Buyers Should See All the Listings, Sellers Should Control How Their Listing Appears Online

Published on April 14th, 2025 by Glenn Kelman

Updated on July 1st, 2025

Because we believe that all buyers should be able to see all listings, Redfin.com will not publish any listings that have been publicly marketed before being shared with all real estate websites via the MLS. To encourage home-sellers to market their listings via the MLS, Redfin is also asking MLSs to create a coming-soon designation for listings that precludes search sites from showing how long a home has been for sale and at what prices.

Other brokers have supported the idea of coming-soon listings, but with access limited to agents, and potentially only to their own agents. This violates the principle established in the last great real-estate anti-trust battle, settled in 2008, that all brokerage customers should be able to see all MLS listings, online or via an agent. And that principle exists for a reason: once brokers give our clients control over how their listing appears online, every client will want that listing to appear everywhere.

Glenn Kelman

Glenn is the CEO of Redfin. Prior to joining Redfin, he was a co-founder of Plumtree Software, a Sequoia-backed, publicly traded company that created the enterprise portal software market. In his seven years at Plumtree, Glenn at different times led engineering, marketing, product management, and business development; he also was responsible for financing and general operations in Plumtree’s early days. Prior to starting Plumtree, Glenn worked as one of the first employees at Stanford Technology Group, a Sequoia-backed start-up acquired by IBM. Glenn was raised in Seattle and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley. He is a regular contributor to the Redfin blog and Twitter.