ISSUE 12 · 8 MIN
Homa is a licensed brokerage run as software. You find the house, its agent writes the offer, and at closing it keeps 1% of the commission the seller already offered and credits the rest, $10,560 on average by its own count, back to you. Arman Javaherian, who left Zillow to build it, reports 9,000+ home buyers. The terrain opened on August 17, 2024, when a $418 million settlement made every buyer sign a fee agreement before the first showing, and the average buyer's agent fee still reads 2.42%.
You open Homa and type in an address in California, Florida, or Texas. A licensed agent employed by Homa uses their internal AI paperwork system to write your offer and carry the deal through closing.
Nothing is due upfront. At closing, the seller pays the buyer-agent commission originally offered. Homa keeps 1% of the purchase price, and the rest appears as a direct cash credit on your settlement statement. The company uses a simple example on a $528,000 home. A traditional agent keeps $15,840. Homa keeps $5,280, and you walk away with a $10,560 credit at closing.
Their homepage highlights over 9,000 buyers and an average credit of $10,560. The press page counts at least 10 homes closed directly through the AI system and notes that founder Arman Javaherian spent six years at Zillow as a senior director.
You are not paying for advice on which house to pick. You are buying the licensed signature the MLS and the state purchase contract still legally require. A human agent delivers it, with a workload stripped down to the tasks software can't do, priced so the seller pays the bill.
Selling a home in America has always meant paying two commissions, and until two years ago the seller set both.
The buyer agent fee was posted straight to the MLS as an offer of compensation. The buyer never saw an invoice. The system stayed remarkably uniform too. The Consumer Federation of America found that across 15 of 21 major cities, more than 88% of buyer agent rates fell between 2.5% and 3.0%, carving up about $100 billion a year in fees.
In October 2023, a Kansas City jury called that price-fixing and awarded $1.78 billion. The National Association of Realtors settled for $418 million. By August 17, 2024, two rules took effect. No more compensation offers would appear on the MLS, and no buyer could tour a home without signing a representation agreement stating the fee upfront.
Yet the commission rate barely moved.
Redfin put the average buyer agent commission at 2.42% in the third quarter of 2025, up from 2.36% a year earlier and right back at pre-settlement levels. That broke down to 2.52% on homes under $500,000 and 2.22% above $1 million. On the August 2026 median home price of $429,100, that comes out to $10,384. Even after the rule changes, 88% of buyers still used an agent.
The toll survived because the settlement changed who signs the agreement, not who holds the keys. MLS access and lockbox codes still require a licensed member. If you want through the front door, you still need an agent.
For builders, what changed is the signature.
An agreement signed before the first showing is a price the buyer actually reads, and a price that is read can be undercut.
New market entrants are already testing the pricing floor:
Homa keeps 1% and credits the rest back to the buyer.
TurboHome rebates 0.5% of what its agent earns in California, Texas, and Washington.
Landian, co-founded by original Kansas City plaintiff Josh Sitzer, launched at $49 a tour and $199 an offer before moving to a flat $4,999 fee.
Ridley attacks the listing side with a flat fee between $1,499 and $5,999.
The incumbents reacted by protecting inventory rather than matching fees. Zillow announced a listing access standard with eXp on April 10, 2025, requiring that any home marketed to the public must be on the MLS and on Zillow. That defensive move actually helps flat-fee operators by keeping listing data in full view.
The margin advantage comes down to basic arithmetic. It is the 1.42 percentage points between the 2.42% the seller pays and the 1% Homa keeps, handed back to the buyer as cash at closing. On the sell side, it is the gap between a flat $1,500 check and a $10,000 legacy commission.
A mention below is listed, never sold.
LISTED · REBATE BUYER AGENT
Homa
Founded by Arman Javaherian after Zillow. A licensed Homa agent writes the offer and runs the transaction through software. At closing, Homa keeps 1% of the purchase price from the commission the seller offered and credits the rest to the buyer, up to 2% of the price. The homepage counts 9,000+ home buyers and an average credit of $10,560 on a $528,000 example, where the traditional agent would keep $15,840; the press page counts at least 10 homes closed through the AI system. Live in California, Florida, and Texas, with a waitlist elsewhere.
Reach them · tryhoma.com · Arman Javaherian
LISTED · FLAT FEE LISTING SERVICE
Ridley
Mike Chambers founded Ridley in Boulder in 2024 to sell the listing side for a flat fee: Essentials at $1,499 up front nationwide, Pro at $3,999 up front in Colorado, Arizona, Florida, and Georgia, and Pro Pay Later at $5,999 due at closing only if the home sells. The homepage reports that sellers save an average of $43,639, and one customer saved $130,000, compared with a listing side a traditional agent prices at 2.5% to 3%, $10,728 to $12,873 on the median home. It is the seller-side answer to Homa: a price that does not move with the house.
Reach them · getridley.com · @chambers__mike
Take Homa’s own example of a $528,000 house where the seller offered a 3% commission, and follow the $15,840.
Under the old rules, the buyer agent kept every dollar. Under Homa, $5,280 is top-line revenue and $10,560 is a pure pass-through credit straight to the buyer on the settlement statement. Brokerages do not publish contribution margins, but assume a direct cost of $1,800 per deal covering agent hours, transaction coordination, MLS dues, and insurance. That leaves $3,480 in contribution per closing, or a 66% margin on revenue. That is the leverage of pricing off seller concessions. The closing credit is the marketing engine.
Customer acquisition cost is where that dynamic pays off. Traditional brokerages recruit agents who drum up their own buyers. A rebate model relies on a buyer telling friends about a $10,000 check at closing. Even with an assumed $600 paid acquisition cost per closed buyer, net contribution sits at $2,880. Because escrow disburses the fee the day the deal closes, there are no invoices to chase and zero accounts receivable risk.
Ridley takes a different path on the listing side with tiered flat pricing. Assuming a $700 service cost per listing, their Essentials tier contributes $799 and their Pro tier contributes $3,299. A book split evenly between the two delivers an average contribution of $2,049 per listing, though any pay-later option forces the platform to absorb the risk of unsold inventory.
For either model to work at scale, three assumptions must hold:
Sellers must keep offering buyer-side compensation. The day sellers stop offering concessions, a rebate model has nothing left to refund, and Redfin data already shows rates slipping as price rises, from 2.52% under $500,000 to 2.22% over $1 million.
Employed agents must handle dramatically higher transaction volume. Economists Panle Jia Barwick and Parag Pathak estimated agent productivity would need to rise 73% if commissions were cut in half.
Buyers must continue doing their own property discovery online, which has been free on Zillow for two decades anyway.
The narrowest wedge is the offer, not the tour. Buyers already find the house online. What they cannot produce on their own is a purchase agreement on the state-approved form, a defensible comparable-sales case for their price, and a licensed signature.
Build for one metro. Use an open-source scraper like HomeHarvest to pull active listings and recent sales, score the asking price against nearby sales per square foot, and generate the offer terms alongside the contingency timeline. Hand that completed package to a partner broker, who reviews, signs, and submits it.
Charge a flat $999 per accepted offer, disbursed at closing through the settlement statement so the buyer never pays out of pocket. Route the buyer share of the seller-paid commission back onto that same closing statement as a rebate. That line item is the advertisement that lands the next user.
The essential technical integration is not an MLS feed. It is whatever document platform the local broker already runs for digital signatures, such as Dotloop or DocuSign. An offer packet that has to be manually re-entered into another portal never gets submitted before the 5 p.m. deadline.
The closing escrow is the payment rail. The ideal first user is a buyer putting an offer on a home under $500,000, where Redfin data shows buyer-agent commissions sit highest at 2.52%, and whose lender is already demanding a signed buyer-broker agreement before moving the loan forward.
RECON · TWO TERRAINS WHERE THE TOLL STILL STANDS
We found two specific niches this week where legacy players still collect fat margins, and no software team is putting up a fight yet. Both breakdowns include the source data below.
We skipped four neighboring verticals because other startups are already running the play. SuperRent is unwinding New York rental fees under the FARE Act, Titl is automating title search work, doola owns corporate entity setups, and Loadsmart runs point on freight cargo claims.
RECON · HOA ESTOPPEL CERTIFICATES
Issue the HOA closing letter
The signal: Florida's 2025 statutes cap the fee an association may charge for an estoppel certificate, the letter every closing needs, at $250 for a homeowners association and $250 for a condominium, with surcharges for rush delivery and delinquent accounts. Texas caps the resale certificate at $375, with $75 for an update. Who collects: the management company, which charges the ceiling for a letter assembled from its own ledger and has no reason to price below it, and the letter depends on a clerk. The build: an agent that reads the association's ledger and governing documents and issues the certificate in an hour. Price: $49 a certificate, our suggestion, sold to self-managed associations and title companies. First customer: a Florida title company.
RECON · EVENT TICKET RESALE
Resell a ticket without the fee
The signal: StubHub's third-quarter 2025 release shows $468 million in revenue on $2.4 billion in gross merchandise sales, a 19% take on every fan-to-fan transfer. The FTC's rule on unfair fees took effect May 12, 2025, and made that take visible in the all-in price. Who collects: the resale marketplaces, whose whole margin is the fee, so they cannot price below it. No product stands on the other side; the closest thing found is a scraping vendor's demo repository. The build: an agent that lists a season-ticket holder's spare seats to a verified fan list, transfers them on the team's app, and settles by card. Price: a flat $3 a ticket, our suggestion. First customer: a season-ticket holder who misses half the games.
ZacharyHampton/HomeHarvest. A Python package that scrapes for-sale, pending, sold, and rental listings from Realtor.com, Zillow, and Redfin and returns them shaped like MLS records, with sold comparables, as CSV, Excel, or a pandas frame. MIT license, 743 stars, last commit December 26, 2025. Worth an hour because the comparable-sales case is the only part of a buyer's offer the software can make better than the agent did, and this is the data layer under it; the licensed signature is the part you partner for.
The software that automates a closing gets robbed at the wire, not during the offer.
Every home purchase ends with the buyer wiring the largest sum of money of their life directly into an escrow account. Those payment instructions typically land in an email inbox from people the buyer barely knows, like the agent, the loan officer, or an unfamiliar escrow clerk.
A criminal who gains access to that email thread simply waits for the closing date. The day before funds are due, they email the buyer revised wiring instructions stamped with the title company logo. An AI agent handling automated closing correspondence is a prime target for inbox takeover, because its automated messages already enjoy the buyer's complete trust.
One operational rule shuts down this entire attack vector. The agent must enforce a strict, unbreakable policy. Lock the designated escrow account at the moment of initial contract signing, sourced directly from the original title agreement. Any subsequent change to routing or account details requires a manual voice confirmation using the phone number printed on the original wet contract, never a phone number listed in a recent email, before a single dollar moves.
PASS IT ON
Send this to whoever in your life is house hunting this fall and signed the buyer agreement without reading the fee line.
NEXT ISSUE
When the Supreme Court struck down the IEEPA tariffs in February 2026, the trade court ordered refunds for every affected importer. By June 15, Customs had processed roughly $23 billion through its CAPE portal, with another $35.46 billion in line.
Now software is fighting over the spread.
Flexport reports a tiny 0.2% filing error rate on automated claims, while Pax AI advertises 15% more capital recovered by catching missed line items.
The wedge is not just filing the paperwork. It is the economics of the recovery itself. The business turns on three basic questions. Who handles the filing work, who gets to keep the statutory interest paid by the government, and what percentage the customs broker takes out of the recovery check.
SOURCES
Homa homepage figures · Homa press page · Ridley homepage plans · TurboHome rebate · Landian homepage fee · TechCrunch on Landian · Landian 2024 launch fees · NAR practice changes · NAR settlement amount · NAR buyer and seller profile · NAR August 2026 median price · Redfin commission data · Consumer Federation commission study · Zillow listing access standards · Sitzer Burnett verdict · Barwick and Pathak NBER paper · HomeHarvest repo · Florida Statute 720.30851 · Florida Statute 718.116 · Texas Property Code 207.003 · StubHub Q3 2025 results · FTC fees rule · Holland and Knight refund update · Flexport refund explainer · PYMNTS on Flexport AI tool · Sacra on Pax AI
