As the housing market has slowed, both agents and proptech companies are looking for ways to attract more business. At Opendoor, this has led to changes to its Agent Access loyalty program, according to an announcement on Tuesday.
The new additions to the Agent Access program include buyer transactions and the establishment of a referral offering to give agents access to Opendoor’s complete market reach, regardless of where the agents are based.
Prior to this expansion, Agent Access had only been available to the listing side of an agent’s business, however, with this expansion, when an agent represents buyer purchasing an Opendoor-owned home, the agent will be eligible to receive Agent Access loyalty points in addition to a buyer’s broker commission.
Since the creation of the agent program in 2019, Opendoor said it has paid more than $750 million in commissions to agents who partnered with the firm and it has seen a nearly 9X increase in program adoption.
“We did a significant number of transactions with Opendoor in 2022 because it was the right fit for the clients and what the market was doing at the time,” Nick Shivers, a Portland, Oregon-based agent and a 3-year veteran of the Agent Access program, said in a statement. “Today, having that give-and-take relationship between agents and Opendoor is going to be even more important because of uncertain market conditions.”
With the new referral program, agents who refer transactions to Opendoor, but are unable to represent a specific client, get a referral fee when the transaction closes.
“The more options that not only a consumer has, but that an agent has to solve a problem, the greater the chances are of solving it,” Shivers said. “The addition of the referral program is another tool. Equally important, it’s an opportunity to prove that you are putting our clients first by showing them all of their options up front.”
This is just the latest expansion of Opendoor’s product offerings. Earlier this month, the firm announced that it would start offering its selling solutions through its partnership with Zillow in three additional markets, Dallas, Houston and Phoenix.
