Corcoran CEO Pamela Liebman is pushing the brokerage's New York City agents to pull their listings off StreetEasy entirely, framing the move as a fight worth winning for the company's own marketing reach. Liebman offered agents a $1,000-per-listing advertising incentive for removing homes from the portal, a pitch she delivered during a town hall with Corcoran agents, according to a recording cited by The Real Deal.
The push comes as Corcoran's parent company, Compass International Holdings, escalates its own campaign against the listings site. Compass sent New York City agents an email on Sept. 13 encouraging them to remove active and in-contract listings from StreetEasy wherever sellers agreed to it, according to Inman. That email reportedly dangled a 30-day, $1,000 digital advertising package spanning Google, Facebook and Instagram for agents willing to make the switch. Homes pulled from StreetEasy can still surface through the RLS, IDX feeds and Corcoran.com, Inman reports, meaning sellers aren't losing all visibility, just the portal's particular audience.
A Battle Over the City's De Facto MLS
Liebman has described the conflict with StreetEasy as a battle over what amounts to the city's de facto multiple listing service, per The Real Deal's reporting, and she's called StreetEasy a “bully pulpit.” Corcoran managers have encouraged brokers to pull listings from the site, according to three agents cited in that same report, and the brokerage has been advertising thousands of homes for sale that aren't listed on StreetEasy at all. Liebman has said Corcoran was spending $1 million a day on advertising support for listings, with $600,000 spent on advertising between one Friday and Sunday alone, including print and digital ads in top publications and ads plastered across city subways.
Compass itself advised top New York City agents from Compass, Corcoran and Sotheby's International Realty back in July to temporarily remove listings from StreetEasy, though a Compass spokesperson said the suggestion wasn't focused on pulling listings off any particular portal or website. Compass and its affiliates account for nearly 50 percent of Manhattan resale listings this year, according to data cited from Marketproof, giving the company outsized leverage in any standoff with a single listings site.
The Numbers Fight: 2 Million Versus 100 Million
At the center of the dispute is a battle over traffic numbers. Liebman has claimed that listings kept off StreetEasy could still rack up more than 100 million average unique monthly views across other home-listing websites. StreetEasy, meanwhile, says it receives roughly 2 million average monthly visitors actively searching for homes in New York City specifically. A Corcoran seller script goes further, estimating its broader digital ecosystem reaches more than 103 million visitors compared with StreetEasy's roughly 2 million, according to Inman's review of the materials.
A StreetEasy spokesperson pushed back on that comparison, telling Inman that the 103 million figure describes a national network whose visitors mostly have no interest in buying a home in New York. The company maintains that its 2 million monthly visitors are the ones actually shopping for homes in the five boroughs, and that StreetEasy remains a go-to destination for New York City homebuyers and renters with name recognition that outpaces competing listing platforms. StreetEasy has also argued that it provides buyer brokers with a constant stream of new leads and gives listing agents greater exposure for their clients — the exact value proposition Corcoran and Compass are now trying to route around.
StreetEasy Tightens the Rules
StreetEasy hasn't sat still. The company updated its Experts lead-generation program on Sept. 2 to ban agents affiliated with companies making up at least 20 percent of the program, a cap that effectively excludes agents tied to Compass, Corcoran and Sotheby's, according to reporting from HousingWire. Compass International Holdings was the only company above that threshold, HousingWire reports. Alongside the participation cap, StreetEasy lowered its success fee from 25 percent to 15 percent for properties priced at $249,000 or less, and to 20 percent for properties selling between $250,000 and $399,999.
StreetEasy also updated its Listings Quality Policy to require agents who publicly market an exclusive sale listing to submit it to the site on the same calendar day, with the same-day upload ban applying to third and subsequent violations. Under the Corcoran script Inman reviewed, inquiries generated through StreetEasy can be redirected away from the original listing agent to another agent participating in the portal's lead program — a detail that underscores why control over lead flow sits at the heart of the standoff.
Falling Listings and a Wider Playbook
The fight has coincided with a measurable drop in Manhattan inventory. Manhattan listings on StreetEasy fell 7 percent week over week during the first week of August, and by the second week of the month, active listings in Manhattan had fallen 11 percent from where they started, according to a separate report from The Real Deal. Through Aug. 13, 18 percent of Compass listings had been moved temporarily or permanently off the market in REBNY's Residential Listing Service — a far higher share than rivals Douglas Elliman (6 percent), Brown Harris Stevens (8 percent), Corcoran (8 percent) and Sotheby's (9 percent) over the same period, per that report.
Compass has promoted a private listing strategy nationally that markets homes away from Zillow and StreetEasy, part of a three-stage approach described by the New York Post: listings start in-house with Compass's 340,000 agents as a Private Exclusive to test the market confidentially, move to a Coming Soon preview on select sites, then go fully public. After Zillow updated its own private-listings policy, Compass shifted nationally away from Private Exclusives and toward Coming Soon listings that appear on Compass's website but aren't syndicated to Zillow or StreetEasy, according to Realty Today. Compass's Coming Soon inventory nearly tripled in August compared with a year earlier, while its Private Exclusive inventory fell by almost 30 percent, the outlet reports. Zillow had announced its own private-listings ban in April 2025 for homes publicly marketed but not entered into a multiple listing service within a set window.
The standoff isn't confined to New York. In Chicago, Midwest Real Estate Data announced that Zillow would lose access to its licensed listing data, a removal applying to both Zillow and Trulia, according to NBC Chicago. Compass International Holdings was the first brokerage to commit to providing its nationwide inventory of listings through MRED's private listing network, which the station notes has existed since 2016, according to Compass counsel cited by HousingWire. The dispute could reduce exposure for Chicago-area listings on Zillow and Trulia, though those listings would remain active on other sites such as Redfin and Realtor.com, NBC Chicago reports.
Compass's Corporate Reach
Compass International Holdings owns Corcoran, Compass and Sotheby's International Realty, and acquired Anywhere Real Estate for $1.6 billion in a deal that closed in January 2025 — a company that itself included Corcoran, Sotheby's and Coldwell Banker under its umbrella. That consolidation helps explain why a single corporate strategy is now shaping listing decisions across several once-separate brokerage brands operating in the same city.
For all the corporate maneuvering, Liebman has said agents should ultimately do what their sellers want. She's urged agents to take all of their listings off StreetEasy and to explain to sellers why they don't need to be on the platform — but she's also said that if a seller wants a listing on StreetEasy on day one, agents should put it there.
