jschoenholtz

Haha - not really! Was saying that most of the criticisms directed towards Redfin agents could be applied to more generally to many real estate agents currently working in the industry.

To date, Redfin has built the best home search tools available. But they continue to reduce their refund amounts and hire agents on salary who work individually in a traditional manner. As a competing entrant, we're trying a different approach. Buyers win because they have more choices.

It's not just Redfin agents: a surprising number of licensed agents have trouble with basic tasks like communicating via email and filling out contracts. Since we work as a team, we've built a vast amount of institutional knowledge over the past 5 months and there are no individual, inexperienced agents representing our buyers. We're also automating most of the offer submission process. This means that we're more responsive, more articulate and more accurate than the majority of agents. We also have the privilege of working with smart, serious buyers. We can honestly say that most agents have been happy to work with us and treat us like any other brokerage.

The most important thing to understand is the seller decides which offer to accept and that decision comes down to price & terms. The best offer always wins. 100% of the time we've submitted the highest offer, it has been accepted. Our offers are clean and our buyers are able to pay more knowing they'll get a significant refund. So far, so good.

Thanks! We'd love to get you into that penthouse...

When you buy a home, your agent is paid a 2.5% commission to represent you in the transaction. As a real estate brokerage, Open Listings replaces your agent and facilitates the transaction on your behalf. At close, we refund you half of the commission we receive, usually crediting the refund against your closing costs.

Here's a more detailed explanation plus a fun slider: https://www.openlistings.co/our-commission-refund

Exactly, comes from this Urban Mobility Report linked in the Medium post: http://d2dtl5nnlpfr0r.cloudfront.net/tti.tamu.edu/documents/...

Great point - We deliver each offer personally and gather the exact information that you are talking about before finalizing each offer.

One of our main goals is to reduce the opacity in the process for our buyers. You've provided examples where the buyer benefits, but we also see private agent-to-agent communication used to drive up offer prices.

We have real-time listing data in LA and SF at the moment as broker members of a local MLS. The only real way to get quality data for a listing product is to connect to every realtor database.

Great questions Austin. We've spent the last 6 months "exploring" the data supply chain and have learned first hand how fragmented and closed the system really is.

National coverage is nearly impossible unless you go through an aggregator like ListHub or Point2, but this doesn't work for real buyers because of delayed, inaccurate and incomplete information. The only reliable way to get listing data in most regions is by opening an office and joining the local MLS.

Our non-answer is that we plan to focus on our clients in California for the time being while we nail the customer experience before thinking about expansion.

We hope to remove this requirement very soon :)

We'll charge a small brokerage fee to start but plan to offer $0 commission closings in the future for clients who utilize partner services. There are other revenue streams we are looking at as well.

We're a registered brokerage. Self-service but with expert support when you need it, you keep the agent commission.

Send us an email if you're interested in becoming one of our first clients and we'll get you setup.