Home Bay: Reviews, Pros, Cons, Everything You Need to Know

Home Bay is an innovative discount brokerage that offers sellers a streamlined, online-only sale experience. This absence of face-to-face interaction enables them to offer their customers fairly low commission rates— but are the savings worth the lack of rapport?

The last decade or so has seen the emergence of the discount brokerage industry, which offers a path for consumers to buy and sell homes for a lower cost than the traditional 6% commission. Most of these brokerages offer a more or less traditional real estate experience, just at a lower price point. Home Bay went a step further by offering a discount selling experience that’s also entirely online.

• What is Home Bay?
• How Does Home Bay Work?
• How Much Does Home Bay Cost?
• Home Bay Pros and Cons
• Surveying Home Bay’s Reviews
• Home Bay vs. Clever Real Estate

What Is Home Bay?

Sellers and buyers who work with Home Bay manage their process through Home Bay’s online platform, with remote assistance from Home Bay’s in-house agents and advisors. Though you’ll have a dedicated agent working with you, they’ll only assist you remotely; no Home Bay employees will ever visit your home or meet you face-to-face.

This means that, while they’ll have expert advice to guide them, Home Bay buyers and sellers are going to be managing their transaction themselves. Sellers who use Home Bay can expect to pay a listing fee between 0.5% and 2%, depending on the final sale price of their home. 

As of June 2020, Home Bay is only available in a few markets:

• San Diego, CA
• Santa Barbara, CA
• Boulder, CO
• Atlanta, GA
• Chicago, IL
• Tampa, FL
• Scottsdale, AZ
• Lubbock, TX

In an era where everything from food delivery to banking is done entirely online, with no face to face interaction, an online-only real estate brokerage was inevitable. But how does it work? And are the shortcomings worth the advantages? 

Read on for a complete rundown of Home Bay’s costs, pros and cons, an overview of reviews, and comparison with competitors.

How Does Home Bay Work?

Once you sign up for an account on Home Bay’s website, you’ll be directed to find your address on the map provided and select a date when you want your listing to go live. Home Bay will then provide you with a list of tasks to get your home and listing ready for the market.

Through Home Bay’s platform, you’ll schedule a professional photographer, confirm your home’s specs, acquire yard signs, and set your list price using data (including a comparative market analysis) that Home Bay will provide. 

Unlike many discount brokerages where you only pay at close, sellers have to put 10% of their listing fee down before the listing goes live.

Once your listing goes live, Home Bay will make sure it also appears on the local MLS, as well as top real estate sites like Redfin, Zillow, Realtor.com, and Trulia.

Buyers and buyer’s agents can contact you directly, through the Home Bay platform, or they can contact Home Bay directly. Home Bay will schedule your showings, and coordinate with you to make sure the times arranged work with your schedule. It’ll be up to you to prepare for, and conduct, the showings.

Buyers can make offers directly through the Home Bay platform, where you can accept or reject them with the click of a button. Home Bay will give a detailed evaluation of each offer, indicating how it compares to market value, and how strong the prospective buyer’s financials are. 

Once you accept an offer, Home Bay will give you guidance on how to proceed with closing. Once you’ve completed closing, you’ll pay the remainder of your listing price to Home Bay. 

As you can tell, selling your home through Home Bay puts a lot of the ownice on sellers, rather than a real estate agent.  

In an article last year, Home Bay’s CEO said their average sale time was 38 days; the national average is 63 to 98 days, though this includes 30 days for closing, meaning that Home Bay is more or less on par with the national average. 

How Much Does Home Bay Cost?

Home Bay uses a sliding fee scale depending on the sale price of your home.

Price	Listing Fee
$100,000-$225,000	$2,000
$225,001-$275,000	$2,250
$275,001-$325,000	$2,750
$325,001-$375,000	$3,250
$375,001-$425,000	$3,500
$425,001-$725,000	$4,000
$725,001-$1,250,000	$6,000
$1,250,000-$2,000,000	$7,500
$2,000,000+	$10,000

Two things to keep in mind: first, sellers should plan to pay a standard 3% buyer’s commission.

That means that if you sell your home for $200,000, you’ll pay a listing fee of $2,000 (equivalent to 1%), plus $6,000 (or 3%), for a total of $8,000.

For comparison, selling that same $200,000 through a traditional agent would cost you a total of $12,000— 3%, or $6,000, to the listing agent, and 3%, or $6,000, to the buyer’s agent.

And second, Home Bay’s fee table offers bigger advantages as the price of your home goes up. For example, the $200,000 home mentioned above essentially gets a 2% discount off a standard 3% listing fee, which comes to a savings of $4,000. But for a house that sells for $2,000,000 or more, Home Bay’s price structure translates to a savings of $50,000 or more. Literally and proportionally, that’s a larger savings.

So how do Home Bay’s costs compare to their competitors? For a more precise side-by-side comparison of listing fees, see the chart below. 

Company	Listing Fee
Home Bay	0.5%-1%, see fee table
Clever	1%, $3,000 flat fee for homes under $350,000
Redfin	1%-1.5%
REX Real Estate	2%, with a $9,000 minimum for homes under $450,000
Redefy	$3,500

To summarize, Home Bay is roughly on par, or slightly less expensive than peers like Redfin, Clever, and Redefy. However, Home Bay offers an online-only experience, while their competitors offer a more traditional face-to-face agent experience at a similar price point. 

That means your opinion will likely hinge on what you think about the impersonal, online-only nature of a Home Bay transaction. If you see it as a benefit, then Home Bay is the best of all possible worlds. But if you see it as a drawback, it could be hard to justify selling with Home Bay when you could get much more agent face-time from other companies, for roughly the same price. 

Home Bay Pros and Cons

The upsides and downsides of Home Bay are pretty significant in both directions. Let’s break them down.

Pros

Low Cost

Their table of flat fees is definitely lower than a traditional 6% commission— although keep in mind that sellers will still have to offer a 3% buyer’s commission.

A One-Stop Shop

Home Bay’s online platform gives you a truly centralized hub for your entire transaction. Selling your home in the traditional way can be a logistical nightmare, as you juggle showings, pricing, inspections, and offers, so letting you manage everything through an app is an amazing advancement.

No Face to Face Contact

Even before the pandemic, many people preferred to keep their personal interactions to a minimum. But in the era of social distancing, it’s become a necessity. 

Not having to meet with your agent in person— especially considering that most agents work simultaneously with multiple clients, exponentially increasing their level of personal contact— is appealing in the COVID era.

Cons

Inexperienced Sellers Might Suffer

Using Home Bay’s online platform is convenient, but the reality is that the seller is left to manage most of the transaction themselves. This is a ton of work for experienced sellers, and it can feel downright overwhelming for first-timers. 

Preparing and staging a home for the market, conducting showings, and sitting down at the negotiating table across from an experienced buyer’s agent is a lot to ask from a non-professional, even if they’re receiving guidance online.

Some Small Advantages Are Lost

Sellers are definitely capable of staging their homes themselves, conducting open houses, and even negotiating the price against a professional agent. But the fact is, it’s unlikely they’ll be able to do any of those things as well as a real estate agent would. Agents have staged dozens or hundreds of homes, and overseen hundreds of open houses; they have a deep, nuanced understanding of what buyers want, based on years of experience. Even if a seller is able to do all of those things 90% as effectively as an agent, that means they’re still giving up 10%, which translates to real money they’re leaving on the table. 

An Impersonal Approach

Even setting knowledge and experience aside, selling a home can be a challenging emotional experience. Having an agent there for support helps soothe the anxiety and uncertainty of navigating one of the largest financial transactions of your life. It’s hard to replace that with some text messages on an app.

Upfront Fees

While most real estate brokerages don’t get paid until the sale is closed, Home Bay requires customers to put a portion of their listing fee down in advance. 

Surveying Home Bay’s Reviews

Home Bay has good customer ratings, averaging 4.5 out of 5, based on 469 reviews across Yelp, Zillow, Trustpilot, Google, and Yelp. They also hold an A+ rating with the Better Business Bureau.

Looking at their reviews on various platforms, a few common themes emerge. The majority of the reviews were positive, and cited financial savings and good communication as selling points. Many reviewers also said they liked the online platform, though some noted that it required a moderate degree of tech savvy.

The negative reviews made up a small minority, and the complaints were almost always related to poor communication and responsiveness, or a failure to sell the house— which, in fairness, has as much to do with the local market as with Home Bay. Some clients also struggled with the online platform.

The takeaway? If you’re considering using Home Bay, look at local reviews to see if people in your market have had good or bad experiences, since results seem to vary.

Home Bay vs. Clever Real Estate

So how does Home Bay compare to Real Estate Witch’s partner company, Clever Real Estate? 

Well, Home Bay’s advantages lie in the areas of ease of transaction, and raw savings. Home Bay’s online platform is unique in that it allows people to sell their homes entirely online, through their phone or computer. For sellers who don’t need a lot of guidance, and who actively avoid real world interactions, Home Bay represents an almost ideal way to sell their home.

And Home Bay is cheap, too. They’re potentially the cheapest option out of all their competitors, depending on the final sale price of your home. However, those savings are partially offset by the fact that, as a novice negotiator going up against an experienced buyer’s agent, the homeowner probably won’t be able to get the highest possible price for the property. 

That’s one of the biggest disadvantages of a self-guided sale through Home Bay— the absence of an experienced agent during in-person showings, negotiations, and inspections. It’s up to individual sellers to weigh the low listing fee against a potentially low sale price.

Next to Home Bay, Clever Real Estate has some obvious advantages. They’re nearly as inexpensive, charging a flat fee of $3,000 for homes up to $350,000, and 1% for homes over that threshold. 

But they also pair sellers up with experienced local agents, who give them a full service, face to face experience. That includes advice on staging, hosting showings, going toe to toe with the other side at the negotiating table, and just generally being there for emotional and psychological support. That means that, at a similar price point to Home Bay, Clever offers a much wider spectrum of services.

Contact Clever today for a free, no-obligation consultation, and find out how they can help you realize your real estate goals!