Compare Zillow Flex and Ideal Agent

Ideal Agent fees come from hidden kickbacks, set at 25% of the gross commission received by a network of colluding Realtors. Lead & Prosper, LLC takes these kickbacks from unlawfully price-fixed 2% listing rates.

Lead & Prosper, LLC (dba IDEAL AGENT, IdealAgent.com, IdealAgent) is a licensed real estate entity in the State of Florida License No. CQ1053626 operates as a "shell" broker to collect an undisclosed referral fee, set at 25% 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 a home.

More importantly, Ideal Agent is a licensed real estate entity that does not engage in actual real estate broker services. Ideal Agent systematically applies pay-to-play bias towards all Realtor matching results, meaning, only Realtors that have agreed to collude on price-fixing and pay an unlawful kickback are matched with consumers.

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

Ideal Agent 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. Ideal Agent is not a marketplace, but a shell brokerage that allocates consumers to other brokers.

Ideal Agent 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 brokers.

Ideal Agent plays junk fees down, claiming there are "no upfront costs" to Realtors and the service is "free" 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.

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, overpriced commissions, and improperly negotiated fees. A referring broker in this scheme does not compete with referred brokers, instead, Ideal Agent 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. Ideal Agent 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. Ideal Agent 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.

Ideal Agent 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 agents 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.

In August of 2021, Ideal Agent has also claimed to secure funding from Incenter LLC as its lead investor for its Series A round. Incenter LLC is a Blackstone portfolio company headquartered in Saint Paul, Minnesota. With over 300 professionals employed worldwide, Incenter provides its lender clients operating in the mortgage and specialty finance markets with access to capital, secondary markets solutions, and fulfillment services. The investment values Ideal Agent at nine figures, according to Lead & Prosper, LLC CEO Steve Johnston. "It's not just the financials; they're strategic, meaning we get to open a nationwide title company with them, they have a national mortgage platform, property insurance, home warranty - everything that we don't do we have, we now have access to starting." According to the IdealAgent’s press release, the funding "will be used in part to expand Ideal Agent's offerings and expects to launch the Ideal Title and Ideal Rate platforms." What this means is that the IdealAgent scheme is further used to bypass RESPA regulations to sell Incenter's "high intent customers" to random colluding brokers, and vice versa, to earn additional kickbacks from the title, mortgage, property insurance, and home warranty services via affiliates. Kickbacks are prohibited by RESPA for this exact reason.

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 Ideal Agent scheme, but probably the most important reason is that the lack of transparency and honesty is contagious. Ideal Agent 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 Ideal Agent Engage in Price-Fixing?

Whatever economic justification particular price-fixing agreements may be thought to have, the law does not permit an inquiry into their reasonableness. They are all banned.

If the consumer uses Ideal Agent scheme to buy a $1 million home, Ideal Agent offers them a "carrot" of a price-fixed listing rate of 2% (about $5,000 in price-fixed savings vs nationwide average listing rate at a 2.5% commission plus 2.5% BAC) while secretly pocketing a 25% kickback from the colluding "partner agent" in the amount of $5,000. Without the hidden kickback, a consumer can easily receive as much as $10,000 in savings from that same Realtor in a form of competitive listing commissions. The price of the scam is the difference between $10,000 and $5,000. The IdealAgent scam uses a shell Florida real estate brokerage to make selling homes MORE expensive, not LESS.

Ideal Agent engages in price-fixing because it needs a "dangling carrot in front of consumers" to "reasonably" justify the kickbacks it takes from the Realtors who patriciate in the scheme. This dynamic is better known as a hub-and-spoke conspiracy. In a hub-and-spoke type conspiracy, all listing rates are set at the same amount for all Realtors, where none of the "partner agents" compete with one another on pricing at all. Ideal Agent 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 to comply with the price fixed rates set by Ideal Agent.

The illicit 25% kickback is the reason why Ideal Agent sets listing commission rates for Realtors outside their firm. ALL consumers and ALL legitimate Realtors are scammed by Ideal Agent, even if the experience and savings may seem "good enough" because price-fixing is a faulty shortcut to genuine open competition between Realtors. By law, all Realtors must compete for consumers and set prices individually. 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." However, these myths cannot be resolved with price-fixing of commissions to some other level, in exchange for kickbacks. ALL Realtors who participate in the IdealAgent scheme are engaged in price-fixing. 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 price-fixing because it is a felony that carries massive penalties. The best Realtors can recognize price-fixing as wrong because they respect the true value of honest negotiations.

The prices fixed by Ideal Agent are not for the services that they offer, but for services offered by their direct competitors – other brokers. When Ideal Agent refuses to compete with these brokers and instead organizes "partner agents" into a network, it breaks an entire host of basic principles that guide our open and fair markets. Moreover, Ideal Agent extends this conspiracy all across the United States, making the scheme highly damaging due to the scaled use of the Internet to transmit collusion. The Internet, like any other scaled information medium, can be used to transmit open competition just as easily as pay-to-play fraud and collusion.

The short answer is: Ideal Agent's intent to fix prices 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.