Key Highlights
- In June, Offerpad announced users could list their homes with the company’s own agents
- Now, Opendoor announced it to bring aboard real estate agents in Phoenix to staff its “Home Reserve” iBuying platform
It’s beginning to look as if the more things change, the more things stay the same in the world of real estate’s iBuying sector.
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At its inception, the well financed venture-backed startup Opendoor was seen as a disruptor to the real estate industry that simply bought for-sale houses directly from owners with all cash offers, modestly repaired those houses and then quickly resold them for scant profits without paying commissions to real estate agents to facilitate those sales.
Now, Opendoor is hiring independent contract agents to staff its Home Reserve platform.
Opendoor’s Home Reserve platform allows Opendoor to list seller’s homes as those sellers purchase and reserve their next home with all-cash offers. Essentially, agents hired by Opendoor will be listing and selling the home just as agents affiliated with “traditional” brokerage firms do.
While iBuyers like Opendoor are integrating such traditional brokerage elements into their business models, traditional brokerages are integrating “disruptive” iBuying elements into their business models. Clearly, the line between traditional and disruptive is blurring as every buyer-seller real estate entity, brokerage or iBuyer, strives to have its respective hand in every real estate transaction.
The media company Inman first discovered Opendoor’s move towards traditional brokerage operations merely by happenstance upon seeing a job listing pitch to agents in the Phoenix area merely. Any number of independent contractor-1099 agents hired by Opendoor would join Opendoor’s existing in-house agents via its 2018 acquisition of Open Listings discount brokerage.
Earlier this year, Offerpad, another venture-backed iBuyer, announced that its users could list their home with Offerpad’s own agents to augment the company’s concierge services. And, also earlier this year, Zillow became a corporate broker in New York and Arizona while simultaneously saying it would not use its licenses in these two states for “traditional brokerage” operations.”
As we said up top, it’s appearing that the more things change, the more things remain the same…even in real estate.
Thanks to HousingWire.
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