In July 2026, Doorify MLS — the multiple listing service Triangle-area agents use to list and search homes — made an important change to its Coming Soon status: listings can now remain Coming Soon for up to 14 calendar days without accumulating Days on Market (DOM).

Showings and open houses aren't permitted during that period, but sellers can begin advertising the property before buyers are allowed through the door.

For Marti Hampton, the rule change makes a strategy she's been developing for more than a decade even more useful.

The idea is simple: the first day buyers can walk through a home doesn't have to be the first day the market hears about it.

Now, sellers have up to 14 days to prepare the property, build the marketing, and create awareness — without those days adding to DOM.

In some cases, using the full 14 days may be ideal. The question isn't whether every seller should use all 14 days. It's how much time this particular home needs, and what should happen during that time.

Think of the Coming Soon Period Like a Movie Premiere

Marti often compares the Coming Soon period to the way a movie is launched.

A studio doesn't wait until opening night to tell people the movie exists. Trailers are released. Previews appear. Media begins circulating. People hear about the movie, see enough to become interested, and know when opening night is coming.

Then the doors open.

Marti believes a home launch deserves the same kind of thinking. The first day buyers can walk through a property shouldn't also have to be the first day they learn about it.

Before showings begin, photography and video can be completed. Pricing and positioning can be finalized. Marketing assets can be built. Buyers and agents can learn that the property is coming — and when they'll have an opportunity to see it.

Then comes the home's version of opening night: its market debut and first showings.

The point isn't to keep buyers waiting. It's to arrive at launch with an audience already paying attention.

Of course, a great trailer can't compensate for a movie people don't want to see. Coming Soon can't compensate for a home that isn't properly prepared, positioned, or priced. Preparation still comes first. It's the same reason choosing the right agent matters as much as the marketing itself — the trailer only works if someone capable is running the release.

It's the same idea Marti points to when she talks about a concert hall going quiet the moment the conductor raises the baton, or when she puts it simply: you've got to get their full attention. Different image, same point — don't wait until the day people can walk in to start telling them it's coming.

Marti Built Coming Soon Homes® Around the Idea

Marti founded Coming Soon Homes® in 2014.

Two years later, the platform was recognized as an Inman Innovator of the Year finalist in 2016.

For Marti, promoting a home before its market debut was never just a marketing tactic. It became a genuine passion and one of the defining threads of her career. She built comingsoonhomes.com and grew it into a company because she believed in what a defined pre-market window could do for a listing — and for the people on both sides of it.

Her reasoning starts with fiduciary duty. Marti views building anticipation before a home's debut as part of representing a seller's best interest — not an optional add-on, but part of doing the job well. And she sees the benefit as running both ways: buyers get advance notice of a home coming to market, more time to prepare a serious offer, and a clearer picture of what's ahead, instead of discovering a listing the same morning it's ready for a decision.

She's been candid that running a full Coming Soon process is more work for her team than a standard listing — more coordination, more steps, more time. Her position is that the extra effort doesn't change the calculation: it's what serves the seller, so it's what she does, even when it would be simpler not to.

The innovation wasn't simply another place to advertise homes. It was a repeatable system built around the period before a home's market debut:

1. Finish the house.
2. Prepare the presentation.
3. Establish the price and position.
4. Build the marketing.
5. Begin attracting attention.
6. Then open the doors.

Doorify's 2026 change didn't create the idea behind Marti's Coming Soon strategy. It changed what's possible within it.

The principle Marti has advocated for years remains the same: build attention before the doors open. But good strategy adapts to the rules, the market, and the individual property. With up to 14 days now available without adding to DOM, sellers have more flexibility in how that pre-market period can be used.

Marti has pointed to this pre-market window as one of the quieter drivers behind her team's track record — from the Inman Innovator finalist recognition to years ranking among the top RE/MAX, and more recently eXp, teams nationally. In her view, going all-in on the coming-soon period wasn't incidental to those results. It was part of how she got there.

What Changes When You Have Up to 14 Days Without DOM?

Previously, sellers had to weigh the benefit of building awareness before showings against the fact that Days on Market were accumulating during that period. That calculation has changed.

Under Doorify's current rules, a listing can remain Coming Soon for up to 14 calendar days without those days adding to DOM. That makes the pre-showing period much more flexible.

Consider a home that still needs time for staging, photography, final repairs, or other launch preparation — those days can now happen during Coming Soon without starting the DOM clock.

But preparation is only part of the opportunity. A longer Coming Soon period can also give the marketing time to work. Buyers and agents can begin discovering the property, awareness can build, the launch date can be communicated, and marketing can begin reaching people before the first showing.

For some properties, a few days may accomplish what's needed. For others, the full 14 days may be the ideal runway. And if a home is completely prepared and there's a strategic reason to begin showings immediately, going directly to Active may still make more sense.

There's no universal number. The value comes from using the available time deliberately.

What Should Happen During Coming Soon?

A Coming Soon period should have a job. Depending on the home, the seller, and the market, that may include several things.

Finish the property before buyers judge it. Final repairs, staging, cleaning, and presentation decisions are better handled before buyers begin forming opinions. The first showing shouldn't also be the final walkthrough for the marketing team. Even small, inexpensive fixes shape how buyers judge a home in the first minute — this is the window to handle them.

Build the marketing before the launch. Photography. Video. Floor plans. Listing copy. Social and digital assets. The trailer shouldn't arrive after opening night — a property should enter its showing period with the marketing ready to support it.

Confirm price and position. Price doesn't exist in isolation. A home's position depends on competing inventory, recent sales, condition, and what buyers are responding to in the current market. That analysis belongs before launch — pricing too high from the start tends to cost sellers more than it protects them.

Begin creating awareness. The buyer most interested in a property may not happen to discover it the morning it becomes Active. Coming Soon creates a defined period in which buyers and agents can learn that a home is approaching its showing date.

Whether the right runway is three days, seven days, or the full 14, the goal is the same: use the time to make the launch stronger.

What a Crowd Can Do for a Seller

A wider audience at the moment a home goes live doesn't just create visibility — it tends to create competitive tension, and that tension is what shows up in the final price. Multiple offers change the negotiating leverage a seller has once buyers start comparing terms, not just price.

In 2021, during an unusually intense seller's market, Marti's team reported that 98% of their Coming Soon listings drew multiple offers once they went Active — averaging around five offers per home, with some reaching as many as 25. That same year, dozens of their listings sold sight-unseen, largely to out-of-state buyers working from floor plans and marketing built during the Coming Soon period.

Numbers like that reflect one specific market cycle and won't repeat in every condition — a buyer's market behaves differently than a seller's market, and results depend on the property, the price, and the moment. Current Triangle inventory levels shape how much competitive pull any given launch is likely to see. But the underlying mechanism holds regardless of the cycle: the more of the market that's paying attention when a home becomes available to see, the more competitive the response tends to be.

Marti also treats the response during a launch as a pricing signal. When a home doesn't generate strong activity once buyers can see it, that's rarely about how well the home was maintained — it's usually about price.

Marti Had Been Building This Strategy for Years

Marti's thinking around Coming Soon didn't begin with Doorify's 2026 rule change — or even with the 2022 conversation below.

She founded Coming Soon Homes® in 2014, and the platform was recognized as an Inman Innovator of the Year finalist in 2016. When the National Association of Realtors introduced its Clear Cooperation Policy in 2019 — a policy many in the industry feared would effectively eliminate "coming soon" marketing altogether — Marti, as CEO of Coming Soon Homes, published her own public response. It wasn't a passing comment. The policy threatened the foundation her business, and her results, had already been built on. She defended the strategy and laid out how it could work alongside the new rule rather than disappear because of it.

In 2022, Marti sat down with Amy Wienands, an Iowa-based real estate leader who had brought Coming Soon Homes into her own business. By that point, Marti had already spent years developing and publicly advocating for the idea of creating attention before a home's first showing.

That conversation provides a useful record of how she explained the philosophy in practice.

Amy described first hearing Marti present the Coming Soon concept at a real estate mastermind. The idea resonated because Amy had already been questioning something about the traditional listing process: a home could go Active, receive one or two showings, get an offer, and sell quickly — but had enough of the market actually had an opportunity to respond?

Hearing Marti explain Coming Soon gave Amy a different way to think about the launch — and, as Amy put it in the same conversation, a program Marti had already taken well beyond the mastermind stage: she'd built the website, brought it to markets across the country, and pushed the idea through real estate boards that weren't necessarily receptive to it at first.

Recorded in 2022, the conversation explores market exposure, seller representation, and the thinking behind building attention before showings begin.

The significance of the video isn't that Marti somehow predicted what Doorify would do four years later — she didn't. What it documents is that the strategy was already well established: build awareness before the market debut, give the property a deliberate launch, create options for the seller, and don't assume the first available offer is automatically the best possible outcome.

"Slow Down"

Later in the same conversation, Marti comes back to another idea: "Slow down."

That principle reaches beyond Coming Soon. Marti's point is that an agent's responsibility isn't to reach the next commission check as quickly as possible — it's to give the seller the time, information, and options needed to make a sound decision.

Amy makes essentially the same argument from the agent's side. Using a Coming Soon strategy can require more work — more preparation, more coordination, more steps before the listing becomes Active. That extra work is the point when it serves the client.

A pre-market strategy shouldn't exist because it makes a transaction easier for the brokerage. It should exist because there's a defensible reason it benefits the seller.

That's also why the new 14-day window shouldn't be treated as either a requirement or something to avoid. If using the full 14 days gives a particular property a stronger launch and creates a meaningful advantage for the seller, then using those 14 days may be exactly the right decision.

More Exposure, Not an Inside Track

Marti also drew a clear line in the 2022 conversation around what she did not believe Coming Soon should become. She rejected the idea of using the pre-showing period as a way to quietly steer a property toward an agent's own buyer. In that same conversation, she described telling sellers directly that it isn't in their best interest for her to bring her own buyer to the table during that period — the goal is the widest possible pool of buyers, not a shortcut for her own pipeline.

The purpose was broader exposure — giving more of the market an opportunity to know the property was coming.

That distinction remains important. Under Doorify's rules, Coming Soon listings are distributed through IDX and syndication channels while physical showings remain prohibited. So the strategy isn't about hiding the home. It's about preparing its introduction.

MLS Rules Changed. The Judgment Call Didn't.

Doorify's updated treatment of Days on Market removes one practical drawback sellers previously had to weigh when considering Coming Soon. But it doesn't make Coming Soon automatic. Instead, it gives sellers and their agents more flexibility.

The questions now become:

• Is the property ready for buyers now, or is there still work to finish?
• How much of the available 14-day period could benefit this particular home?
• What will we accomplish before showings begin?
• How will we use that period to build awareness?
• Would using the full 14 days create a stronger market debut?
• What are we giving up by delaying physical access?
• What happens the moment the property becomes Active?

Those answers won't be identical for every home. Nor should they be.

The listing status is only the vehicle. The strategy is what happens during it.

Doorify Just Caught Up to What Marti Started in 2014

Marti founded Coming Soon Homes® in 2014 — twelve years before Doorify made its 2026 change. The rules surrounding Coming Soon have evolved during that time, and they'll likely evolve again. The principle underneath them hasn't: don't wait until opening night to start building the audience.

Today, Doorify gives Greater Raleigh sellers up to 14 calendar days in Coming Soon without those days accumulating toward DOM. That's not a new philosophy — it's a bigger toolkit for the same one. Used well, it can create a valuable runway to prepare the home, establish its position, build the marketing, and begin attracting attention before buyers ever walk through the door.

Sometimes that runway may be short.

Sometimes, using the full 14 days may be ideal. The principle stays fixed: build attention before the doors open. What's changed is how much room sellers now have to do it well.

Prepare first. Create attention. Then open the doors.

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