Fair Play in Home Selling and Home Buying

Fair Play Is a Hard Line in Residential Real Estate

An Open Internet must improve your experience, instead of looking to get a referral fee on the back-end

We are sometimes asked why we do not accept referral fees. It’s always a no. HomeOpenly is the exception to an industry-wide referral fee methodology. In an industry-standard practice where 25%-40% fees paid for consumers who are readily “sold as leads,” why a hard no?

An Open Marketplace is about quality of matched results and market rates of each individual real estate agent competing for consumers, not percentages and payouts we receive. An Open Marketplace allows consumers to sort out the best of the best, instead of being pushed onto service providers who choose to pay kickbacks into a random network. Referral fee networks always lead consumers into a biased upside down proposition, a sign of a broken market that makes buying and selling homes more expensive.

HomeOpenly aims to make the real estate process transparent and more affordable organically. We can never provide our users with the best results by adding another fee into play, and instead, we do the opposite.

Today, HomeOpenly is the only go-to resource for consumers looking for a friction-free and a kickbacks-free online experience, call it a non-accidental monopoly on fair play. Despite the rapid rise of networks with “no upfront costs, pay us only if you close” proposition by every major network in the industry, HomeOpenly aims to genuinely change the way all 6,000,000 homes are bought and sold each year in the United States. The more people find their savings with us, the better marketplace we can build, the more service providers opt-in, the better we can make the experience for consumers — this is known as network effects.

Instead of standardizing kickbacks, we standardize an Open Marketplace for commissions and buyer’s refunds. Instead of “vetting consumers for a fee,” we allow consumers to view openly all local competitive options available to them. Instead of selling consumers as leads, we provide agents with an open process to advertise their services to buyers and sellers directly.

Feel free to use this methodology in everyday life — someone offers you a service of another, ask why? Are they referring you to someone in an effort to get some fee on the back-end, or are they actually doing so to genuinely improve your experience? Despite any claims a referral fee network makes, one can’t have their cake and eat it too. Any matches made between service providers and consumers must be free from pay-to-play in order to be considered unbiased.

If you don’t believe me, ask any referral fee network:

  • How is your process consumer-focused and not broker-focused?
  • Will you ever match me with anyone who doesn’t pay you a kickback?
  • As a middle-man, what is your actual real estate service?
  • Why would anyone who is locked in at 25%-40% of their gross commissions able to give me their best rate or service?

The response you will get is… silence… The flashy call “we have the best matches” slowly fizzles into nothing more than a self-serving pay-to-play process.

For this reason HomeOpenly is not a real estate broker, we never will become one, instead, we aim to deliver 100% consumer-focused results and actually bring fair play into the real estate process. In that sense, we will never subscribe to pay-to-play philosophy and neither should you.

Fair play is always a hard line.

Related to: referral fees, real estate, open marketplace, no upfront costs, savings, realtor fees, commissions, buyer refunds

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Feel free to contact us if you need further assistance. At HomeOpenly we aim to make the opportunity of homeownership transparent, affordable and an open experience.

Last updated: November 03, 2019
First published: March 09, 2018