If you're in the market for a home, good luck. It can be really difficult right now.

I think the general experience for home buyers is that it's stressful. That's our colleague Nicole

Friedman. She covers real estate. It's very expensive to buy a home,

especially these days. Home prices are high. Mortgage rates are high. And in a lot of parts of the

country, there are still not enough homes to choose from. The inventory is lower than it was before

the pandemic. And so they're really kind of glued to the listing sites, you know, waiting for a new home to pop up, hoping that this could be the one.

Those online listing sites have become an essential part of buying a home.

Sites like Zillow and Redfin list thousands of homes for sale across the country.

I think for a lot of buyers, that's where they start the process.

If they're thinking about buying a home, even just casually like, oh, is this the year?

Maybe we should buy.

They go to one of these portals.

They set up, you know, search alerts for their neighborhood or their budget.

And so looking at home listings is often the very first step.

And for home buyers, these sites can be a treasure trove of information, everything from how

many days a home has been on the market to how many other buyers have viewed the listing.

But one real estate brokerage wants to change how the system works to give more power and flexibility

to sellers. And in the process, upend the way real estate is done. That brokerage is Compass.

So Compass is trying to promote essentially a different strategy for selling your home.

Compass is telling sellers, you know,

widely advertising your home for sale immediately is not the best strategy for everybody.

Instead, the company is focusing on private listings and limiting what information is shared

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