FSBO” — a listing accessible only to buyers working with agents at one brokerage or on one portal’s pre-market feed. Fewer buyers mean less competition. The seller should know that going in and decide for themselves what matters most.

A FSBO limits your buyer pool to whoever drives by. A Company FSBO limits it to whoever works with one company. Both reduce competition. The seller deserves to know that before they sign.

The private listing, coming soon and preview listing confusion

If this sounds confusing to you, that’s not a failure of your comprehension. That is the point. Here’s my best attempt at sorting it out:

• Private listings: homes never publicly advertised, shown only within one brokerage’s internal network
• Coming soon: homes publicly advertised on portals, but showings are restricted. No one — including the listing agent, in theory — is supposed to be showing the home.
• Compass-Redfin coming soon: an exclusive three-year deal: Compass Coming Soon listings on Redfin with priority placement and all leads going directly to the Compass listing agent.
• Zillow Preview: Zillow’s response, open to all brokers willing to sign up — making our industry even more fragmented.

(Don’t confuse Zillow Preview with Zillow Premier Agent. They are different programs. That confusion alone tells you something about where we are.)

Are you confused yet? Just think about how buyers and sellers are feeling. Private listings. Preview listings. Premier listings. Coming-soon listings. It’s a pea soup of P-words creating pure pandemonium, leaving consumers perplexed.

Maybe it’s time to purge all of it and go back to when you had a house to sell, agents had buyers who wanted to buy it, and we just introduced them to each other as quickly, publicly and transparently as possible.

What’s actually happening

A buyer sees a coming-soon listing on Zillow, gets excited, calls the listing agent — and is told they can’t schedule a showing. That buyer is motivated, pre-approved, been searching for months. Most don’t wait. They go buy something else.

And here’s the part agents know but don’t always say: Showings are often happening during the coming-soon window anyway. I buy about a dozen homes a year, and when I call on coming-soon listings, agents are almost always happy to show them. 

So, if an agent is showing a home during coming-soon status, they owe it to the seller to be honest: Fewer buyers have seen this home than if it were fully active, and that could affect where the price lands.  

The research backs that up. Zillow’s study of 2.72 million transactions found that sellers who limit pre-market exposure can lose between 1.5 percent and 3.7 percent of their final sale price. Bright MLS data confirms pre-market listings take a median of 37 days to reach contract, versus 20 days for full MLS listings.

Those are trade-offs worth knowing — not reasons to avoid the strategy, but reasons to have an honest conversation before using it.

The lead capture reality

Here’s what Zillow Preview actually does for the listing agent: Buyer inquiries go directly to them instead of Zillow’s referral network. Not seller protection. Not price optimization. Lead capture. That’s not a scandal — listing agents are entitled to their leads. But sellers should understand that’s part of the arrangement, alongside the benefits they’ve been shown.

What should agents do?

Use “coming soon” the way it was intended — for homes genuinely not ready to show. The same Bright MLS study found that nearly half — 47 percent — of office exclusives went through Coming Soon status before selling. There is no way 47 percent of those homes had a room that needed painting.

The honest conversation with a seller sounds like this: 

“There are real advantages here — less disruption, fewer strangers through your home, one person handling all buyer conversations. The trade-off is that limiting who sees the home right away may affect how much competition we create on price. Some sellers decide those benefits are worth it. Others want full market exposure. Either way, I want you making that call with both sides of the picture.”

“Coming soon” was a good idea. What we’ve done to it — making it a default strategy, wrapping it in seller’s choice language and presenting it as a seller benefit while the listing agent’s lead pipeline is the real winner — is worth honestly examining. The agents who do will be the ones their sellers trust most.