As real estate brokerages have unveiled competing private listing platforms in the last year, a luxury team based out of Boston, Massachusetts, is now entering the playing field, Inman has learned.
The Sarkis Team at Douglas Elliman, which is the No. 1 large team by sales volume in Massachusetts, according to RealTrends, has launched its own team-run private listing platform.
Known as “Sarkis Soon,” the platform debuts with more than $200 million in private listings. Sarkis Soon is accessible via the team’s recently revamped website, SarkisBoston.com, and offers clients access to exclusive on-market, pre-market and completely private listings.
A screenshot of the Sarkis Soon platform entrance | The Sarkis Team
“Boston has always been a market built on relationships, discretion and trust,” brothers and team leaders George and Manny Sarkis said in a joint statement.
“With the launch of SarkisBoston.com and our private-exclusive platform Sarkis Soon, we’re honoring that legacy while introducing a more modern, streamlined, and secure way for clients to explore opportunities that rarely make it to the public market. We’re building an ecosystem that meets clients where the market is headed, redefining how top teams can deliver value in one of the country’s most competitive and private luxury markets.”
Several high-end firms have created private listing networks in recent years, including Compass, Corcoran Group and Douglas Elliman, while other firms have taken the less flashy approach of merely offering private listing services without marketing them on a separate platform.
The team leaders told Inman that even though Douglas Elliman has its own private listing network, they wanted to have a platform that they could control more directly and in real-time.
“We have some very exclusive listings and some very private and exclusive clients, so we wanted to be able to control the narrative,” George Sarkis told Inman. “We wanted to be able to control what we’re putting on, what we’re updating and just have overall control of our own site because at the end of the day, the clients are our clients — they’re not Douglas Elliman’s clients, they’re The Sarkis Team’s clients.”
By creating a team-specific platform, The Sarkis Team creates a more intimate private listing network — which currently has 15 listings across different price points — that may be more limited in scope than an entire brokerage’s private listing network, but has the potential to be more tailored and curated to the team’s distinct clientele.
Private listings are very common in Boston’s luxury market, George and Manny Sarkis told Inman, and nearly all of the team’s clients prefer to start their listings out as private ones. “Everyone wants to test the market,” George said.
Consumers and agents alike who want to view listings on the platform will need to provide the team with basic information, like their name and contact information, on the Sarkis Soon platform, and will be able to view the team’s private listings to varying degrees, depending on the seller’s preference for privacy.
Knowing about Sarkis Soon may even give agents outside of the team a leg up when it comes to finding more inventory for their clients, the team leaders argued.
“It’s giving agents an opportunity to send [Sarkis Team listings] to a buyer,” George Sarkis said. “They can send the listing via our website to a buyer. We are always going to value the relationships with the broker community. We are both big believers in ‘co-broke or go broke,’ and we’ll always make sure that we’re honoring the relationship that a buyer has with a broker.”
The team is also creating a mobile app version of Sarkis Soon, which it anticipates will go live during the first quarter of 2026.
Get Inman’s Luxury Lens Newsletter delivered right to your inbox. A weekly deep dive into the biggest news in the world of high-end real estate delivered every Friday. Click here to subscribe.
Read Next
