> Seller agents in the Bay Area will definitely "blacklist" buyers who use this, as they've done for Redfin and Open Listings. How are you solving this?
OL founder here. A few points to consider:
- We represented buyers on plenty of transactions in the Bay Area and had very competitive acceptance rates. Of course there is an art to being included in the counter process but unsurprisingly, sellers mostly optimize for expected value (money * certainty) and the highest legit offer wins. Vague notions of not wanting to transact with a "disruptor" go away pretty quickly when you realize it's a bona-fide offer + compelling buyer letter + pro agent who has done way more successful transactions than most. If you have a standardized process for preparing and presenting offers in a market and optimize it over thousands of reps, you can actually submit pretty compelling offers.
- An actual point of friction/discrimination to consider (that applies to all markets) is when the user is at an open house and the listing agent asks who their agent is. When they said OL, the agent would often try to dunk on us and steal the client. Important to prep the buyer with what to say in this moment so that this doesn't happen (e.g. tell them to just give the name of the agent who would be delivering their offers + give them compelling stats about that agent's performance). Rare that they'd bad-mouth a named person to their client.
- Throughout the time we operated, the Bay Area was a relatively small and unique market. We had a healthy business there from the early-adopter techie crowd, but ultimately focused more in Los Angeles because the market diversity yielded more useful product insights. Do not design for the Bay if you're trying to build a national (or even CA-wide) real estate product!
OL founder here. A few points to consider:
- We represented buyers on plenty of transactions in the Bay Area and had very competitive acceptance rates. Of course there is an art to being included in the counter process but unsurprisingly, sellers mostly optimize for expected value (money * certainty) and the highest legit offer wins. Vague notions of not wanting to transact with a "disruptor" go away pretty quickly when you realize it's a bona-fide offer + compelling buyer letter + pro agent who has done way more successful transactions than most. If you have a standardized process for preparing and presenting offers in a market and optimize it over thousands of reps, you can actually submit pretty compelling offers.
- An actual point of friction/discrimination to consider (that applies to all markets) is when the user is at an open house and the listing agent asks who their agent is. When they said OL, the agent would often try to dunk on us and steal the client. Important to prep the buyer with what to say in this moment so that this doesn't happen (e.g. tell them to just give the name of the agent who would be delivering their offers + give them compelling stats about that agent's performance). Rare that they'd bad-mouth a named person to their client.
- Throughout the time we operated, the Bay Area was a relatively small and unique market. We had a healthy business there from the early-adopter techie crowd, but ultimately focused more in Los Angeles because the market diversity yielded more useful product insights. Do not design for the Bay if you're trying to build a national (or even CA-wide) real estate product!