Stop trying to make “seller’s choice” happen.

There's a scene in Mean Girls where Gretchen Wieners keeps trying to launch a new slang word. She drops it into every conversation. "That's so fetch." Nobody bites. Finally Regina George turns around and ends it: "Gretchen, stop trying to make fetch happen! It's not going to happen."

Robert Reffkin, the CEO of Compass, is currently trying very hard to make "seller's choice" happen.

Here's what the phrase is selling: Compass wants your listing to launch as a "Private Exclusive," visible only to buyers working with Compass agents. Then it graduates to "Coming Soon" on Compass.com. Eventually, it reaches the actual market, where the rest of us and our buyers get to find out your home exists. Reffkin calls it giving sellers the freedom to market their home "how they see fit."

I have never—not once—had a seller tell me that their goal was to attract fewer buyers.

They have, however, told me that they’d like the most money for their property in the least amount of time. And the way to get that is by putting the home in front of as many qualified buyers as possible, as early as possible, because a listing gets more attention in its first two weeks than in the next three months combined.

And if a seller genuinely needs discretion, REBNY's listing service has offered a Participant Only option since 2024: your home stays off StreetEasy, off Zillow, off social media, and your days on market don't accrue. But every member firm in the city can view your listing and share it with their buyers directly. I use it on occasion as a way of testing price before launching on the open market. If the quiet response is soft, we adjust and launch fresh, with no scar tissue on the listing.

So what does a private exclusive add? Fewer buyers, mostly. Zillow studied 15 million sales and found homes kept off the open market sold for 1.3% less. On a $1.5 million apartment, that's roughly $20,000 for the privilege of less exposure. A Bright MLS study with Drexel University found a wider gap. Compass has its own study, naturally, showing pre-marketed homes sold for 4.6% more, but read the fine print and it mostly measures homes that sold on the open market anyway.

So who does a Compass Private Exclusive actually serve? It serves Compass. Keep the listing in-house and there's a better shot at both sides of the commission. Build a big enough pile of "inventory" only your agents can access, and it becomes a recruiting pitch and a moat. That's not seller empowerment. That's hoarding.

"Seller's choice" is a lovely phrase for a simple arrangement: your home, their walls, your money on the table.

It's not fetch. Stop trying to make it happen.