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Neighborhoods.com fees come from hidden kickbacks, likely set between 25% and 40% of the gross commission received by anyone in the network of colluding Realtors.

Neighborhoods.com, LLC (dba Neighborhoods.com) is a licensed real estate firm License No 481.012453 in the State of Illinois (55places is a licensed real estate firm License No 477.013455) operates as a "shell" broker to collect an undisclosed referral fee, likely set between 25% and 40% from the gross commissions, paid by all colluding Realtors in the network. This fee is inevitably passed down to consumers in a form of inflated real estate commissions when selling or buying any home.

More importantly, Neighborhoods.com is an active licensed real estate entity that does not engage in actual real estate broker services. Neighborhoods.com 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.

Neighborhoods.com, LLC claims that its "specialized online real estate marketplaces make a difference in the way people buy and sell their home." In the real world, Neighborhoods.com, LLC is a "shell" "sham" "paper" Illinois real estate broker that operates a nationwide broker-to-broker collusion scheme via https://www.55places.com/ and https://www.neighborhoods.com/ online web services. Neighborhoods.com falsely claims that "our real estate experts specialize in the purchase or sale of homes." In reality, this shell brokerage does not represent consumers when buying or selling a home anywhere, the "shell" brokerage scheme allocates consumers to random "partner agents" around the United States.

According to Neighborhoods.com website, "a Partner Agent is an agent that works for a brokerage that is not Neighborhoods.com or its affiliated brokerages (including Neighborhoods.com Connecticut Brokerage, LLC, Neighborhoods.com, LLC of Delaware, Neighborhoods.com Florida Brokerage, LLC, Neighborhoods.com Indiana Brokerage, LLC, Neighborhoods.com Nevada Brokerage, LLC, Neighborhoods.com Virginia Brokerage, LLC, Neighborhoods.com Minnesota Brokerage, LLC, or Neighborhoods Home Source, Inc.), but that partners with us to provide the Services."

Neighborhoods.com promotes its scheme to colluding Realtors where "the neighborhoods.com Partner Agent Program will not cost you anything unless we can put qualified prospects in your hands that result in a transaction for you." Neighborhoods.com further falsely claims to consumers that "the Company does not charge fees to use the Services."

In reality, real estate brokers never work for free. Neighborhoods.com operates through a hub-and-spoke conspiracy and consumer allocation scheme with a massive network of colluding competitors willing to secretly and unlawfully agree to give up a significant portion of their future commissions into the collusion scheme. Neighborhoods.com fees are exigent and are merely hidden in the price of commissions, eventually paid by consumers.

The colluding Partner Agents simply increase the price of their commissions to make up for the hidden kickbacks. Each broker in the collusion scheme knows that their services are promoted as a group ahead of others outside the scheme, therefore, benefitting from the lack of open competition. The scheme further requires colluding brokers to feed potentially private and confidential client information back to the broker-to-broker collusion "hub" where every Parter Agent is "expected to log all correspondence in the 55places.com Agent Portal." Such schemes are highly poisonous to healthy real estate representation markets because they operate through removing competitive forces between "spokes" and allocate consumers in scale through interstate commerce.

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

Neighborhoods.com 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. Neighborhoods.com is not a marketplace, but a licensed "sham" real estate brokerage.

Neighborhoods.com 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.

Neighborhoods.com 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. Neighborhoods.com scam operates on a false notion that all buyer agent and listing agents commissions are the same, where no colluding Realtor in the Neighborhoods.com 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, Neighborhoods.com 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. Neighborhoods.com 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. Neighborhoods.com 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.

Neighborhoods.com 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.

A typical broker-to-broker collusion scheme often attempts to fool consumers with heavily advertised campaigns on Google, Nextdoor, Facebook, or local radio and TV. Such a false ad might read: "Unbiased. Get Data-Driven Results. Our Agents Can Get You the Best Deals. Sign Up Now! Save Time & Hassle and Get Matched to the Perfect Agent for Your Needs. Find Quality Realtors. Top Agent Rankings. Personalized & Fast. 100% Free. Top 1% of Real Estate Agents Compete to Sell Your Home. No Obligation. Save Thousands."

In reality, all such "matches" are 100% biased, pay-to-play collusion steering mechanisms between licensed brokers, and they all cost consumers tens of thousands compared to open market savings. These "paper" brokers do not connect consumers with anyone outside the network, in fact, they specifically steer consumers into the network in exchange for massive kickbacks pre-negotiated in advance.

There are numerous reasons why consumers are wise to avoid the Neighborhoods.com scheme, but probably the most important reason is that the lack of transparency and honesty is contagious. Neighborhoods.com 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 Neighborhoods.com 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.

Neighborhoods.com 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. Neighborhoods.com 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 Neighborhoods.com shell brokerage.

The illicit kickback is the reason why Neighborhoods.com colludes with Realtors outside their firm. This is also the reason why the scheme does not mention this kickback anywhere on their website. ALL consumers and ALL legitimate Realtors are scammed by Neighborhoods.com, 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 Neighborhoods.com, LLC 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." Neighborhoods.com is a direct extension of these uncompetitive, unethical, and unlawful notions. ALL Realtors who participate in the Neighborhoods.com scheme are engaged in plain collusion, where each Realtor knows that Neighborhoods.com, LLC 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 Neighborhoods.com 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, Neighborhoods.com 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 Neighborhoods.com, LLC is a licensed real estate brokerage that collects a massive kickback from their transactions because the nature of the scam requires this information to be deliberately hidden. Neighborhoods.com 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: Neighborhoods.com'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.