How to find off-market real-estate listings, according to real-estate pros

By Aarthi Swaminathan

Tired of bidding wars? Finding an off-market real-estate listing can help house hunters avoid competition.

For some house hunters, finding a property that's available to buy but isn't officially on the market comes with a dash of secrecy and an air of exclusivity. It cuts out the competition, which can also help avoid a protracted bidding war that ends in heartbreak.

For homeowners, the motivation to sell a property without putting it on the market is often far more practical: Selling their home listing it publicly on multiple brokerage sites allows them to maintain their privacy.

In either scenario, off-market listings are an attractive option. These homes are up for sale, but they never hit the Multiple Listing Service, the network of databases where most real-estate professionals list homes for sale. That means they don't appear on many of the popular brokerage sites, such as Redfin (RDFN) or Zillow (ZG).

But these homes are still sold and bought - just completely off the MLS market, shrouded from public view. Off-market properties are also sometimes called "pocket" listings, meaning they're metaphorically in the real-estate broker's pocket.

To be sure, these transactions do eventually go on the public record, because local property records will reflect the sale - but that happens after the transaction is complete. This information can be harder to track down than a listing on a real-estate website, giving sellers and buyers some privacy.

So how does one find off-market homes for sale, and what's the catch? Here are tips from three real-estate professionals.

The pros of selling a house off the market

Cynthia Mattiza, an Austin, Texas, real-estate agent with Kuper Sotheby's International Realty, told MarketWatch that about 15% to 20% of her deals are typically done off the market. Over the last year, about a quarter of her clients overall were buyers and 75% were sellers, Mattiza said.

"People like to boast about it - I don't know why - but it's like this illusion of secrecy and connections," she said. But to her, an off-market listing is ultimately just another property.

Many luxury homes in Austin are often sold off the market, Mattiza said, but are advertised through sites and platforms brokers use to communicate with one another that aren't available to the general public.

"In the luxury space, there is a wider pool of buyers that are looking for off-market opportunities," she said. In her area, these privately listed homes typically cost upward of $1.5 million.

Certain neighborhoods in Austin circulate their off-market listings privately, she added: A seller meets with the broker and gives them permission to advertise the home with a neighborhood group, such as a local email list, a Nextdoor group or a members-only Facebook page for neighbors.

New York City real-estate broker Tate Kelly with Coldwell Banker Warburg says about a quarter of his deals in 2023 were off-market, which he called an aberration. Previously, the average was about one or two a year, he said.

The biggest reason homeowners look to sell their home without listing on the MLS is to maintain privacy, both brokers said.

Some families don't want the wider public to know the list price of their property or how much it eventually sells for, Kelly said. (As previously noted, real-estate transactions do eventually become public record in most, though not all, states.)

Some sellers also balk at the possibility that listings on public-facing websites could invite nosy neighbors or strangers with bad intentions, in addition to interested home buyers, into their private domain.

So going off-market is "a plus for the private individual [or] family, since they don't have a lot of strangers going through their home," Kelly said. "There are no photos of their home online."

The cons of selling a house off the market

For sellers, one big drawback to keeping their home sale under wraps is that it puts much more pressure on the broker to make sure the home is exposed to enough potential buyers. Without a home listing viewable by potentially millions of internet users, brokers have to do the legwork to make sure the listing reaches enough eyeballs.

But off-market listings can present challenges on the pricing front for both buyers and sellers. Because the listing is off the market and the offer is made without any other buyer coming in, the challenge for sellers is to value the property fairly. Meanwhile, buyers may end up paying more for the off-market home because the seller can walk away at any point and list their home on the open market.

"Usually, when something is off the market, a buyer expects a discount, whereas the seller usually expects a premium, and it can be difficult to get them to agree on a price," Kelly added.

Another potential issue is that "sellers can sometimes be noncommittal or get cold feet, which happens more with off-market [listings] compared to public listings, where the seller is committed to letting all buyers know that their property is for sale," he said.

Disputes may also erupt over the amount of time it takes to close, who pays for any needed repairs, and who pays which fees. Particularly with the disruption to Realtor commissions in recent months, buyers and sellers may disagree on who pays for whose broker and how much they will pay.

To avoid the pricing problem, Mattiza says, she looks at sale prices for homes in the area over the last 90 days and presents the hard facts to her sellers.

"I really am brutally honest with my clients," she said. "It's sometimes not exactly the information that they want to hear, that maybe [their home value] didn't massively appreciate. But when we come up with pricing, I just use the line, 'The numbers don't lie.'"

How to find an off-market property

There's a variety of ways to find off-market properties, according to real-estate pros.

One traditional route is to undertake a mass-marketing campaign, Nick Narodny, the founder and CEO of Aalto, a San Francisco-based real-estate startup, told MarketWatch.

That is, if a prospective home buyer is interested in homes on a certain street or neighborhood, they can create a mass mailer and put it under homeowners' doors. They can also place paper door hangers on knobs, or send other types of physical mail, to alert the homeowner of the opportunities that are possible if they sell.

Narodny's family has been in the real-estate business for five decades, and his mother became a broker at age 19. Another tried-and-tested method is to look for subtle signs that a home is being prepared for sale, such as a dumpster in the driveway, he said. Real-estate agents have been known to walk up to the homeowner in those instances to ask if the home would come on the market soon.

Home shoppers can also look for homes listed for sale directly by the owners, instead of just looking at homes on the Multiple Listing Service that appear on brokerage sites like Zillow. "The best source is expired listings, so looking back at homes that didn't sell," Narodny added; a house hunter could find those homeowners and make them an offer.

Ultimately, finding a real-estate agent may be the best option, because they're plugged into listings day in and day out. A sharp-eyed house hunter who finds an expired listing should consider contacting that listing agent first, because they have a strong incentive to sell the home.

Agents also have vast online networks, including email and messaging channels, where they share homes among themselves. So for an agent, "it's not that hard," said Mattiza, the Texas agent. With 14 years in the Austin market, the real-estate agent said, she's worked to build relationships with other agents. When she gets a request from a buyer who wants to live in a specific neighborhood, she can usually reach out to other agents there to inquire.

Connections and relationships within the industry are essential, she said, "because when you have a good relationship with other agents, they'll be able to help you out and help kind of force listings that might be hard to find."

Kelly, the New York broker, said that aside from his own network of sellers, he maintains an extensive list of agents that he emails when he's on the hunt for off-market listings. He'll also check in with a WhatsApp group made up of other real-estate professionals, and hit the road to find off-market listings.

"I send letters to buildings asking if they are ready to sell now or in the future, which leads to them informing me of their willingness to sell if they were approached by the right buyer," he said. Because he's in New York City, where many properties are in apartment buildings, he also checks in on building doormen and superintendents, he added.

-Aarthi Swaminathan

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