Why Selling Off-Market May Be the Smartest Move for Seniors and Their Families

That framing tracks the article’s main arguments about higher prices in the cited study, fewer price cuts, and a lower-stress process for older sellers. 

For decades, the conventional wisdom in real estate has been simple: put your home on the MLS, get maximum exposure, and let the market do its thing. More eyeballs means more competition, which means a higher price. It sounds logical, and for many sellers it works well enough. But here’s what nobody in the industry wants to talk about honestly: that playbook wasn’t designed with older adults in mind, and the people it fails most often are the ones who can least afford to leave money on the table.

A groundbreaking new academic study is finally giving us hard data to support what many of us who work closely with senior sellers have observed for years. Selling off-market isn’t just a viable alternative for older homeowners. In many cases, it’s the better one.

The Study That’s Changing the Conversation

In February 2026, Darren Hayunga, a finance professor at the University of Georgia, published a paper on SSRN called Pocket Sales in the Housing Market: Selection, Outcomes, and Policy. What makes this study worth paying attention to is that it appears to be genuinely independent, funded through a university research award rather than by any brokerage, MLS, or portal with a horse in the race.

Hayunga analyzed more than 700,000 residential transactions in the Dallas-Fort Worth area over a twenty-year period, from 2002 to 2022. His focus was on what the industry calls pocket sales, which are homes that were negotiated privately and entered into the MLS only after the deal was already done, showing up as zero days on market.

The headline finding is one that turns traditional real estate economics on its head: those privately sold homes didn’t sell for less. They sold for approximately 1.7% more than comparable homes that went through the standard MLS listing process. And for luxury properties, that premium jumped to over 8%.

To make sure this wasn’t just an artifact of comparing different types of homes, Hayunga matched each pocket sale to similar properties in the same neighborhood that sold in the same month through the normal MLS process, controlling for size, age, features, and location. Even after all that matching, the premium held up. As industry analyst Rob Hahn noted in his widely read analysis of the paper, the same agent produced better results when doing a private sale than when going through the standard MLS process, which means the advantage isn’t about having a superstar agent. It’s about the strategy itself.

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Why Off-Market Selling Works (And Why It Matters So Much for Seniors)

So where does the premium come from? This is where the study gets really interesting, and where the implications for older sellers become impossible to ignore.

Hayunga identified two primary mechanisms that explain the price advantage, and both of them connect directly to challenges that seniors and their families face every day in the traditional selling process.

Avoiding the Negotiation Discount

In a standard MLS transaction in a typical North American real estate market, the list price functions as a ceiling. Buyers see it as a starting point for negotiation, and they work to talk the price down. That’s simply how the open market operates. But in a pocket sale, this dynamic gets short-circuited entirely. Hayunga found that the sale-to-list price ratio for pocket sales was 1.6% higher than for comparable MLS transactions. Sellers were essentially capturing their full asking price instead of giving back what he calls the “negotiation discount.”

Why does this matter so much for seniors? Because research from the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College and a recent analysis covered by CNBC shows that older homeowners already tend to receive lower prices when they sell. The gap starts becoming measurable around age 70 and widens with each passing year. Older sellers are more likely to accept lower offers, make price concessions, and sell below their listing price compared to younger sellers in the same markets selling comparable homes.

Part of that disparity comes from deferred maintenance, which is understandable when you consider that many older homeowners simply don’t have the physical capacity or financial appetite to take on major home improvements before listing. But part of it comes from something more subtle: reduced negotiation stamina. Selling a home through the traditional process is exhausting for anyone, but it is especially draining for someone in their 70s or 80s who may be dealing with health challenges, grief over losing a spouse, or the emotional weight of leaving a home where they raised their family.

An off-market sale removes the negotiation grind almost entirely. The buyer is paying a premium for the privilege of locking down the property before it hits the open market, which means the seller holds the leverage without having to fight for it. For a senior seller, that’s not just a financial advantage. It’s a quality-of-life advantage during one of the most stressful transitions they’ll ever go through.

Eliminating the Stigma of Price Cuts

The second mechanism Hayunga identified is what he calls the “pre-market filter” effect. When you list a home on the MLS, your list price becomes a public commitment. If the market doesn’t respond and you need to reduce the price, that reduction is visible to every buyer and every agent. It signals that something might be wrong, whether that’s overpricing, a defect, or simply a lack of interest. Each price cut erodes buyer confidence and weakens the seller’s position.

Hayunga found that pocket sales were about 20 percentage points less likely to undergo a price cut, dropping from 25.5% for standard MLS listings down to just 5.6% for private sales. The private channel lets sellers test the market quietly. If the price doesn’t work, nobody knows, and there’s no digital trail of days on market ticking upward while buyers wonder what’s wrong with the place.

This is enormously significant for seniors selling older homes. Many of the properties owned by long-term older homeowners have characteristics that can spook buyers on the open market: older systems, dated kitchens, accessibility modifications like grab bars and ramps that signal the home was occupied by someone with mobility challenges. On the MLS, these features can lead to extended market time and price reductions that create a downward spiral. In a private sale, the home can be presented to a targeted buyer who understands what they’re getting, and the price can be calibrated without the whole market watching.

Your Neighbor Sold their House too Cheap!

The Stress Factor: Why the Traditional Process Hits Seniors Hardest

Beyond the financial math, there’s a human dimension to this conversation that the industry tends to gloss over. The traditional home selling process is genuinely brutal for older adults, and I don’t think we talk about that enough.

Think about what we ask of a senior seller in a conventional listing. We ask them to declutter a lifetime of belongings, which for someone who has lived in the same home for 30 or 40 years means confronting decades of memories under time pressure. We ask them to stage the home, which often means removing the personal touches and accessibility features that make their daily life manageable. We ask them to keep the house in showing condition, which means constant tidying, leaving the home on short notice when buyers want to tour, and having strangers walk through the most intimate spaces of their lives, sometimes multiple times a week.

For a 75-year-old with mobility limitations, or an 82-year-old who just lost their spouse and is trying to figure out the next chapter of their life, this process isn’t just inconvenient. It can be genuinely harmful. The stress of constant showings, the disruption to daily routines that may include medication schedules and caregiver visits, the anxiety of waiting for offers while the days-on-market counter climbs higher, all of it takes a real toll on health and wellbeing.

An off-market sale can eliminate most of these stressors. There are no public showings, no parade of strangers, no pressure to stage the home like a model unit. The process is quieter, more controlled, and happens on a timeline that can accommodate the seller’s actual life rather than demanding that the seller accommodate the market.

Hayunga himself acknowledged this dimension in an interview with RISMedia when he noted that even in scenarios where the financial premium might be modest, avoiding the marketing hassle represents a real economic benefit. If you know you’re going to get a fair price without suffering a discount, he suggested, that certainty and simplicity has genuine value.

The Agent Connection: Why Experience and Relationships Matter

One of the more fascinating findings from the Hayunga study is about the types of agents who successfully execute off-market sales. Top-producing agents with large networks were nearly three times more likely to complete pocket sales than newer agents. But here’s the nuance: agents who primarily represent sellers were actually less likely to do off-market deals. The agents who excelled at private sales were those who worked with both buyers and sellers, because they had their own pool of qualified buyers they could match with properties without needing the MLS to source demand.

This finding has important implications for seniors and their families who are choosing an agent. You don’t just want someone who lists a lot of homes. You want someone who has deep relationships on both sides of the transaction, who knows the buyer pool in your market intimately enough to identify the right match for your home without hanging a sign in the yard.

For older adults especially, this is about more than sales volume. It’s about working with an agent who understands the unique needs of senior sellers, who won’t rush the process, and who has the network to make a private sale work rather than defaulting to the MLS because that’s the only tool they know how to use.

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Addressing the Concerns

I want to be honest about the fact that off-market selling isn’t without criticism, and some of those criticisms deserve serious consideration.

Fair housing advocates have raised legitimate concerns about whether private listings could limit access for certain buyer populations. Hayunga acknowledges in his paper that his data doesn’t permit a direct test of racial exclusion effects, and this is something the industry needs to continue examining carefully. Any strategy that benefits sellers shouldn’t come at the cost of creating barriers for buyers, particularly buyers from historically underserved communities.

There’s also the question of whether some pocket sales in the data might represent non-arm’s-length transactions, like sales between family members or neighbors, where the premium might reflect a pre-existing relationship rather than a genuine market dynamic. The study can’t fully disentangle these situations from true private market transactions.

And it’s worth noting that the study focused on a single market, Dallas-Fort Worth, over a specific time period. Markets like the Bay Area, with tighter inventory, higher price points, and more concentrated broker networks, may produce different results, though many practitioners in these markets would argue the case for off-market selling is even stronger in competitive, privacy-conscious environments.

But none of these caveats change the core finding: the idea that limiting exposure automatically means getting a lower price is not supported by the data. For sellers who have a qualified agent with the right network, private selling can and does produce superior financial outcomes while offering practical benefits that are difficult to quantify but impossible to ignore, especially for older adults.

The Fiduciary Question

Here’s where I want to get a little pointed, because I think this matters. If you’re an agent working with a senior client, and the data shows that a private listing strategy could net your seller between 1.7% and 2.3% more than a traditional MLS listing (as Hayunga’s arm’s-length transaction data suggests), while simultaneously reducing the physical and emotional burden on an older adult, then you have a fiduciary obligation to at least present that option.

Too many agents default to the MLS because it’s what they know, because it’s what they’ve always done, or because they don’t have the buyer network to execute a private sale. None of those reasons serves the client. And when the client is a senior who stands to lose the most from a drawn-out, stressful selling process, the failure to explore alternatives isn’t just a missed opportunity. It’s a failure of duty.

The Hayunga paper puts this in stark terms: the premium from private sales has nothing to do with double-ending deals or agent self-interest. The premium is actually larger in arm’s-length transactions where the buyer comes from a different brokerage. It comes from better negotiation positioning for the seller, period. And the agents who do it best are the ones whose networks give their clients more options, not fewer.

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What This Means for Families

If you’re an adult child helping a parent navigate a home sale, this research should reshape how you think about the process. The traditional approach of listing on the MLS, doing extensive showings, and playing the competitive offer game may produce a good result. But it also creates significant stress and disruption for your parent, and the data now suggests it may not even produce the best financial outcome.

Before your parent’s home goes on the open market, it’s worth having a conversation with a qualified agent about whether a private or off-market approach might be appropriate. Ask about their buyer network. Ask how many transactions they’ve completed without MLS exposure. Ask whether they understand the specific needs and limitations of older sellers. And ask whether they’re willing to take the time to find the right buyer through their relationships rather than throwing the listing onto Zillow and hoping for the best.

The home your parent is selling likely represents their single largest financial asset. For many seniors, the proceeds from that sale will fund their next chapter, whether that’s a move to a senior living community, a smaller home closer to family, or simply the financial security to age comfortably. Getting 1.7% more on a $1.5 million Bay Area home means an additional $25,500 in their pocket. On a $3 million home, it’s $51,000. Those numbers matter when you’re planning for potentially decades of retirement living, healthcare costs, and everything that comes with aging well.

What This Study Doesn’t Tell Us

I believe in being transparent when we’re talking about decisions that affect someone’s largest financial asset, so let’s talk about the limitations of this study.

This is one market, and it’s not our market

The study draws entirely from Dallas-Fort Worth, which is a non-disclosure state where sale prices aren’t public record. Consumers there rely more heavily on agents for pricing information, and off-market deals are more normalized in that ecosystem. California is the opposite. Sale prices are public, the MLS functions as a transparent source of truth, and buyers can verify pricing independently. That doesn’t mean off-market selling can’t work here, but a 1.7% premium found in Texas doesn’t automatically translate to what we’d see in Silicon Valley.

We don’t know what these homes would have sold for on the open market

The study compares pocket sale prices to similar MLS sales, but the same home was never sold both ways at the same time. Statistical matching is valuable, but it can’t replicate the competitive urgency that real exposure creates. Anyone who sold in the Bay Area during 2021 knows what happens when multiple motivated buyers fight over the same property, and that dynamic is almost impossible to capture in a dataset.

The data can’t see what happens inside brokerages

Hayunga concludes that agency conflict isn’t driving outcomes, and his transaction data supports that. But transaction data doesn’t capture recruiting pitches, internal incentives, or cultural pressure to keep deals in-house.

In Silicon Valley, limiting exposure has real costs

For a senior selling a four-bedroom home in a desirable school district in Cupertino or Los Gatos, broad MLS exposure might generate a multiple-offer scenario that drives the price well beyond what any single pre-market buyer would pay. The right answer depends on the specific property, the seller’s circumstances, and whether maximizing price or minimizing stress matters more.

Transparency protects consumers, especially vulnerable ones

The study frames days on market and price reductions as problems to avoid. But those metrics exist because the market demanded transparency, and the MLS is still the only truly agnostic data platform in real estate. For seniors who may already be navigating an information disadvantage, weakening that transparency isn’t automatically a net positive.

None of this means off-market selling is wrong. It means the choice should be made with eyes open, with an agent who will walk you through the full picture rather than cherry-picking data to support a predetermined strategy.

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The Bottom Line

Let me be clear about something: this is one study, from one metro area, and it hasn’t been through peer review yet. Dallas-Fort Worth is a big market, but it’s not the Bay Area, and it’s not Chicago, and the dynamics of private selling may look very different in markets with tighter inventory and higher price points. We can’t draw sweeping conclusions from a single paper, no matter how well-constructed the analysis appears to be.

What we can say is that the Hayunga study challenges a long-held assumption that has gone largely unquestioned in our industry: the idea that putting a home on the MLS is always, for every seller, in every situation, the best path to the highest price. That assumption deserves scrutiny, and this research gives us a credible, independent reason to scrutinize it. The mechanism it identifies, that private sellers hold stronger negotiating position and avoid the stigma of public price reductions, makes intuitive sense to anyone who has walked an older client through the traditional listing process and watched what it costs them, financially and otherwise.

For seniors, the conversation goes well beyond the data. Even if future research narrows or complicates the financial findings, the practical realities remain. The traditional selling process asks a lot of older adults: constant showings, strangers walking through their home, the pressure to stage and declutter a lifetime of belongings under time constraints, and the anxiety of watching days on market tick upward while public price cuts chip away at their confidence. An off-market approach won’t be right for everyone, but for some sellers, it offers a quieter process, a more controlled timeline, and a transaction that respects both the value of the home and the dignity of the person selling it.

Not every home or every situation calls for a private sale. But every senior seller deserves to know the option exists, to have an honest conversation about the tradeoffs, and to work with an agent whose network and experience make it a realistic choice rather than just a talking point. The research is early, and more work needs to be done across different markets and under peer review before anyone should treat this as settled science. But it opens a door that’s worth walking through, carefully and with the right guidance, for older adults and families who want to explore every available path to protecting what is often their single largest financial asset.

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