A seller who has heard about coming soon believes it is a way to sell the house quietly, before the crowd arrives. The company winning the pre-market race says 94 percent of those listings do not sell pre-market at all and end up syndicated everywhere anyway.
A research newsletter put the three pre-market programs side by side: Compass Coming Soon, Zillow Preview and Redfin Early Access.
The scoreboard is lopsided. Compass holds 3,896 coming soon listings and adds about 180 a week. Zillow Preview, nearly six months after launch, holds 284 and adds about 15 a week, even with more than 100 brokerage partners behind it and roughly 280,000 agents inside them. Redfin Early Access holds 327 with about 2,000 agents.
Then, explaining why almost none of Zillow's revenue is actually at risk, the piece drops the line that matters at a kitchen table: "Compass says 94 percent of coming soon listings don’t sell pre-market, eventually syndicating widely." The estimate that follows is that Zillow permanently misses around 3,600 listings a year, about 360 transactions, roughly 0.1 percent of the 500,000 it monetizes.
So the brokerage with the biggest pre-market program in the country is saying, in its own number, that about six of every hundred coming soon homes actually sell that way. The rest go to the open market like everything else, just later.
“Compass says 94 percent of coming soon listings don’t sell pre-market, eventually syndicating widely.”
The seller conversation usually gets framed as exposure versus exclusivity, and exclusivity wins because it sounds sophisticated. The 94 percent turns it into a question of time instead: for almost every one of these homes, coming soon is not a different way to sell, it is days spent before the listing that sells it starts.
That does not make it worthless, and it should not make you refuse it. It makes it a preparation window — finish the photos, get the sign in, build a showing queue for launch day. Say that out loud and you can offer coming soon honestly, without letting a seller believe a buyer is waiting on the other side of it.