Homes Are Not Birkin Bags. Stop Treating Them Like One.

At The Real Deal's NYC Forum last week, Corcoran CEO Pam Liebman and Brown Harris Stevens CEO Bess Freedman got into it over private listings. Freedman has been vocal: get listings on the open market, share them across brokerages, let buyers see the data. Liebman pushed back with a now-infamous line. Freedman compared days-on-market to the odometer on a used car, Liebman rejected the analogy, comparing buying a home to shopping for an Hermès bag.

"When you go into Hermès to buy a bag, you don't get to say, 'How many do you have in the back?'"

It's a clever line. It's also completely wrong.

Here's the thing about Hermès. Nobody needs a Birkin to survive. Nobody's kids are sleeping on the street because they couldn't get on the waitlist. A luxury handbag is a luxury. A home is not. It's the most basic human need after food and water. And in New York City, where the rental vacancy rate hovers around 1% and the average one-bedroom rents for over $3,500 a month, treating housing inventory like limited-edition merchandise isn't just a bad analogy. It's a dangerous one.

The open listing system isn't a courtesy to buyers. It's a safeguard.

When every property hits a shared, public platform [the RLS, StreetEasy, wherever] every buyer sees the same inventory. A first-generation immigrant family in Queens sees the same listings as a hedge fund manager in Tribeca. A young Black couple buying their first apartment has access to the same data as a white family from the suburbs. That's how it's supposed to work. Equal access to equal information.

Private listing networks blow that up. And not by accident.

When listings stay inside one brokerage's ecosystem or get quietly shopped to a curated list of buyers, the seller (or the broker) decides who gets to see it. That decision doesn't happen in a vacuum. Fair Housing law has been on the books since 1968, and housing discrimination has never stopped. It just got more sophisticated. Private platforms give it new cover.

We've seen it in this city. Sellers who only want to deal with buyers of a specific background. Brokers who "happen" to know the right people. Buildings that have stayed almost entirely homogenous for decades, not because of the market, but because of who controlled the information flow. A private listing network doesn't create that problem, but it absolutely feeds it. It makes it easier to keep certain buyers out while keeping that exclusion invisible.

That's not a seller's right. That's discrimination. And the argument that sellers should get to choose who sees their listing sounds reasonable until you follow it to its logical end.

Liebman did say Corcoran has a long history of advocating for co-broking, and she insisted no one is trying to "trick" the market. Fair enough. I'm not saying Corcoran is running a discriminatory operation. But the policy you defend and the outcomes it enables are two different things. Good intentions don't override bad results.

Freedman's position is simple: "We believe in marketing your properties to everybody." That's it. That's the whole argument. And she's right.

Cars and handbags are products. You can sell a product however you want. Housing is infrastructure. It's the foundation that everything else in a person's life gets built on: their commute, their kids' school district, their access to healthcare, their ability to build wealth over time. The city has a direct interest in making sure that foundation is accessible to everyone equally.

Every apartment for rent or sale in New York City should be listed publicly. Not quietly circulated. Not whispered about in brokers' group chats. Listed. With days on market, price history, and every other piece of data buyers need to make an informed decision. The moment we start carving out exceptions, we start carving out people. And in this city, we already know which people tend to get carved out first.

Pam Liebman said, "No one's telling me what to do."

Fine. But someone should be saying this clearly: a home is not a handbag. Treat it like one, and the people who get hurt aren't the ones shopping at Hermès.