One thing worth knowing as a buyer: a house being off-market doesn't mean you found a bargain. Some of them are simply overpriced homes that would have sat, and without public days-on-market you can't see that. Roughly a dozen states don't publish sale prices at all, which makes checking harder still.
Wait, that is only the last paragraph. Here is the full post:
They point at overlapping things and only one of them has a strict meaning.
Off-market is the loosest term. It just means the property isn't listed in the MLS, the shared database agents use to publish listings to each other. A house can be off-market because the owner hasn't decided to sell, because they want privacy, or because a deal is being done between two agents who know each other.
An office exclusive is the specific one. It's a signed listing agreement where the seller has instructed in writing that the property not be published to the MLS, and it's marketed only within the listing brokerage. It's a real category with paperwork behind it.
Pocket listing is the loose market phrase for a property an agent is shopping around without a public listing, and people use it for office exclusives and for handshake arrangements alike. Whisper listing means the same thing with better tailoring. Coming soon is different again, it's a status meaning the property will hit the MLS on a known date.
Nothing got banned. What happened is that MLS rules were introduced requiring a listing to be entered into the MLS within a short window once it's publicly marketed, with a carve-out for genuine office exclusives. Those rules differ between MLSs and have been changed and litigated over, so check what your local MLS currently requires rather than trusting a summary.
One thing worth knowing as a buyer: a house being off-market doesn't mean you found a bargain. Some of them are simply overpriced homes that would have sat, and without public days-on-market you can't see that. Roughly a dozen states don't publish sale prices at all, which makes checking harder still.
