This post may contain affiliate links, which means I may receive a small commission, at no cost to you, if you make a purchase.Most likely the biggest transaction of your life is selling your home. Thousands of dollars can be made or lost with each decision. It can be intimidating, to say the least.
We sold our first home back in 2017 with a traditional realtor. The first weekend we had multiple offers, some even over asking!
Very little was required of our realtor. No open house, the buyer’s agents did the showings, we ended up finding our own buyer, etc. yet we still paid them thousands and thousands of dollars.
For a frugal sister like me, it just felt like a bit of a waste.
Since we sold our first house I started to hear about a new company called homie. They advertised a flat rate fee for selling your home. I was intrigued.
When it came time to sell our second house I realized I could save almost $10,000 if I went with homie vs a traditional agent so I sent them an email and decided to give them a shot.
Disclosure: homie provided their real estate services for free in exchange for this review. We did, however, use the homie title company and did pay for that ourselves. Their covering of the service fee did in no way biased my opinion and I will be completely honest in this review.
What is homie?
So what is homie?
Homie is a full-service real estate brokerage that provides services on both the buyer’s and the seller’s side of a real estate transaction.
They now are actually the largest brokerage here in my state.
How does homie work?
With homie, you complete a simple application on their website to get started with listing your home. There is no upfront fee, you only pay when your house sells.
Once you’ve submitted your profile on their site you will be paired with one of homie’s realtors. They will be your guide through the selling process. They receive the offers for you, give you counsel on negotiating your offers, help with the inspection, closing and any issues that come up.
How much does homie cost?
Homie is a flat sales commission of $2,000.
The average single-family home in our area sells for about $350,000. With a 3% sales commission that would have cost us $10,500 to list with a traditional realtor.
Straight out of the gate that is a savings of $8,500.
Can homie really be that good for that price?
I’ve heard some flack about homie (mostly from disgruntled traditional realtors) that for a rate like that the service must be lacking.
“You get what you pay for.” has been thrown around a lot.
However, my experience with homie completely dispelled that rumor in my mind. I was so impressed with the support we received. We worked with two other realtors on buying/selling houses in the past and the homie team was absolutely amazing.
Below I will outline our homie review and a step by step of our experience.
Homie Review
Homie Systems and Onboarding
In the starting phase, you will fill out your profile and get ready to list your home. Due to the high volume of transactions homie completes, they have a streamlined process that makes getting your house listed a breeze!
Seriously, their system was one of my favorite parts.
When you create your listing they have tons of videos and helpful resources to help you create your listing, set your price, etc.
They also have a super knowledgeable team pull a competitive analysis of recent sales in your area so you can feel confident in your list price.
Before you list your home you will likely have a call with your agent too. We were paired with an awesome agent named Tristen, she was so incredibly helpful and always responded quickly.
Once your listing is active they have a great client portal that you get access to view all of your offers, where they have your home listed, additional documents, etc.
It was so convenient to have everything in one place!
When your home starts to get showing requests they use an awesome tool that texts you the showing request and you just hit Y or N to confirm or decline the showing.
So much easier than playing phone tag with your realtor.
They use this same tool for scheduling your inspection and appraisal.
How does homie handle complicated sales?
Initially, it seemed like our home sale was going to be as simple as it goes…but it didn’t turn out that way.
We listed our house, immediately had offers that day and multiple offers that weekend. We accepted a conventional offer for well above our listing price and were happy campers.
Unfortunately, right before the due diligence deadline, our buyers backed out because they had a medical emergency that they had to pay for with their down payment.
Tristen was so supportive and reached out to others who had previously made an offer and got our listing back up.
Again we had multiple offers within a couple of days.
However, this is when things started getting weird.
We felt strongly about one family’s offer and decided to accept it. We were actually able to meet with them after the inspection, and they were wonderful people, but pretty much everything during the closing process went wrong.
Their realtor missed a lot of things in the paperwork, gave little to no notice for inspections, the appraisal, etc., was really pushy about the inspection and asked for multiple quotes for repairs (her team member quoted almost $4,500 in repairs while I quote was $250), called our neighbors who had recently sold their houses about their sales price, appraisal, etc. She was incredibly difficult to work with.
For weeks I was talking with our Homie agent almost every day because more and more snags came up (we listed in the middle of the Covid-19 shut down too). She was a flipping rockstar.
The buyer’s agent was rough but our agent was always professional and honestly worked harder and was more informed than any realtor I’d ever worked with.
Homie Title Review
When it finally came time to close we went with homie title. It was easy to keep everything with the one company and we’d loved their processes and service.
They were always prompt to get back with us and made the process a piece of cake.
They even had a super cool service they offered called a “mobile notary.”
If you haven’t sold a house before you may not know that you have to have your closing documents notarized.
In the past when we bought/sold houses our agent chose the location and we just had to make it work. This was about an hour from our home and was not convenient at all (in the middle of moving, with two kids, plus jobs and everything else, that is the last thing you will need).
Homie had a notary drive to our new home to meet for the signing. It was seriously awesome. They were super friendly and it took a fraction of the time since we did not have to drive all the way to a different location.
Bonus Ways To Save More Money When Selling Your Home:
1. Seller’s commission rate
I always thought it was set in stone that real estate commissions were 3% on each end. When talking with our homie realtor she let us know that we really could do anywhere between 2-3% for the buyer’s agent commission.
She said at 2.5% that wouldn’t turn away good agents so we went with that.
That half a percent on a $350,000 home is another $1,750.
Talk to your agent and if you are in a competitive area it may work for you to list at 2.5% too!
2. Highest And Best
If you are in a hot market there is a chance that you may receive multiple offers on your home. If you receive 2-3+ offers, have your homie agent put out a “highest and best” notification to those that have put in offers and in your listing.
When we did this we had multiple people raise their offers (one by over $20k!)!
This won’t necessarily save you money, but it can drive up the sales price!
3. Homie’s Bonus Gift
After our house closed we received a super kind bonus gift from homie. They sent us a survey via email asking about our experience and when we completed it we were able to choose a couple of fun house warming gifts.
Here is a screenshot of one of the items we snagged.
Conclusion: Homie Review
Would I use homie again?
Abso-freaking-lutely.
Working with them saved us so much money and the service was phenomenal.
You can check out homie at their website here.
Have you ever worked with homie? What is your homie review?