Instant Home Offers – 4 Things You Must Know

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1. Zillow Instant Offers are Coming.

Zillow announced last month that it plans to roll out its instant offer service in Portland in fall of 2019. Sellers who wish to offload a home without going through the entire sales process can fill out a form online, send in a few photos, and receive an offer.

Portland isn’t new to instant offers — Opendoor.com has been operating in the area since August 2018. Opendoor provides essentially the same service as Zillow Offers. For both companies, the selling point is they give cash offers and the seller gets to name the closing date.

So what’s the downside? For sellers in a hurry to offload a home, who are not concerned about getting the market price for their home, this could be a great solution. For most people, a house is the biggest investment they make in their lifetime — and they can’t afford to get less than full market value or better. 

This is true, even for homes that get offers from Zillow — though the analysis done so far shows that Zillow Offers are usually better than offers from Opendoor. 

2. Instant Offer Fees are Huge!

While Zillow Offers does not disclose its fees directly on the site, they reportedly range between 6% to 13% of the offer. Opendoor is currently charging 7%. In my opinion, those are some incredibly huge fees.

That means that if a seller accepts an instant offer of $350,000 for their home, they are actually getting $21,000 to $45,500 less than that. 

3. The reviews on instant home offers so far are terrible.

According to an Inman article on the subject, Yelp is actively hiding Opendoor and Offerpad’s terrible customer reviews. Customers, in general, so far are not happy with the ibuyer, instant home offer process.

4. You can do a lot better than an instant home offer.

For the last few years running, we’ve been the number one home seller in Portland and we charge a max. rate of 4.25% commission. We pay a ton of money to market our client’s homes so they sell faster than our competition and for more. With our cancel anytime policy for no charge – there is no risk. In 2019, 116 of our homes sold in less than 30 days on market and 47 in the first weekend. Our list price to sold price average was 100%. We will get you market price or better – quickly and for less. We have over 300 positive reviews you can check out. See our full home seller’s package here.

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