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Comment by treis | Hacker News Reader

I'm not really sure I'd call this fraud. In that Opendoor delivered the product the customer was promised and paid for. Lying about the quality of that product compared to the alternatives is dishonest for sure but I don't think anyone here was really cheated. It's understood that when companies tout their product compared to competitors it's not a fair comparison.

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The National Association of Realtors is the second largest lobbying group. Bet they are at least part of the reason.

https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/top-spenders

opendoor is a licensed brokerage and a member of the National Association of Realtors. They partnered with realtor.com in 2020.

https://www.opendoor.com/w/blog/realtor-dot-com-partnership

Just an Anecdote, but all the realtors I’ve spoken to hate OpenDoor/iBuyers.

It's not even clear to me that they lied. If someone claims the "true market value" of an asset is $X, and the owner accepts an offer of $X, then the market value of the asset is indeed $X, no?

A market cannot just be two people. If I sell you a brand new Rolex for $1, I would say I’m selling it to you at a discount from the market rate, because if I posted it on an open auction like eBay, I’d receive higher bids than $1.

For that to work there would need to be a liquid market with clear valuation for those types of Rolexs.

Which sometimes there is, sometimes there isn’t.

eBay in particular is full of scam bids, over and under.

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