Unique Inventory and the Coming Soon Scoreboard
As the battleground of unique inventory shifts from private exclusives to coming soon, the programs to watch come from the largest broker, the largest portal, and a company that is both: Compass Coming Soon, Zillow Preview, and Redfin Early Access.
Why it matters: In a world of undifferentiated search portals, unique inventory may be the biggest reason consumers visit one site over another.
Which is what underpins Compass's inventory strategy: coming soon listings surged from 11 percent of its exclusive inventory in January to 43 percent today, as MLS rules loosened.
Zillow unveiled Preview, its answer to Compass Coming Soon, nineteen days after Compass announced its listing partnership with Redfin.
Twenty-nine brokerages signed in the first eight days, including Keller Williams, RE/MAX, HomeServices of America, Side, and United Real Estate, and now Zillow says it has more than 100 brokerage partners.
But the challenge is the pipeline: nearly six months after launch, Preview holds just 284 listings against Compass's 3,896.
Redfin Early Access launched in May and holds 327 of Redfin's own coming soon listings alongside thousands of Compass listings it displays under their listing partnership.
The difference is the ground game, not the product: every coming soon listing requires a broker to convince an agent, and an agent to convince a homeowner.
Compass spent two years building that muscle in person, one office at a time, which explains its adoption and growing momentum.
Zillow's pipeline runs through brokerages it does not control, and even a launch partner, Side's CEO, told me in March that pre-marketing is “a solution that's searching for a problem.”
Zillow has a long way to go to catch up – Compass is adding about 180 coming soon listings each week compared to Zillow’s 15.
Ultimately, Zillow may not need to win the listing count scoreboard – simply having the program may be enough.
It gives broker partners and their agents a comparable program to Compass's Coming Soon when pitching homeowners.
It's similar to when every brokerage bolted on an iBuyer offering without necessarily believing in iBuying – an arrow in the quiver for when the seller asks.
Most pre-market programs stay small and grow slow, the exception being the one where the portal gave up its own revenue to get the listings.
Hemnet's version waives the roughly $1,000 a Swedish seller normally pays to list, resulting in more than 1,000 listings on the platform in two weeks.
Howard Hanna launched Find It First in 2019, took it down, relaunched it this April, and it holds around 50 listings today, primarily in Ohio and western Pennsylvania.
Redfin Early Access holds 327 listings with roughly 2,000 agents, more than Zillow Preview has with 100 brokerage partners and their ~280,000 agents.
The direct financial impact on Zillow is small: Compass says 94 percent of coming soon listings don’t sell pre-market, eventually syndicating widely.
Applying my estimates from earlier this year, Zillow would permanently miss around 3,600 listings a year, which converts to roughly 360 transactions, or 0.1 percent of the 500,000 it monetizes.
The threat isn't to Zillow's bottom line — it's that these listings give consumers a reason to visit a competitor.
The bottom line: A listing scoreboard may be the wrong metric to watch, because Zillow really needed a program to point at more than a pipeline to fill.
A defensive product can be announced in a day; the agent infrastructure behind it takes years.
The unique inventory threat to Zillow isn’t traffic or transactions, it’s trust – because its moat is the perception that it has everything.