Washington State Just Made It Official: Your Home Deserves a Full Audience
Back in January, I wrote a post about private listings. I'll admit I wasn't entirely sure the real estate industry was ready to have an honest conversation about them. Private listings — sometimes called pocket listings — are what happens when a broker markets your home exclusively within their own company's network before ever putting it on the MLS. The seller gets a smaller audience. The brokerage gets an advantage. I never understood how that was a good deal for the person who actually owns the home.
Washington State just agreed with that. On March 16th, Senate Bill 6091 was signed into law — making Washington only the second state in the country, after Wisconsin, to ban this practice. The vote in the legislature was about as lopsided as you can get: 49-0 in the Senate, 92-1 in the House. Not a close call. That's a statement.
Here's what the law actually says, in plain language. A broker may not market the sale of your home to a limited or exclusive group of buyers or other brokers — unless that same home is being marketed to the general public at exactly the same time. No staged rollout. No "coming soon" period visible only to one brokerage's agents. If it's being marketed at all, it has to be marketed to everyone. The only exception is for genuine health or safety concerns — say, a seller in a difficult personal situation who needs to limit who knows the property is for sale. That's a reasonable carve-out. Using exclusivity as a competitive business strategy is not.
Violations aren't just a slap on the wrist, either. Each infraction can bring a fine of up to $500 and puts a broker's license at risk. The state Department of Licensing will be the enforcement authority. The law takes effect 90 days after the legislative session adjourns — so roughly around June 10th of this year.
I want to revisit something I said in my original post, because I think it bears repeating in light of this new law. The question I kept coming back to was: who actually benefits from a private listing? The answer, if you look at it honestly, is almost never the seller.
Think about it from first principles. You own an asset. You want to sell it for the highest possible price. The highest possible price comes from the most possible competition among buyers. Competition requires awareness — buyers can't bid on a home they don't know exists. So the logical conclusion is unavoidable: you want every qualified buyer out there to know your home is available. A private listing does the opposite. It shrinks the audience very deliberately, and in a way that seems self serving.
I've watched this industry evolve over thirty years, and I'll be honest — some of the changes have been improvements and some have been head-scratchers. The MLS model, despite its imperfections, is genuinely a great consumer-friendly structure. It's a centralized, broadly accessible marketplace where buyers and sellers operate on something close to equal footing. Private listing networks are a quiet erosion of that. Washington Realtors President Ryan Beckett put it well when he said that families making the biggest financial decision of their lives deserve a process that is transparent, accessible and fair. I'd put it a bit more directly: if someone is telling you there's a strategic advantage to keeping your home a secret, ask whose strategy it's serving.
OB Jacobi, co-president of Seattle-based Windermere — our brokerage — said something worth noting. Windermere has the largest market share in Washington, which means a private listing network could actually have worked to our advantage. We supported the legislation anyway. Because protecting sellers matters more than protecting market position. That's the kind of thing that's easy to say and a little harder to actually do. I'm proud we did it.
For sellers in Tacoma and throughout Pierce County, this law changes nothing about how we do business — because we were never in the business of hiding your home from buyers. The broadest exposure has always been the right move. But for anyone who was approached by a company pitching the supposed benefits of a pre-market or private listing, Washington just drew a clear line. Your home belongs in front of every buyer. Full stop.
If you're thinking about selling and want to understand what a properly marketed listing looks like — and what it can do for your bottom line — give us a call. The conversation is free, and the strategy makes a real difference.
