Compare HomeVestors and Estately

For Sellers

Cash Offers
30%
Home Equity
HomeVestors does not provide real estate services to home sellers. Instead, local franchisees buy homes directly, repair and resell or rent them to tenants. Typically an offer equal to 70% of home value is expected from this type of sale after any cost of the repairs and resale.

For Sellers

Partner Agents
25%-40%
Referral Fee
Estately does not provide real estate services to home sellers. Instead, this company colludes with various listing agents in exchange for an undisclosed referral fee. Estately likely takes a 25% to 40% kickback from the net commission earned by the colluding Realtor. Collusion between any real estate entities is a felony.

For Buyers

Not Applicable
0
No Rates
HomeVestors does not provide real estate services to home buyers. Instead, local franchisees buy homes directly, repair and resell or rent them to tenants.

For Buyers

Partner Agents
25%-40%
Referral Fee
'Estately does not provide real estate services to home buyers. Instead, this company colludes with various buyer agents in exchange for an undisclosed referral fee. Estately likely takes a 25% to 40% kickback from the net commission earned by the colluding Realtor. Collusion between any real estate entities is a felony.
Question: What is the difference between HomeVestors and Estately?
Answer: HomeVestors is a direct home cash buyer that buys select homes off-market with cash offers and resells them at a profit to homebuyers while Estately is a referral fee network that enables broker-to-broker collusion with use of blanket referral agreements
Compare HomeVestors and Estately for home buying and selling. Geodoma is an impartial and an open resource focused on trending real estate services, portals and start-ups.

First published: 05 December 2024
Last updated: 05 December 2024

Buying and Selling with HomeVestors

HomeVestors (also known as We Buy Ugly Houses) is a franchise network where each individual local franchisee considers the condition of a home and makes an offer to pay cash for the property. In determining the offer, each franchisee discounts from the estimated retail value after it’s fully renovated.

HomeVestors Pricing

HomeVestors franchisees make money with a difference between buying and selling each home. Typically an offer equal to 70% of home value is expected from this type of sale after any cost of the repairs and resale.

Listing Services

  • This Service Does Not Represent Sellers

Buyer's Agent Services

  • This Service Does Not Represent Buyers

HomeVestors Editor's Review:

HomeVestors franchisee will buy a home at a price that is below market value due to necessary repairs, renovation, and other factors. After the franchisee buys the home, it renovates and resells it for a profit or rents it out to qualified tenants.

With the low offer price, comes a convenience of an all-cash closing when selling a home. HomeVestors franchisee typically closes a home in 30 days of receiving cash offer.

Typically each franchisee uses the following factors when determining the offer: existing condition of the home including repairs needed, time it will take to finish needed repairs, value of a home compared to other comparable homes in the area, real estate commission required to resell, costs associated with maintaining a home during repairs, including taxes, payments, insurance, utilities and homeowner dues.

The main disadvantage of using HomeVestors is high losses in homeowners' equity. HomeVestors is a "heavy" model, ready to buy homes in all-cash transactions.

As any real estate investor, HomeVestors franchisee is susceptible to losing money in any given transaction. This model is prone to a number of risk factors, high operational costs and a continued need for higher-than-average Return on Investment (ROI) with each flip.

HomeVestors franchisee is not legally bound to represent consumers, its main legal obligation is to its stakeholders. Moreover, because most homes in the United States are financed, homeowners own only partial net equity in their home.

Banks receive the same amount of the remaining mortgage sum regardless of how any given home is sold, or how much of homeowners' net equity is lost in the transaction with HomeVestors.

Today, there are a number of highly qualified real estate agents who offer competitive listing rates and flat fee listings across the United States. Unless a situation absolutely requires a quick sale, Geodoma recommends that consumers first consider using a licensed real estate agent working on competitive terms to properly list their homes on the open market before turning to HomeVestors option.

Where does HomeVestors operate?

HomeVestors currently operates in select areas across United States.

Buying and Selling with Estately

WARNING: Unlawful Kickbacks, Broker-to-Broker Collusion, False Marketing, Wire Fraud, Price Fixing.

Estately) is a broker-to-broker collusion scheme, where "partner agents" unlawfully agree to pay massive kickbacks to receive your information and engage in market allocation, consumer allocation, false advertising, unlawful kickbacks, wire fraud, and price-fixing practices in violation of, inter alia, 18 U.S.C. § 1346, 18 U.S.C. § 1343, 15 U.S.C. § 1, 15 U.S.C. § 45, 12 U.S.C. § 2607, 12 C.F.R. § 1024.14. As a consumer, you will always significantly overpay for Realtor commissions subject to hidden kickbacks and pay-to-play steering promoted in this scheme.

United States federal antitrust laws prohibit consumer allocation and blanket referral agreements between real estate companies.

Be smart; do not allow your information to be "sold as a lead" to a double-dealing Realtor in exchange for massive commission kickbacks paid from your future home sale, or your future home purchase.


Estately is a broker-to-broker collusion scheme that allocates home buyers and sellers to a network of colluding Realtors through a "shell" real estate entity. When consumers submit information on the Estately website, this information is sold in exchange for an undisclosed fee with real estate agents in a process known as a pay-to-play steering and a "blind match." Estately, a Washington state brokerage, unlawfully allocates consumers with various Realtors as a hub-and-spoke conspiracy that inflates real estate commissions.

Estately Pricing

Estately fees come from hidden kickbacks, likely set between 25% and 40% of the gross commissions received by colluding Realtors.

Listing Services

  • This Service Does Not Represent Sellers

Buyer's Agent Services

  • This Service Does Not Represent Buyers

Estately Editor's Review:

Realogy (NYSE:RLGY) subsidiary Estately, Inc. (dba Estately.com) is a licensed real estate firm in the State of Washington License No. 10002 operates as a "shell" broker to collect an undisclosed referral fee, set at 25% to 40% from the gross commissions, paid by all colluding Realtors in the network, aka Estately Partner Agents. This fee is inevitably passed down to consumers in a form of inflated real estate commissions when selling or buying any home.

More importantly, Estately is an active licensed real estate entity that does not engage in actual real estate broker services. Estately systematically applies pay-to-play bias towards all Realtor matching results, meaning, only Realtors that have agreed to collude and pay a referral fee are matched with consumers.

Realtors only sign-up with Estately because the price of the referral fee can be easily incorporated into their client's agreement with excessive commissions.

Estately receives a low Editor's rating because this service is a biased hub-and-spoke broker-to-broker collusion scam, that falsely claims to provide an independent and unbiased service of matching consumers with agents.

Estately operates on a pay-to-play methodology to collect junk fees that needlessly make home buying and selling more expensive. In this scheme, consumers are no longer in the driver's seat, but instead, are traded as a commodity between licensed brokers.

Estately plays junk fees down, claiming that the service is "free" "unbiased" and "no obligation" to consumers, but it rigidly locks every participating Realtor into a kickback attached to the back-end of every agreement that restrains free trade. As a licensed real estate entity that doesn’t perform any real estate services or take any responsibility for the transaction, this scheme operates to unlawfully allocate consumers and bypass RESPA anti-kickback regulations through a "shell" entity. Estately scam operates on a false notion that all buyer agent and listing agents commissions are the same, where no Realtor in the Estately scheme competes for consumers on pricing.

Consumer brokering is an act of selling information of potential home buyers and home sellers (paid referrals) between real estate brokers, in exchange for a cut of a broker’s commission. Brokers on each side of the adopted scheme, cause direct damage to the real estate representation market with reverse competition, anticompetitive market allocation, price-fixing, lack of competition, limited choices to consumers, unnecessary high commissions, and improperly negotiated fees. A referring broker in this scheme does not compete with referred brokers, instead, Estately administers a series of agreements that restrain free trade, disguised as Realtor matching services.

12 C.F.R. § 1024.14(g)(1)(v) (Regulation X) and RESPA 12 U.S.C. § 2607(c)(3) narrowly allow payments pursuant to cooperative brokerage and referral arrangements between real estate agents and real estate brokers. This limited exemption on kickbacks only applies to fee divisions within real estate brokerage arrangements when all parties are acting in a real estate brokerage capacity. Estately shell entity does not act in a brokerage capacity, in fact, this entity willfully chooses to disengage from offering real estate representation services to consumers, as the core premise to create successful collusion through interstate wire communication to further the scheme. Wire fraud is financial fraud involving the use of any telecommunications or information technology.

Real estate transaction is a rare, high-value, and high-risk-aversion experience that is easily subjected to unlawful kickbacks, especially with the use of the Internet. Consumers are often subjected to high commissions and hidden referral fees without a full understanding that these fees increase their commissions and result in a lower quality of service. Whenever any double-dealing Realtor agrees to pay these massive kickbacks, he or she is unable to offer full and competitive representation services to anyone. Estately does not cater to honest Realtors, it only caters to Realtors willing to cheat their clients out of full services, and willing to share private information about their clients' transactions with the scheme.

Estately antitrust and consumer protection violations are not harmless. Realtors who attempt to compete for consumers on fair terms and competitive pricing are at a massive disadvantage in this environment. As a result of broker-to-broker collusion, consumers end up getting steered toward a limited pool of dishonest Realtors and overpay for commissions. Consumers’ private transaction information is always shared with a referring broker that requires it to be disclosed to calculate the referral fees to be paid at the close of each transaction.

Consumers, of course, pay for this abuse with higher costs of commissions that, eventually, make it directly into their new mortgages and cause significant losses of net equity from a home sale.

Estately utilizes local MLS systems to obtain home listing records and transmits these records via Internet search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Estately is not a legitimate real estate agent, where the access the scheme gains to MLS is, in fact, unlawful.

In reality, Estately is a 100% biased, pay-to-play collusion steering mechanism between licensed brokers, that costs consumers tens of thousands compared in inflated commissions compared to open market savings. Estately specifically steers consumers into the network in exchange for massive kickbacks pre-negotiated in advance.

There are numerous reasons why consumers are wise to avoid the Estately scheme, but probably the most important reason is that the lack of transparency and honesty is contagious. Estately scheme attracts ONLY double-dealing Realtors who are willing to break a host of federal antitrust laws, and unwilling to compete for consumers with transparency. An unethical Realtor will always find a way to turn the most important transaction into a self-dealing proposition - to collect a bigger commission check faster without any regard for what is truly a good deal for their clients.

Why Does Estately Engage in Collusion?

Plain agreements among competitors to divide sales territories or assign customers are almost always illegal. These arrangements are essentially agreements not to compete.

Estately engages in consumer allocation because it is an active real estate entity that refuses to compete with other real estate agents who patriciate in the scheme. This dynamic is better known as a hub-and-spoke conspiracy. In a hub-and-spoke type conspiracy, all Realtor commissions are set at the same amount for all Realtors, where none of the "partner agents" compete with one another on pricing at all. Estately scheme produces absolutely no tangible service as a licensed broker to anyone and instead delivers inflated prices and lower quality of service. The scheme originates as a conspiracy to restrain trade and to funnel consumers toward the scheme and away from the open market. There are hundreds of thousands of highly competitive Realtors who offer great savings and great service, and they refuse to pay kickbacks or collude with Estately shell brokerage.

The illicit kickback is the reason why Estately colludes with Realtors outside their firm. ALL consumers and ALL legitimate Realtors are scammed by Estately, even if the experience may seem "good enough" because collusion is a faulty shortcut to genuine open competition between Realtors. Federal laws require all Realtors to compete for consumers and to deliver a tangible service, a simple test Estately brokerage entity decisively fails. Open competition is at the core of our free and independent society everywhere in America.

The Realtor commissions in the United States have long suffered from the "standard" 6% myth and the false notion that "buyer agents work for free." Estately is a direct extension of these uncompetitive, unethical, and unlawful notions. ALL Realtors who participate in the Estately scheme are engaged in plain collusion, where each Realtor knows that Estately shell brokerage will not compete at all, in exchange for a blanket kickback from the home sale or a home purchase. The Sherman Act imposes criminal penalties of up to $100 million for a corporation and $1 million for an individual, along with up to 10 years in prison for each count. Persons found guilty of wire fraud under federal law face fines up to $250,000 for individuals and up to $500,000 for organizations, subject to imprisonment of not more than 20 years. There are additional penalties of 30 years imprisonment and a million-dollar fine if the wire fraud involves a financial institution. These penalties are per count, which means that each electronic communication can be considered as a separate count. No legitimate Realtor will ever willingly allow themselves to be exposed to such massive liability.

The best, highly-experienced, well-educated, law-abiding, honest, and ethical Realtors will never participate in collusion because it is a felony that carries massive penalties. The best Realtors can recognize collusion as wrong because they respect the true value of honest negotiations.

When Estately refuses to compete with these brokers and instead organizes "partner agents" into a network, it breaks an entire host of basic open commerce principles that guide our open and fair markets. Moreover, Estately extends this conspiracy all across the United States via its website, making the scheme highly damaging due to the scaled use of the Internet to transmit collusion. The Internet, like any other scaled telecommunications medium, can be used to transmit open competition just as easily as pay-to-play fraud.

Most consumers do not know that Estately is a licensed real estate brokerage because the nature of the scam requires this information to be deliberately hidden. Estately scam is built entirely on false advertising to deliberately deceive consumers. This shell broker presents itself as an unbiased marketplace, but it is a real estate broker that engages in unlawful activities under federal laws. The short answer is: Estately's intent to allocate consumers as a secret real estate shell entity is directly tied into the kickbacks it receives from the "partner agents." This dynamic is a product of the restraint of genuine competition. The "standard commissions" problem in the residential real estate sector can only be fixed legally by encouraging Realtors to set and advertise competitive prices to consumers at scale without paying any kickbacks.

Where does Estately operate?

Estately currently operates in select areas across United States .

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