When one of three listing proposals wants to keep an estate sale off market first

Ask C for the names of the two off-market sales and whether they represented one side or both. If they were the buyer's agent on someone else's discreet sale, that is a different claim than having sourced a buyer themselves.

On buyer-side compensation in an off-market deal, mechanically nothing special happens. The buyer's agent has a written agreement with their buyer saying what they get paid, and then either the buyer pays it, or the seller's side agrees to pay it as a negotiated term of the contract, or some split. Off market just means the number isn't advertised anywhere in advance. It still lands in the purchase agreement. The practical effect at a high price point is that compensation gets negotiated deal by deal against whoever shows up, which can go either way for the seller.

120 days on market at that price band sounds long to me but four sales in eighteen months means it isn't. That's roughly a sale every four and a half months in the whole band. C's staleness argument is doing a lot of work on a market where nothing sells fast anyway.

Plumb beat me to it. If everything at that price sits, buyers in that band know everything sits, and nobody's reading 100 days on market as a red flag.

Just under two acres in a small market raises a real question about split potential and whether zoning matters to the value. High end rural edge houses often carry a chunk of their price in the land itself, and it is common for agents to price purely off house comps and miss that. Worth asking all three what they did with the acreage specifically. If one can articulate it clearly and the other two cannot, that is a signal about who actually understands the market.

The spread between A and C is $450k on price and about 0.5% on fee. On $3.05M the extra fee is roughly $15k. So C only needs to beat A's realized price by $15k to justify the fee, which is nothing. The whole question is whether the $3.05M is real or whether it's the number that wins listing appointments. Worth asking C what their last six listings listed at and closed at.

Sable's last line is the whole thread. List-to-close ratio on their last six listings, and days on market for each. An agent who won't hand that over has already answered the question. The C proposal is also worth making conditional: 2.5% if it sells during the off-market window at or above a stated number, 3% only if a higher price gets brought in. Whether that structure is permissible under this state's rules and with their brokerage is a question for them and their broker, but agents at that level do negotiate structure.

One thing nobody has raised is the buyer's financing. At $3M in a thin market you are probably looking at a jumbo or a portfolio loan, and appraisals get interesting when there are four comps and two of them are not public. A discreet sale with no market exposure gives an appraiser even less to work with. Ask each agent how they would handle an appraisal that comes in short, because that is where the $3.05M gets tested.

I'd take A and not lose sleep, mostly for warrant's reason. Full exposure is the defensible choice for an executor and the fee difference is small in dollars. But tender's appraisal point applies to A too, so ask that question regardless of who you hire.