“Can I Just Sell It Quietly?”

The Off-Market Question Every LA Seller Is Asking Me Right Now

I get this question more than almost any other, and it usually arrives in the same hushed tone:

“Amir, can we just sell it quietly? No sign. No Zillow. Nobody knowing my business.”

I understand the instinct completely.

When you own a home in Bel Air or the Bird Streets, a public listing isn’t just a marketing decision — it’s an announcement. Your neighbors see it. Your business partners see it. The tabloids sometimes see it.

So the appeal of a private sale is obvious.

Here’s what most agents won’t tell you: going off-market is a real strategy with real advantages, but it is not free. It has a price, and that price is measured in dollars.

The job is knowing when that trade is worth making — and right now, the rules governing that trade are being fought over in federal court.

The Rules Changed — and Most Sellers Have No Idea

In March 2025, the National Association of Realtors maintained its Clear Cooperation Policy, which generally requires a listing to be submitted to the MLS within one business day of being publicly marketed.

At the same time, NAR added a new option: Delayed Marketing Exempt Listings.

In practical terms, with a seller’s signed authorization, a property can be filed with the MLS and made visible to other agents while being withheld from the public IDX feeds that power consumer-facing sites such as Zillow, Realtor.com and Homes.com. Each MLS determines its own delay window.

Then, in April 2025, Zillow announced its Listing Access Standards.

Under Zillow’s policy, if a home is publicly marketed but not added to the MLS within one business day, Zillow won’t display the listing — including later in the listing process. Zillow does allow certain “coming soon” listings, true office exclusives and Delayed Marketing Exempt Listings, provided the brokerage follows the applicable rules.

That policy set off a genuine industry war.

Compass sued Zillow over the policy in June 2025, then dismissed that suit without prejudice in March 2026. Zillow subsequently filed its own federal antitrust lawsuit in May 2026 against Compass and Chicago-area MLS MRED, as reported by Inman and The Real Deal. The dispute remains in active litigation.

Why should a Los Angeles homeowner care about a corporate lawsuit?

Because the outcome could affect whether the private marketing strategy your agent is pitching comes at the cost of access to one of the largest consumer real estate audiences in the country.

The Premium Argument vs. the Discount Argument

You’ll find studies claiming off-market luxury sellers capture meaningful premiums.

You’ll also find studies — including Zillow’s own research — arguing that sellers who stay off-market leave money on the table.

Both sides can point to data. Neither tells the entire story.

Here’s the mechanism that matters.

Off-market sales can appear to underperform because of who chooses them: estates, divorces, distressed sellers and owners who prioritize speed or discretion over achieving the highest possible price.

That creates selection bias. It doesn’t necessarily prove that selling privately caused the lower price.

On the other hand, off-market transactions can appear to outperform in certain datasets because trophy properties, unique estates and homes with genuinely thin comparable pools can skew the averages upward.

The answer is much simpler:

Price is a function of competition.

Ten qualified buyers competing for a property can produce a very different outcome than one buyer negotiating directly with a seller.

Every qualified buyer you remove from the pool potentially removes a fraction of your leverage.

If your private network genuinely contains the right buyer for your specific house, you may lose nothing.

If it doesn’t, you may be quietly negotiating against yourself.

When Selling Quietly Is Actually the Right Call

I recommend the private route in four situations — and I’ll tell a seller plainly when I don’t believe they’re in one of them.

1. Genuine Security or Privacy Exposure

If publishing photographs, layouts or identifying details about your home creates an actual security or privacy risk, that isn’t vanity.

It’s a legitimate reason to limit exposure.

For certain high-profile homeowners, executives, public figures and families, discretion can have value that goes well beyond the sale price.

2. Price Discovery on an Unprecedented Asset

Some properties simply don’t have true comparables.

A one-of-one architectural residence, major compound, assemblage or highly unusual estate may require a different approach to price discovery.

Testing privately can allow you to evaluate demand without immediately accumulating public days on market while determining where sophisticated buyers actually see value.

3. You Need to Test the Market Without Creating a Public Trail

This may be the most underrated advantage of a private strategy.

A property marketed privately may avoid accumulating the same public-facing days-on-market and price-reduction history that buyers can later use as negotiating leverage.

In the luxury market, perception matters.

A buyer who sees that a $20 million property has been publicly available for six months and reduced twice walks into the negotiation with information — and leverage — that didn’t exist on day one.

Preserving a clean public listing history can therefore have real value.

4. A Specific Buyer Already Exists

Sometimes the right buyer is already identifiable.

If I know exactly who is likely to want the house, and that buyer is capable of performing at a price the seller finds compelling, there may be little reason to immediately launch a full public auction.

Outside of these situations, however, the math generally favors exposure.

I would rather execute a disciplined, beautifully staged, fully public launch and allow competition to do the work.

The Strategy I Actually Use

I don’t treat private versus public as a binary decision.

Because it isn’t.

For the right property, I prefer a sequenced release.

Phase One: Private Market Intelligence

We begin with a targeted agent-to-agent strategy designed to gauge legitimate demand, identify likely buyers and sharpen our pricing.

This isn’t about quietly emailing a listing to hundreds of people and calling it “private.”

It’s targeted.

Who has the buyer? Who has sold comparable properties? Who represents the families, developers or collectors most likely to understand the asset?

The objective is intelligence.

Phase Two: Public Market Execution

If the private phase doesn’t produce the right buyer at the right number, we move into a proper public launch.

By then, the photography, staging, creative direction, pricing and positioning have already been refined.

Instead of using the public market to figure out the strategy, we enter the public market with the strategy already established.

You get intelligence first, then maximum exposure — without unnecessarily wasting valuable days on market.

Listing a Property and Positioning a Property Are Not the Same Thing

That distinction matters even more at the luxury level.

Putting a property into the MLS is easy.

Determining who the buyer is, how that buyer needs to discover the property, when to expose it, how to establish scarcity and how to create competitive tension is the actual work.

I don’t just list properties.

I position them.

If you’re weighing a quiet sale this fall — or you’ve been told that going off-market is automatically the more sophisticated choice — let’s look at your specific house, your objectives and your actual buyer pool before you make that decision.

[email protected]
(818) 561-1600

Amir Jawaherian
The Agency
CA DRE# 01899893

Sources

National Association of Realtors — Multiple Listing Options for Sellers, March 2025
Zillow Group — Listing Access Standards, April 2025
Inman
The Real Deal
Real Estate News