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Comment by alemanek | Hacker News Reader

I am actually your target market. We are looking to buy a house early next year. But, one thing that put me off is that you don’t list what fees you charge, is it flat rate or a percentage, ..etc.

In the FAQ I see this but no mention of the standard terms of the buyers agreement:

> Do I need to sign a buyer agreement?

> We will let you know if you need to sign a buyer agreement. You will for sure need to sign a buyer agreement when you submit an offer through us, but otherwise we can work out a timeline.

I know you just launched so not assuming any bad intent but it would be good to share pricing information for the services you offer. I have had to deal with lots of “Call us for pricing” in my day job. So, for stuff like this I just move on if I don’t see at least a price range listed somewhere upfront.

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Other relators do not put their fee pricing on their websites so we decided to follow suit. We have the same pricing model - negotiable. But we provide better service.

> But we provide better service.

How would a prospective customer know that?

We let you drive your own process and interpret real estate data with AI. We target customers who are looking for these in their Realtor

> interpret real estate data with AI

What does this actually mean though?

The texting service we provide works similarly to texting a regular realtor. You can text it "Is a $1200 HOA fee per month high for san francisco?" and it will do the searches and compare the local properties to tell you an answer

So do you actually do real estate agent things: make contracts, review contracts, communicate with your client, negotiate on behalf of your client?

Or are you an information service specializing in real estate information?

I'm a licensed agent in CA and am particularly interested in the answer to this question.

There's very strict regulation around unlicensed individuals performing activities requiring a license (negotiating, showing property, etc). Thus I would be surprised if they have AI doing this for a client!

That doesn't in any way address the question the other commenter was asking?

Perhaps he meant better user experience.

Some realtors do in fact list their commissions and fee structure:

Some examples from the market we are looking in.

1. Flat fixed fee and refunds extra: https://arrivva.com/

2. Minimum 1.25-1.5% but refunds 50% of any commission paid above: https://www.walawrealty.com/buy

Minimum for me to work with a company is transparent pricing. Even a range based on levels of service is cool. But, I am not going to waste time on a phone call with no clue as to fee structure.

The whole agent commission business is already fully shady and at least one class action brought that to light[1]. Both buyer and seller agents benefit from higher home prices and from percentage based commission despite the work being the same regardless of home price. The customers are always the victim.

https://realestate.usnews.com/real-estate/articles/what-the-...

I've been very pleased to use an attorney on a simple hourly fee who did not have such gross conflicts of interest.

We are not participating in the race to the bottom. There are a lot of 0% fee realtors out there! Try https://www.turbohome.com/, I've seen them on social media

Frankly your responses on this page have convinced me to stay clear of this product.

Sorry, I guess.

Thanks for feedback. Our priority is on good service

I was so excited when I saw this and now I'm disappointed. This kind of statement "quit on trying to win clients that are trying to get the best price" creates a false dichotomy of those who are trying to pay nothing and those willing pay whatever. There are tons of customers in the middle who are happy to pay for important services but think 30K (3% in high COL areas) is too much for the services rendered.

That being said, I think as long as you are honest that "better pricing" isn't your goal then fair enough. It isn't the service for me, but I'm sure some folks will certainly be excited about it.

> We are charging for the service.

> Our service is rendered by an AI.

I really don't know what their eventual value-add is. I doubt anyone's going to be paying 2.5-5% to househunt with an AI.

They say in theOP "Our mission at Modern Realty is to make home buying easier, faster, and far more enjoyable."

But here in the comments, they say their mission is to get rich with AI. Tricky! I wonder which claim is right.

Your communication style in this thread is adversarial and curt, yet you aim to provide good service. You clearly have a very, very long personal journey ahead of you if you want to satisfy the good service objective.

...So being up-front with your pricing, even if that's a "our fees are negotiable but tend to be (flat rate or percentage) around the X range" is a "race to the bottom"?

This says to me, "we are just like other realtors" and makes me less inclined to use your services.

Transparency is a killer feature for realtors that would set them apart from the masses. AI is a nice to have feature.

> We have the same pricing model - negotiable

Nobody wants to start off with an adversarial discussion with the person they are trying to hire to help them.

Also, I'll point out that on your front page, you say:

> We are more responsive (24/7), provide better service, and offer better prices.

But here you are saying you offer the same prices.

True, I'll update the website to reflect our updated pricing model

FWIW services like Redfin list their fees right upfront.

Fwiw redfin is also tiny with 0.78% market share and slim or negative profits

How much market share do you have?

Why would we mimic Redfin, who's a fairly small & declining player in the real restate brokerage space, when we could mimic features of much more successful players like Keller Williams

Rarely read from someone so immune to constructive criticism, that is so full of himself, it is reason enough to avoid anything he touches.

Because your mission is to make home buying easier, faster, and far more enjoyable?

Sounds like you just said you don't care about that, and your real mission is to maximize your profits.

Realtors do in fact list their fees. More and more of them are, especially after the August 2024 changes

Struggling realtors list their fees as a feature. Look through any of the top realtors in the bay area from last year: https://www.theleading100.com/honorees/theleading1002024/, you'll notice none of them list their fees. Here's the websites of the top 2 realtors in the bay area from last year, to save you some clicks: https://www.kerinicholas.com/, https://go2marin.com/

Aren’t you trying to be better than them though? People need to know that they are saving money with your new and unproven service that could go awry in so many ways.

People buying consumer products typically believe in price signaling. We've actually had clients believe in our services much more at full price than when we were discount a couple months ago.

The default question when we charged a discount price was - "but what am I missing out on if I choose you?" - and even when we said "Nothing!" clients bought into the discount pricing signal already and could not be swayed. This question is never asked at full price

So 3% and even lower touch service, oh yea “the seller pays for it” right? Buyer Agents are already grossly overpaid for the amount of actual work involved IMO, you so much as pointed that out in your stated value prop except found a way to keep the greedy commissions and not actually improve anything for the buyer.

There’s flat fee agents that will do exactly this without AI and at a cost of $500-1000 where I live. You should do that and go for volume. Edit: Oh and their offer doc includes a clause that effectively negates the 3% buyer commission and nets seller the same amount without letting their agent keep the full 6%

If you could normalize this, you will have truly disrupted the industry. As is, your an ai substitution for status quo

I’m curious about the “market charges X so I’ll charge X too but with a better service.” I’ve seen this elsewhere, too.

Isn’t the point of replacing a human agent with software that your margins are better and can charge less to the end user?

I don't know a single home buyer who likes that though. You have an opportunity to differentiate by moving away from the obnoxious dynamic that exists today.

“We can't tell you what our product costs beforehand because we try to extract as much as we can from you.”

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