“Ugh, they’re black” is the text a Black couple allegedly received back in June when a Queens real estate agent, who was supposed to be showing them a rental property, sent the message by mistake. The couple believes the text was meant for the landlord, and they say the agent apologized.
But that didn’t stop the pain, the lawsuit, or the headlines that rightfully followed.
Discrimination, unfortunately, is alive and well in real estate, even on the open market. It can happen at any brokerage, in any part of the country. Over decades, the industry has built a system rooted in fair housing laws and transparency to fight it.
Right now, the progress we’ve made is threatened by the growing trend of private listings: homes for sale that never show up on Zillow, Realtor.com, or the search your agent runs for you. Instead, they’re kept within one brokerage and shared selectively with those who can gain access.
Your real estate agent owes you a fiduciary duty, which means they’re required to put your interests ahead of their own and their company’s. They’re also bound by fair housing law to treat every buyer and seller equally. Equal access to housing in 2026 shouldn’t still be up for debate, but here we are.
If you’re selling, you may hear a pitch for keeping your home in a private listing network. Your agent might suggest testing the price quietly within one firm, so your home doesn’t rack up days on the market and look stale. While that concern is understandable, days on market only hurt when a home is priced incorrectly.
Moreover, testing the price on a one-of-a-kind home before it hits the open market delays the sale and disrupts your launch. You don’t get a true idea of what your largest asset is worth unless you let the market do its job.
There will likely be more fair housing violations if we let private listings continue to erode trust. Research from Zillow found that Black and Hispanic home sellers were about three times as likely as white sellers to have an agent recommend a private listing network, and that sellers who skip public marketing typically leave money on the table. Zillow has its own business stake in this debate, but that doesn’t make the pattern any less troubling. So why do agents keep pitching private listings as a good strategy when they’re so ethically ambiguous and potentially a fiduciary violation?
Psychologists have long documented how ordinary people follow instructions from authority, even when it’s against their better judgment. Stanley Milgram’s famous experiments at Yale showed that most volunteers would deliver what they believed were dangerous electric shocks simply because a calm authority figure told them to continue.
Real estate is experiencing a similar dynamic. Some brokerages encourage agents, sometimes with financial incentives like extra marketing budget, to promote private listings and keep homes off the sites where you search. Licensed agents know their duty is to you, and they’re trained in fair housing law. Yet pressure from the top has encouraged many of them to convince clients to sell privately, which threatens sellers’ ability to get the best price, keeps buyers from homes they’ll never know existed, and undermines fair housing protections. That doesn’t make your agent a bad person, but it does mean the advice you get may reflect what’s good for the brokerage rather than what’s good for you.
There are instances where a seller values privacy over price, and listing privately makes sense. That choice has always existed. Make no mistake: it is the exception to the rule, and some brokerages are pushing to make it the rule.
Housing is one of the most consequential decisions in life because it’s a gateway to everything else: education, employment, healthcare, transportation, and general quality of life. Private listing networks shut that gateway by blocking equal access to housing. Lawmakers are already taking action. Washington, Connecticut, and Wisconsin have passed laws that make public marketing the default for homes on the market, and New York’s legislature passed a similar bill this year that would apply to rentals as well as sales.
You don’t have to wait for the law to catch up to protect yourself. If you’re selling, ask your agent: Will my home be on the MLS and the major public sites? Does your brokerage benefit if I list privately? How many buyers will actually see my home if it isn’t public?
The business intent behind private listing networks may not be discriminatory, but the impact is real. If an agent will text a landlord complaining about a couple’s race in the open market, imagine what bad behavior could thrive in a closed, opaque system.
Bess Freedman is the CEO of Brown Harris Stevens, a luxury real estate firm founded in New York.