Some of the legalities have already been addressed, such as unlicensed folks showing properties, E&O, dual agency, etc., but if you're just talking vacant investor owned properties, OpenDoor already has a go and show model that you could functionally follow with getting driver's licenses/ registrations, etc., but you'd need to rely on local contractors or someone to go and check that the house is locked up/ secure on occasion, so definitely some logistical issues there to consider.
Additional logistical issues - if your agents are centrally working, then you need a logistical solution for: signs, sign riders (coming soon if that's required in your market/ pending), lockboxes, pick-up, and storage. Also, you need a solution for photos. If you want quality real estate photography, you'll need a pricing solution per market to factor into your budget.
I didn't see a plan for Transaction Coordination. Will the agents be handling this as well?
Who is vetting the buyers and calling the lenders to confirm financial ability?
And who is verifying information with tax records and the seller, securing disclosure documents, and entering the property into MLS and any showing applications?
You mentioned an hourly rate for agents, but there are a lot of tasks associated. Even if you got an agent to work from home for $25 an hour coordinating (this would not be negotiating - this would have to be transaction based with essentially forwarding the contract to the client and not advising because an agent who agrees to work for $25 an hour cannot negotiate their own compensation let alone pricing for a property), if one property took 10 hours (very low amount of time for a property), you would be looking at $250 for the agent. Since transaction coordinators alone typically charge $250-750, depending on location and expertise, this may be a challenging budget to meet.
Customer service issues are likely. Since this is minimal service, to minimize your hourly payroll time, you could consider a solution like ZenDesk for client question intake, and have a VA respond as appropriate and escalate to a licensed agent, though this will have the knock on effect of requiring more systems or contributing to lower client satisfaction when they can't reach an agent.
You will have longer DOM, as a couple of folks mentioned, owing to minimal marketing, so if you have demanding/ time consuming clients who want to discuss why their property is not selling, you'll want to budget in payroll time. Ditto for lender/ appraisal/ title delays, and calls with buyer agents.
And what about the seller's who have expectations set that they will not have to pay a buyer agent commission when that's entirely negotiable? If your market has a significant number of FHA or VA loans with zero to low down payments where a buyer can't afford to pay their agent out of pocket, your sellers may end up cutting off a significant portion of the home buying market, or once they do come around to considering negotiating on BAC, they may feel deceived, and now you may lose the potential for the recurring client that will ultimately otherwise drive your seller lead acquisition cost down.
For planning:
In a great business, a good rule of thumb is to estimate:
100% Gross Income
35% Cost of Sale
30% Expenses
35% Profit <-- very few businesses achieve this, but we're looking at an ideal solution
Assuming a national price average of $300k and 0.6% GCI, you'd be looking at:
$1,800 Gross Income
$630 Cost of Sale <-- agents/ transaction coordinators
$540 Expenses <-- photos/ signs/ lockboxes/ Errors & Omissions insurance/ MLS fees/ liability insurance/ tech fees/ VA admin support/ marketing to get clients for the business (this piece should be roughly 10% of revenue, which would be $54 in this case)
$630k Profit
If your business sold 1,000 of these homes a year, you would have:
$1,800,000 Gross Income
$630k Cost of Sale <-- agents/ transaction coordinators (you could have 5 agents handling 200 sales each at $100k incomes and TC support at scale)
$540k Expenses <-- photos/ signs/ lockboxes/ Errors & Omissions insurance/ MLS fees/ liability insurance/ tech fees/ VA admin support/ marketing to get clients for the business (you're going to est $125k in runner fees alone for signs; $25k+ in signs, $54k in ads to attract clients, $200k in photos, $10-20k minimum in E&O, $2k in liability, and what tech/ VA support)
$630k Profit
Scale costs will include hiring a managing broker for compliance to help oversee all of these transactions and implement legal changes and training. That'll eat into a chunk of that profit.
And if you do enough real estate, one of your agents will do something that will cause you to get sued at some point. You need to sock away savings for that because an attorney is not going to work for $25/ hour.
Ultimately, you would have one of the highest selling teams in the country with not enough profit. If you found a way to add additional revenue streams, such as title, mortgage, etc., then you may have a reasonable business, but otherwise...why would you do this model? If your only value is lowest cost, someone is going to underbid you by $100, and now you've lost your recurring investor client and his buddies.
