In-justo.ca
One of our favourite brokerages is Justo. They claim to be the champions of justice in this archaic real estate industry, giving you 50% cash back on their commission while pairing you with one of their salespeople. As far as ZVR is concerned, half-priced highway robbery is still highway robbery. They even tell you pleasing lies, such as saying they include the price of an inspection and a lawyer, but in reality they deduct it from your reimbursement. That means you pay for it out of pocket. There is a mistaken belief that this cash is falling from the sky, but actually it is just your money. For all their claims of being a tech company and disruptor, they have yet to publish the results of any new tech. There are machine learning competitions where engineers compete to create the most accurate home price prediction models, one of which Zillow hosted.
They do one useful thing though. They are one of the first brokerages to publish what the listing brokerage offers as commission to the buyer’s agent without being sued into non-existence. ZVR’s proposal is simple: we will approximately double it. You have to do the legwork anyway when buying. After all, what does a buyer’s agent showing you a home even mean? Do they give you a ride to the home and hold you by the hand? Do they point at the toilet and tell you that is the philosophy chamber? Unlike the seller they have never even been inside the home, and know as much as you do about it. No matter how entertaining they may be as company, you must physically view a home yourself anyway, as few people trust another to select their home for them. These salespeople are not useful to point out physical defects, because they do not have the technical background for it. When it comes to contract formation and negotiation, it appears to us that they might just be practicing law without a license. What is certain though, is that their mistakes in this field can cost their customers large amounts. This isn’t normal by the way. In the UK a buyer negotiates a purchase agreement with an estate agent in principle, and then they both step back and let lawyers form the contract that becomes binding.
If you insist on half-priced highway robbery, ZVR will also offer you 50% cash back to have a salesperson tag along with you to home viewings and provide full service. By the the time the process is done, you will see how little value salespeople provide in this process. Our estimate: zero value.
(Edit 11 Sep 2021): As our brand here at ZVR is to poke these land salespeople in the eye, we are pleased to say that this article made its rounds within Justo and has caused discomfort. We suppose that is what happens when the front page of your website still contains highly misleading information, tricking customers into believing legal fees and inspection are covered. In fact, when clicking on the asterisk beside their claim you will quickly find out it isn’t covered at all, and that their so-called preferred prices are basically just the market value for such services. Even the arithmetic in Justo’s blog articles is occasionally incorrect. This is why at ZVR we state our fees plainly, and otherwise offer full cash-back of the buyer agent’s commission.
We would also like to take the opportunity to rub more salt in this wound, and call out their CEO directly. Daphne De Groot claims that Justo’s model is somehow innovative and disruptive, whereas in fact she just plagiarized a decades-old idea. She just happened to convince a hockey player to dump money into better advertising. Here is a newspaper article dated 13 Aug 2004, which is far from the first iteration of the 50% cash-back model:
De Groot is quite lucid about the undeniable truth: that there is no reason that salespeople have to be involved in a real estate transaction. In her home country of Israel she readily admits that buyers simply use a lawyer to transact in real estate. Instead she calls her discount “money out of the sky”, because unlike a traditional agent she has just one hand in your pocket instead of two. She could have implemented a fair model like ZVR, but clearly money speaks louder than justice.
