If you're house-hunting in Manhattan Beach, one in five homes that sold in the first half of 2026 never showed up on Zillow, Redfin, or any public listing site.

That 20% off-market rate, covering January 1 through June 30, is the highest Manhattan Beach has ever recorded for that six-month window and the highest of any South Bay city tracked in the analysis, according to MB Confidential, the local real estate data site run by Dave Fratello, broker at Edge Real Estate Agency in Manhattan Beach. The analysis counts any closed MLS sale that reported zero days on market as an off-market transaction, a proxy measure that may not capture every private deal.

The gap is stark. Redondo Beach sat at just 5% off-market for all of 2025, Torrance at 4%, and Palos Verdes at 3%, according to the same analysis reported by The MB News on Monday, August 3. Manhattan Beach's own full-year 2025 rate was 15%, meaning the city jumped five percentage points in six months.

Why it's accelerating

Fratello pointed to two forces. "Luxury markets do tend to have a somewhat elevated degree of sales that occur off-market," he said in the analysis published August 2. He also theorized that new, more lenient National Association of Realtors rules about how off-market sales are reported may have pushed the numbers higher.

Those rule changes are documented. NAR introduced two new exempt-listing categories effective March 25, 2025: the Delayed Marketing Exempt Listing, which lets a seller file with the MLS but block syndication to portals like Zillow during a delay window, and the Office Exclusive Exempt Listing, which keeps a property marketed only within the listing agent's brokerage. All NAR-affiliated MLSs were required to adopt the categories by September 30, 2025. Then in November 2025, NAR approved 18 sweeping updates to its MLS Policy Handbook, effective January 2026, clarifying that tracking days-on-market data is a matter of local discretion, not a national mandate.

Who wins, who loses

For sellers, privacy and control are the draw. But industry research consistently shows off-market listings sell for less on average than homes listed broadly, because a smaller buyer pool reduces competitive bidding. NAR now requires agents to inform sellers of that tradeoff in writing before choosing an exempt option.

For buyers, the picture splits. Those with agents plugged into private broker networks can find less competition and more favorable terms. Buyers relying solely on public portals will never see these properties at all.

What to watch

Manhattan Beach's off-market share has climbed every year in Fratello's tracking, from 15% for all of 2025 to 20% in just the first half of 2026. With NAR's exempt-listing categories now fully implemented and the MLS handbook rewritten as of January, the policy framework that enables off-market deals is locked in for the foreseeable future. Fratello's full data tables and year-over-year breakdowns are published on MB Confidential at mbconfidential.com.