Landed Down Payment Scheme
Housing affordability requires an entirely new approach: transparent, affordable, and open home-ownership experience.
Unfortunately, in 2019 the US housing marketplace is still chockfull with excessive commissions, consumer brokering, agent kickbacks and massive house-flipping schemes. In some cases, consumer brokering schemes are even encouraged and rewarded is an actionable approach to solving the housing crisis. Landed is one of such companies. In my Editor's Review of Landed, I explore how this licensed real estate broker targets teachers in an effort to take advantage of ineffective "6% standard" commissions, via high origination costs incurred as part of the down payment assistance program.
Landed program operates on commission kickbacks as a way to distribute down payment assistance funds available to the program coming from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. The benefits of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative sponsorship to provide teachers with down payment assistance is, without a doubt, a valuable and a much-needed proposition. However, the way these funds are managed should not depend on consumer steering in an exchange for unlawful kickbacks and broker-to-broker collusion schemes.
If you think kickbacks for real estate commissions are harmless, think again. In my review, with specific savings, I show how Landed referral fee network is costing teachers tens of thousands in origination fees and excessive broker commissions. Landed operates as a real estate broker that doesn’t produce a service typical of a real estate agent—it doesn’t list homes, it doesn’t represent consumers, it doesn’t hold open houses, it collects referral fees. It is unclear why Landed is allowed to operate under Business and Professions Code and RESPA in the first place.
Broker commission kickbacks cannot be encouraged as an affordable housing solution—they should be disrupted.
An Open Real Estate Marketplace is a transparent environment with a focus on consumers and savings. Built with privacy by design and an open systems approach, the user experience is to encompass all residential real estate verticals with a powerful factor of trust. To build a sustainable affordable housing solutions means to forgo consumer steering and commission kickbacks. There is no excuse to use these methods for an effective business model. Our teachers deserve real savings, transparency, and affordability, not hidden fees.