Coming Soon and Office Exclusive Adoption in the Market
Pre-market listings get the lion's share of industry attention, and a decade of Bright MLS data shows why: nearly half of new listings in its footprint start in Coming Soon, and about five percent as an Office Exclusive.
Why it matters: Coming Soon and Office Exclusives are mostly argued about in principle, and the data below shows how they actually behave — adoption, days on market, time to contract, and price reductions.
This research was conducted with Bright MLS, the nation's largest, and covers 3.7 million listings across six states and D.C., roughly 6 percent of all U.S. home sales.
Today, about 45 percent of new listings start as Coming Soon, a level that has remained relatively constant over the past five years.
Office Exclusives sit at about five percent of the market.
Office Exclusive adoption peaked in the spring of 2025 at 6.6 percent of new listings and have run between 4 and 6 percent ever since.
The much-fought-over Compass private exclusives would sit in this bucket, where a listing is in an MLS but not publicly marketed.
Despite all the ballyhoo, adoption of this listing type has barely budged in two years.
On average, a listing spends 7 days in Coming Soon and 33 days as an Office Exclusive, before entering active status.
From start to finish, Office Exclusives take the longest to reach a contract at 57 days, compared to 42 days for active and 33 days for Coming Soon.
Office Exclusive listings move quickly once active, though, spending half as many days on the open market as a listing that starts as active.
Listings that start as an Office Exclusive get fewer recorded price reductions, 0.5 per sale compared to 0.6 for those that start as active.
But the pattern inverts above $750,000, where Office Exclusives get 0.55 reductions per sale against 0.51 for active.
For this dataset, price reductions are only counted while a listing is active, so any repricing during the private period is not recorded.
Listings that start as an Office Exclusive sell before reaching Active 17.6 percent of the time, compared to 1.6 percent of listings that start in Coming Soon.
Half of Office Exclusives move to Coming Soon first, a third go straight to Active, and the rest sell while in the Office Exclusive status.
82 percent of Office Exclusives reach Active at some point, meaning that, in total, 99.3 percent of Bright's closed sales are publicly marketed before they sell.
A note on correlation and causation: the data above is fairly clear, but interpreting it is not.
Coming Soon listings reach a contract faster and Office Exclusives get fewer recorded price reductions, but the data only shows what happened, not why.
Sellers pick a listing type based on their own preferences, their agent's advice, the house, and the market, so the difference may be the kind of home that ends up in a program rather than the program itself — as I wrote last year, flying business class doesn't make you richer.
Bright MLS is the nation's largest, but it isn't the entire nation, and adoption of pre-market programs varies everywhere else.
CRMLS's Coming Soon in California runs 17 percent of new listings, MRED's private listing network in Chicago 17 percent, and UnlockMLS's Flex program in Austin 11 percent.
Each program sets its own rules on marketing, syndication and duration, so these are adjacent products shown for context and not an apples-to-apples comparison.
The bottom line: The industry has spent the past two years fighting over pre-market listings, but homesellers have already decided how they want to market and sell their homes.
In Bright's market, adoption of Office Exclusive and Coming Soon listings barely moved through the lawsuits, rule changes, promotional campaigns, and listing bans.
In the end, almost every sale still runs through the open market, with just 0.7 percent of Bright's closed sales never publicly marketed at all.