A Prior Lake homeowner recently asked her agent to list her lake home "coming soon" so she could test the market quietly before deciding whether to sell. She pictured a soft launch. A handful of agents get a heads-up, a few showings happen behind the scenes, and if the price feels right, she goes fully public. If not, she pulls back with no one the wiser.
That is not what happens here. In Minnesota, a Coming Soon listing is one of the most publicly visible things you can do with a house. It goes straight to Zillow, Realtor.com, and every brokerage website pulling from the local MLS feed, often the same day it's entered. The only thing withheld is the ability to actually walk through the front door. Everyone can see it. No one can tour it yet.
That gap between what sellers assume "quiet" means and what the local MLS rules actually deliver is the thing worth understanding before you decide how to market a home in Prior Lake this year, especially if privacy matters to you or you're trying to time a listing around a summer inventory swing that's larger than anything the south metro has seen in years.
The Middle Path That Never Arrived Here
In March 2025, the National Association of Realtors introduced a new option nationally called Delayed Marketing. The idea was a genuine middle ground: a seller could file a listing with the MLS so other agents could see and cooperate on it, while keeping it off public sites like Zillow and Realtor.com for a period the local MLS decided on. It was pitched as a way to give sellers a controlled runway before full public exposure.
NorthstarMLS, the regional MLS that covers Prior Lake, Lakeville, and the rest of the Twin Cities metro, looked at that option and turned it down. In June 2025, its board voted to adopt NAR's required policy changes but explicitly declined to build the Delayed Marketing status. The reasoning, laid out on NorthstarMLS's own site, came down to a technical mismatch: portals like Zillow and Redfin pull data through a separate feed called VOW, which would still show a "delayed" listing to the public, while the thousands of local agent websites and Realtor.com, which run on the IDX feed, would not. A seller trying to stay quiet would end up half-visible in a confusing, inconsistent way. NorthstarMLS wasn't alone in that call. California Regional MLS, one of the largest MLSs in the country, made the same decision that spring.
So instead of a new in-between category, Minnesota sellers work within statuses that already existed, refined rather than replaced.
What Actually Happens to a Listing Here
| Status | Who sees it | Showings allowed | Days on market counted |
|---|---|---|---|
| Active | Public sites, all agents, full search | Yes | Yes |
| Coming Soon | Public sites, all agents, full search | No, for up to 10 days | No, while in this status |
| Withhold (office exclusive) | Only agents inside the listing brokerage | No, until moved to Active | No |
Coming Soon became a formal, defined status on NorthstarMLS starting in January 2026, and it comes with real structure. A listing has to have every data field filled in before it goes live in that status, and it can stay there for a maximum of 10 calendar days before it automatically flips to Active. During that window, buyers can browse every detail online, but no one can walk through the house. It's built to generate demand before the first open house, not to shield the sale from view.
The one status that delivers genuine privacy is Withhold. A withheld listing is filed with the MLS for record-keeping, but it is not distributed to any agent outside the listing brokerage. If an outside agent hears about it through a phone call and has a buyer who fits, they can inquire one-to-one, but the property has to move to Active before that buyer can actually see it. This is the closest thing Minnesota has to a true office exclusive, and it comes at a real cost: the pool of agents who even know to ask about it shrinks down to whoever happens to work at that one brokerage.
Why the Math Changed This Summer
None of this matters much in a market where every home sells in a weekend regardless of how it's marketed. It matters more right now. Minnesota's housing inventory hit a seven-year high in July 2026, with the Twin Cities metro reaching 11,586 active listings, up 6.7% from a year earlier, and roughly three months of supply. The median sale price across the metro was $408,000, up 3.3% year over year. Closed sales rose too, but buyers are finally seeing more choices and more room to negotiate than they had for most of the past several years.
More listings on the market means more competition for buyer attention. Buyers can afford to be pickier, and buyer's agents have a wider pool of homes to show their clients without ever needing to hunt down a quiet, brokerage-only listing. Nationally, research on off-market sales has found that homes sold without full public exposure often close somewhere in the 10 to 20 percent discount range compared to similar homes that went through the open market. That gap tends to widen, not narrow, when inventory is loose and buyers have plenty of other options that don't require a special phone call to find.
A withheld listing asks the market to work in the seller's favor twice. It has to reach the right buyer despite a smaller pool of agents even aware it exists, and it has to do that in a summer when the average buyer has more choices sitting in front of them than at almost any point in the last decade.
What This Means If You're Selling a Lake Home
Prior Lake sellers weighing privacy tend to fall into a specific group: people who don't want neighbors watching a for-sale sign go up, who are managing a sensitive personal situation, or who simply don't want their home's interior circulating publicly before they're ready. Those are legitimate reasons, and Withhold exists for exactly that purpose.
The honest tradeoff is worth saying out loud before you choose it. A withheld lakefront listing in Prior Lake isn't reaching the buyer actively watching public portals for waterfront inventory, and in a market where lake homes already draw a narrower buyer pool than a standard subdivision listing, cutting that pool further is a real cost. If privacy is the priority, Withhold delivers it. If getting the best price with the widest possible pool of qualified buyers is the priority, Active or a short Coming Soon window ahead of your first weekend of showings will do more work for you.
What This Means If You're Hunting for a Deal
Buyers and investors who assume "off-market" deals are hiding in some private Minnesota pipeline should recalibrate. Because NorthstarMLS didn't build a Delayed Marketing category, there's no formal quiet layer between "everyone can see it" and "only one brokerage knows about it." The real opportunities live in that Withhold status, and the only way in is through relationships with agents at the brokerages actually holding those listings, or by watching for homes that get pulled to Temporarily Not Available for Showings and later relisted. A cold search on a public portal will never surface a withheld listing, because by design, it isn't there.
A Few Straight Answers
Does a Coming Soon listing hurt my days-on-market number? No. Time spent in Coming Soon status doesn't count toward days on market. The clock starts once the listing moves to Active.
Can I show a withheld listing to a buyer I'm working with if I'm not at that brokerage? You can find out about it through a one-to-one call with the listing agent, but the property has to be switched to Active before an outside agent can actually show it to a client.
Is Minnesota unusual for skipping Delayed Marketing? Not particularly. California Regional MLS, one of the country's largest MLSs, made the same call in April 2025, months before NorthstarMLS followed with its own decision that June.
Whether you're weighing privacy against exposure on a lake home, or trying to figure out how to actually find the properties that never make it to a public search, the answer usually comes down to understanding exactly what each status does and doesn't do before you commit to one. If you want to talk through what that looks like for your specific situation in Prior Lake, Nicholas Thull is a phone call away. Let's Connect.
