News

On Wednesday, the Association of Real Estate License Law Officials (ARELLO) published a study that's already making the rounds: homes sold through private listings went for 0.87% less than comparable MLS sales in 2025, and 1.26% less in 2024. That lands in the middle of a fight that has been brewing all summer. In July, a House antitrust subcommittee sent letters to Compass and to MRED, our own MLS, about their private listing network partnership. Senator Elizabeth Warren followed with her own inquiry in August.

If you own a home in DuPage County, the headline you'll hear is simple: private listings cost sellers money. I've been doing this long enough to know that a national average rarely describes your street. So I pulled MRED's own Private Listing Report for DuPage County, five years of it, to see what actually happened here.

1.  What the national study measured

It's worth understanding how the ARELLO number was built before we react to it. The researchers looked at more than 10 million transactions nationwide from January 2024 through June 2026. They judged "price performance" by comparing each sale to what an automated valuation model predicted the home was worth. ARELLO itself says the findings "do not establish causation."

That doesn't make the study wrong. It means it answers a national question with a national method. Other studies have landed all over the map: one industry analysis found phased-marketing homes sold for more, while another MLS-backed study found the opposite by a wide margin. When the research disagrees this much, local data is the tiebreaker.

2. What five years of DuPage data shows

MRED has offered a private listing option for about a decade. In DuPage County it isn't a niche tool: 36% of residential listings this year used it, and those listings account for 41% of closed sales so far in 2026.

Here's the number that stands out. Year to date, private-network listings in DuPage have closed at a median of 100.0% of list price. Standard listings closed at 95.5%. That gap isn't a one-year fluke. Private-network listings have closed closer to their list price in every one of the last five years (chart below).

Speed tells the same story. The median private-network listing this year spent 10 cumulative days on market, compared with 26 for standard listings.

Median sale-to-list price ratio, DuPage County residential, 2022–2026 YTD. Source: MRED Private Listing Report (refreshed 9/25/2026).

Now the honest part. This data shows outcomes, not cause and effect. Private-network homes in DuPage skew pricier: a median close of $524,950 this year versus $420,000 for standard listings. And sale-to-list only measures the price against the list price. A home that's priced low can hit 100% of a number that was too low to begin with. That's exactly the risk the national researchers are worried about.

So the takeaway isn't "go private." It's that the private option, in this market, hasn't been the money-loser the national headline suggests. What protects a seller is the strategy around it.

3. The market all of this is happening in

Zoom out and the backdrop is still firmly in sellers' favor. Nationally, NAR reported August existing-home sales at a 3.98 million annual pace with 4.9 months of supply, the highest in more than a decade. Mortgage rates are back above 7% (7.03% on Freddie Mac's September 24 survey, up from 6.30% a year ago). Read those two numbers together and the national story sounds like a market cooling off.

DuPage isn't following that script. Every market I track has between 1.2 and 2.1 months of single-family supply, a fraction of the national figure and nowhere near the roughly six months that marks a balanced market.

 
Corridor Watch

This week in DuPage

▪ Wed 9/30 Live Music in the Beer Garden — Cantigny Park, 5:30–8:30 PM (also Thu 10/1 and Fri 10/2 same time, Sun 10/4 3–6 PM)

▪ Thu 10/1 Date with History: Irregular Warfare in the American Revolution — Cantigny Park, 6–7 PM

▪ Fri 10/2 Night at the Museum: “Cars” — DuPage County Historical Museum, 102 E. Wesley St., Wheaton. Costumes welcome, flashlight scavenger hunt and a model train demo

The Bottom Line

The private listing debate is going to keep generating headlines this fall, and some of them will sound alarming. In DuPage, the record says private-network listings have closed closer to list price, faster, five years running. That doesn't make private right for every home. It means the question to ask isn't "private or public?" It's "what's my home worth, and what's the smartest way to get it in front of the right buyers?"

If you'd like to know where your home stands against this week's numbers, you can get a private, no-obligation estimate by reaching out to me at apupius@southwestern.com.