In 2025, nearly 1.4 million homes were withdrawn from the MLS. Not sold, withdrawn. Pulled from the market, held off for days, weeks or months, then relisted as if new. I’ve been tracking this practice for 20 years. I first started measuring it at my company, Altos Research, in 2006, when a potential venture capital investor told me bluntly: “This market is a racket. All the new listings are fake.” He was shopping for a home in Silicon Valley at the beginning of the end of the housing bubble.