
HomeLight collects kickbacks from about 70,000 brokers across real estate transactions and originated “over 1 million homebuyers and sellers in the U.S.”
Consumer allocation between licensed real estate brokers is a felony. This illicit practice costs US consumers about $15 billion in overpriced commissions each year. HomeLight alone has collected several billions USD in kickbacks from #realtors since inception, without helping anyone to sell or buy a single home anywhere.
Why is broker-to-broker collusion on the Internet prevalent? Mostly because brokers tend to collude with kickbacks rather than to compete for consumers with competitive commissions. Real estate remains one of the most anticompetitive industries, and it is also the largest consumer market in the world.
With HomeLight’s hub-and-spoke broker collusion scheme, all consumers receive a biased pay-to-play match with a random #realtor accompanied by an overpriced commission, as a matter of fact.
One of the best ways to make home buying more affordable it to eradicate kickbacks and consumer brokering as a quantifiable #thing from the US housing sector.
#antitrust #kickbacks #ShermanAct #FTCAct #RESPA #vc #megarounds #homeselling #homebuying #consumers #onlinescams #hubandspoke #paytoplay Zeev Ventures Group 11 Menlo Ventures Lydia Jett SoftBank Group International Bullpen Capital Crosslink Capital Drew Uher U.S. Department of Justice California Department of Real Estate California Department of Justice Federal Trade Commission Consumer Financial Protection Bureau