OpenDoor opened its doors wide to welcome Open Listings into its now comprehensive iBuyer program. With this recent purchase of Open Listings’ personalized, proprietary, autonomous self-service home search platform, OpenDoor now offers its customers a full blend of buyer/seller/trade-in-centric services.
Included in those services are mortgage, title and automated technology systems. Additionally, OpenDoor now offers its customers Open Listing’s in-house and partner real estate agents that work with other brokerages for” high touch” assistance at every step of the way in the home buying/selling process.
Convenience, efficiency, all cash offers, no showings, etc. have been OpenDoor’s promise to customers since its launch in 2014. Now, with its acquisition of Open Listings, launched in 2015, OpenDoor customers automatically receive a rebate of up to 50% rebate from agent commissions at the close of the transaction.
What? All those services under one brand AND a rebate of up to 50% from agent commissions? How does that work?
Open Listings takes the typical 2.5-3% commission that a buyer’s agent would receive (usually paid for by the seller), cuts that amount in half and gives back to the buyer one half of that commission amount to help the buyer save on closing costs.
Open Listings purports that this “halving” of a buyer agent ‘s commission that goes to its iBuers “…saves our customers an average of $9,604 at close.”
What about the real estate agents? OpenDoor will absorb Open Listing’s in-house agents who are currently compensated by salary as employees and work with partner agents associated with other outside real estate brokerages. Partner agents may choose to participate in any and/or all of the home buying/selling/trading-in transactions to help the customer with home showings, offers and negotiations, and closings.
Clearly, OpenDoor’s acquisition of Open Listings positions the company to go head-to-head with Zillow and its newly hatched iBuyer program. OpenDoor now has an in-house, personalized home search platform via Open Listings, in-house mortgage services, in-house title services and in-house and partner real estate agent services to assist its iBuyers.
Zillow has some of these component services but not all. Zillow does not presently employ real estate agents. Instead, Zillow uses its own agent customers who advertise with them in its Premier Agent program to assist their iBuyers.
And, Zillow does not offer its iBuyers any sort of rebate or discount at the close of a transaction. Currently, the only other brokerage offering customers any kind of discount or rebate is Purplebricks through its $1,000 discount to its iBuyers at transaction close.
OpenDoor and its collection of star-studded investors are most enthusiastic about the company’s strategy to expand its reach and implement its promise of convenience to iBuyers throughout the country.
Currently, Open Listings serves customers throughout California and in Seattle, Austin, Houston and Chicago. OpenDoor currently serves customers in Phoenix, Dallas-Ft. Worth, San Antonio, Houston, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Raleigh-Durham, Las Vegas, Tampa, Orlando and Sacramento.
OpenDoor intends to be present in all 50 states no later than 2020. It also intends to open its doors as a publicly traded company sooner rather than later.
