Compare Realtor.com ReadyConnect (Opcity) and Zillow Offers

For Sellers

Referred Agents
30%-40%
Referral Fee
Realtor.com Opcity does not provide real estate services to home sellers. Instead, this company “sorts and matches” consumers with various real estate agents in exchange for an undisclosed referral fee; typically these fees are 25%-40% of the agent’s entire commission. Realtor.com Opcity results suffer from pay-to-play bias because the network does not match consumers with agents unwilling to pay 25%-40% of their commission to Realtor.com Opcity.

For Sellers

Cash Offers
15%-20%
Home Equity
Zillow Offers does not provide real estate listing representation. Instead, the company buys homes directly, repairs and resells them to consumers or companies that rent them to tenants. Zillow Offers typically makes an offer equal to estimated 80%-85% of home value accounting for fees and any cost of the repairs and resale.

For Buyers

Referred Agents
30%-40%
Referral Fee
Realtor.com Opcity does not provide real estate services to home sellers. Instead, this company “sorts and matches” consumers with various real estate agents in exchange for an undisclosed referral fee; typically these fees are 30%-40% of the agent’s entire commission. Realtor.com Opcity results suffer from pay-to-play bias because the network does not match consumers with agents unwilling to pay 30%-40% of their commission to Realtor.com Opcity.

For Buyers

Not Applicable
0
No Rates
Zillow Offers does not provide real estate services to home buyers. Zillow Offers does resell some of the homes it buys on the open market, just like any other real estate investor aiming for the highest return on investment.
Question: What is the difference between Realtor.com ReadyConnect (Opcity) and Zillow Offers?
Answer: Realtor.com ReadyConnect (Opcity) is a referral fee network that enables broker-to-broker collusion with use of blanket referral agreements while Zillow Offers is a direct home cash buyer that buys select homes off-market with cash offers and resells them at a profit to homebuyers
Compare Realtor.com ReadyConnect (Opcity) and Zillow Offers for home buying and selling. HomeOpenly is an impartial and an open resource focused on trending real estate services, portals and start-ups.

First published: 17 February 2019
Last updated: 25 April 2021

Buying and Selling with Realtor.com ReadyConnect (Opcity)

WARNING: Unlawful Kickbacks, Broker-to-Broker Collusion, False Marketing, Wire Fraud, Price Fixing.

Realtor.com ReadyConnect (Opcity) is a broker-to-broker collusion scheme, where "partner agents" unlawfully agree to pay massive kickbacks to receive your information and engage in market allocation, consumer allocation, false advertising, unlawful kickbacks, wire fraud, and price-fixing practices in violation of, inter alia, 18 U.S.C. § 1346, 18 U.S.C. § 1343, 15 U.S.C. § 1, 15 U.S.C. § 45, 12 U.S.C. § 2607, 12 C.F.R. § 1024.14. As a consumer, you will always significantly overpay for Realtor commissions subject to hidden kickbacks and pay-to-play steering promoted in this scheme.

United States federal antitrust laws prohibit consumer allocation and blanket referral agreements between real estate companies.

Be smart; do not allow your information to be "sold as a lead" to a double-dealing Realtor in exchange for massive commission kickbacks paid from your future home sale, or your future home purchase.


Realtor.com ReadyConnect (Opcity) is a referral fee network designed to collect fees by matching consumers with local real estate agents willing to participate. Opcity operates as a licensed real estate brokerage in Texas under TREC License # 9005100, but it does not produce any services that are typically offered by real estate agents and does not represent consumers when buying or selling real estate in any State.

When consumers submit information to Realtor.com ReadyConnect (Opcity), this information is simply sold to real estate agents who are willing to pay for it with 30%-40% share of their commission.

Realtor.com ReadyConnect (Opcity) Pricing

Realtor.com ReadyConnect (Opcity) revenue comes from referral fees and sale of user data.

Listing Services

  • This Service Does Not Represent Sellers

Buyer's Agent Services

  • This Service Does Not Represent Buyers

Realtor.com ReadyConnect (Opcity) Editor's Review:

Opcity is a Texas licensed real estate broker that collects an undisclosed referral fee (estimated at 30%-40% of agent’s commission) from all real estate agents. This fee makes it hardly a free service for anyone since referral fees are inevitably passed down to consumers.

More importantly, Opcity is a real estate agent that “does not engage in actual real estate broker services.” Opcity systematically applies pay-to-play bias towards all matching results, meaning, only real estate agents that have agreed to pay a referral fee are matched with consumers.

Opcity audits all transactions and requires agents to update the status of each transaction on continued the basis because it needs to find out how much money real estate agents receive in commissions and when these fees will be due, inevitably collecting private details of consumer’s agreement for home purchase or sale.

Opcity further calls it a "dispatch process that matches agents to available leads based on lead's proximity, lead's price points." The main qualification for real estate agents who participate with Opcity is their willingness to pay a referral fee. With Opcity is a subsidiary brokerage for Realtor.com, what used to be an independent MLS Aggregator, now is a middle-man broker.

Realtor.com had acquired Opcity in 2018, making this scheme one of the most scaled and damaging Referral Fee Networks in the United States. Realtor.com Opcity scheme is the low point of a transparent real estate process. From Opcity's own description of the service, the nature of the process could not be clearer: "We send a lead alert via text or mobile push notification to the agent 1st in the queue. That agent has approximately 5 seconds to click-to-claim the lead alert before the 2nd agent receives a lead alert and can also click-to-claim the lead. 5 seconds later, another agent is alerted, and so on."

In this process Opcity "qualifies" and "dispatches" consumers, where consumers are no longer in the driver's seat, but instead, are traded as a commodity.

Opcity plays fees down, claiming there are "no upfront costs" and does not publically disclose the exact amount of referral fees it charges each agent, but it rigidly locks every participating real estate agent into a referral fee attached to the back-end of every contract. As a licensed real estate agent that doesn’t perform any real estate services or takes any responsibility for the transaction, it is not entirely clear how this process works under the Business and Professions Code and RESPA.

Clearly, real estate agents only sign-up with Opcity because the price of the referral fee can be easily incorporated into their client's agreement with excessive commissions.

Opcity receives the lowest score because this service is clearly biased and it claims to provide the complete opposite of what it actually does. Realtor.com Opcity must be well aware of this issue but continues to operate on pay-to-play methodology in order to collect fees that needlessly make home buying and selling more expensive. As a matter of this review, it is impossible to segregate Realtor.com from Opcity - consumers should avoid using either service in order to protect their information from being "sold as leads" to random agents while being subjected with heavy referral fees.

Where does Realtor.com ReadyConnect (Opcity) operate?

Realtor.com ReadyConnect (Opcity) currently operates in select areas across United States.

Buying and Selling with Zillow Offers

Zillow Offers is a real estate investor and an agent referral network that operates across highly specific locations. Where available Zillow Offers mainly focuses on homogenous homes. In determining the offer, Zillow Offers discounts from the estimated retail value after home is fully renovated.

Zillow Offers Pricing

Zillow Offers is almost entirely built to sell consumer’s data to Premier Broker and Premier Agent participating agents. Zillow also makes money with a difference between buying and selling homes, although only about 1% of all requests end up in successful Zillow Offer.

With these few actual buying transactions each year, Zillow makes money with value appreciation between what Zillow Offers buys and seller each home for. Sellers can expect to receive 80%-85% of their home value from this type of sale after any fees, cost of the minor repairs, and resale.

Zillow Offers further looks to push consumers to use its own mortgage company.

Listing Services

  • This Service Does Not Represent Sellers

Buyer's Agent Services

  • This Service Does Not Represent Buyers

Zillow Offers Editor's Review:

Skip the hassle, it is only 1% likely that sellers will accept an offer from Zillow Offers. Instead, Zillow will try to convert seller's request into a lead, sold to random Premier Agent.

Zillow Offers is a classic bait-and-switch sales model. First, consumers are "baited" by Zillow’s magical all-in-one home offer opportunity, but out of tens of thousands requests only a few dozen homes are actually sold to Zillow. Instead, Zillow’s business model aggressively converts consumer requests into seller leads. The interesting thing about this scheme is that Zillow is blatantly open about it.

Here are some excerpts from Zillow Offers website:
  • "Initial data from Zillow Offers indicates that of sellers who request a Zillow Offer, the vast majority end up using an agent."
  • "Zillow Group does not guarantee that it will make an offer or that any offer made will provide the best terms available or will result in the greatest net proceeds to you."
  • "If you do not accept our offer, we can refer you to one of our local partner agents who advertises on Zillow."

Zillow Offers suffers from terrible privacy policy. From one side Zillow states to consumers that "we do not share your contact information unless you request to be connected with an agent or a mortgage lender," and on another section directed at brokers it states that "if a seller is not yet working with an agent and they decline Zillow’s offer, Zillow will work to immediately connect them with a local partner brokerage and agent."

Here is how one of these Premier Brokers describes the process:
  • "We receive listing and buyer referrals directly from Zillow's Premier Broker concierge services. These leads have been scrubbed and vetted before they are directly handed off to you."Source: Sonoma County RE/MAX Marketplace, Zillow Premier Broker participant.

Zillow Offers will buy a home at a price that is below market value due to necessary repairs, renovation, and other factors. After Zillow Offers buys the home, it renovates and resells it for a profit to other buyers or companies that rent homes to qualified tenants. With low offer price, comes a convenience of an all-cash closing when selling a home. Zillow Offers claims to provide convenience, speed, and certainty of a fast sale.

Dubbed as an iBuyer, Zillow Offers makes an offer on a house within days, but this offer is highly conditional. Each offer Zillow Offers makes is just an estimate until it makes a home inspection. At the inspection, Zillow Offers will often find reasons to lower its original offer when it finds items that need repair or if it has made a mistake in its original valuation. When the company is unable to make an offer, it simply redirects consumers to a random real estate agent in exchange for an undisclosed fee. Zillow Offers only makes offers for select homes in select regions.

The main disadvantage of using Zillow Offers is high losses in homeowners’ equity, this is beside the fact that the program is designed to collect and sell user data instead of actually buying homes.

As any real estate investor, Zillow Offers is susceptible to losing money in any given transaction. This model is susceptible to a number of risk factors, high operational costs and a continued need for higher-than-average Return on Investment (ROI) with each flip. Zillow Offers is not legally bound to represent consumers, its main legal obligation is to its shareholders.

Zillow Offers’s fast transaction and easy move-out experience typically come at an extremely high price because this model incurs “double” transaction costs during the purchase, holding period, rehab work and final sale that includes real estate agent fees.

Zillow Offers pays real estate agent commissions like any other buyer and seller of real estate, so these costs must be accounted for in the company’s fee structure. Moreover, because most homes in the United States are financed, homeowners own only partial net equity in their home. Banks receive the same amount of the remaining mortgage sum regardless of how any given home is sold, whereas only homeowners’ net equity is lost in transaction fees paid to Zillow Offers.

Typically Zillow Offers uses the following factors when determining the offer: existing condition of the home including repairs needed, time it will take to finish needed repairs, value of a home compared to other comparable homes in the area, real estate commission required to resell, costs associated with maintaining a home during repairs, including taxes, payments, insurance, utilities and homeowner dues.

Where does Zillow Offers operate?

Zillow Offers currently operates in select areas across Raleigh, Charlotte, Phoenix, Denver, Atlanta, and Las Vegas.