Terms of service
Terms of service
A plain-language draft for Colorado counsel to review. It states what the product actually does and the commitments already made in its interface, so the reviewed version cannot contradict them. Bracketed items are blanks counsel fills in.
This is a plain-language draft for Colorado counsel. It describes what the product actually does so the reviewed version cannot contradict it; bracketed items are blanks counsel fills in. Nothing on this page is in force until counsel has reviewed it.
1 · Who you are agreeing with
De/commission is operated by [LEGAL ENTITY NAME], a Colorado [ENTITY TYPE] ("we", "us"). These terms are a contract between you and us. They apply the moment you create an account, start a listing, or join a listing through a seller’s private link. If you do not agree with them, do not use the service. You can reach us at [CONTACT EMAIL] or [MAILING ADDRESS].
2 · What De/commission is, and is not
De/commission is software. It organises the work of selling a home without a listing agent — disclosure, pricing, listing, showings, offers, contract deadlines and closing — and gives buyers a place to ask for a showing, message the seller and make an offer. We are not a licensed real estate brokerage, a law firm, an accounting firm, a title company or a settlement agent. We do not act as your agent, attorney or accountant. Nothing on the service is real estate, legal, tax or financial advice, and nothing on it is a recommendation about what you should do. Every decision and every signature in your sale is yours.
3 · The partner brokerage and the listing agreement
Only a licensed brokerage that participates in the local multiple listing service can enter a listing there. De/commission is not one. A partner flat-fee brokerage, Cottonwood Realty, holds your listing and is the MLS participant. To publish, every owner of record signs a listing agreement with that brokerage. That agreement is between you and the brokerage, on its terms, and it is a separate contract from these terms. The brokerage sets its own fee for entering and holding the listing and bills you directly, under that agreement. We do not collect it, do not pass it on, and take no share of it; the brokerage takes no share of your sale and pays us no referral fee for you. Our $599 is for the software and does not include the brokerage’s fee. [COUNSEL: confirm this arrangement against the brokerage agreement, and against C.R.S. § 12-10-201 et seq. and RESPA § 8 — the seller now pays the licensee directly, as with the broker panel.] The brokerage does not negotiate for you, does not advise you, and does not hold money for you.
4 · What it costs
A seller pays us $599 per listing, once, when they choose to move from the intake result to the preparation work. Payment comes before the account exists: the button takes you to our payment processor, and the email address you give it is the one we send your sign-in link to and the one your account is created under. The fee is non-refundable: it pays for the software, not for a sale, and it is not returned if your home does not sell, if you withdraw, or if you stop using the service. [COUNSEL: paying before an account exists means these terms are accepted at checkout rather than at sign-up — confirm how they should be presented there.] The $599 does not include the partner brokerage’s fee for entering and holding your listing on the MLS. The brokerage sets that fee and bills you directly under your listing agreement with them; we never collect it, never hold it, and take no share of it. It is a separate payment to a separate company. Buyers are never charged. There is no access fee, no offer fee and no closing add-on for a buyer, and no buy-side screen contains a paywall. A seller who already has a buyer when they arrive is charged nothing, because the service has little to offer them; the intake result tells them what comes next and stops. Agents booked through the service are paid for their time at the rate shown when you book, never a percentage of your sale. That fee is disclosed before you confirm the booking.
5 · Your account
Sellers and buyers use the same kind of account. Your email is confirmed by a sign-in link. You are responsible for keeping your credentials to yourself and for everything done from your account until you tell us it was compromised. Tell us at once at [CONTACT EMAIL] if you think it has been. You must be at least 18 and able to enter a binding contract. You must give us accurate information and keep it current.
6 · What you are responsible for
Colorado law requires a seller to disclose known material defects, and the duty does not end at closing. The disclosure interview asks the questions; the answers, and their accuracy, are yours. We do not inspect your home and we do not verify what you tell us. You set the list price. The calculated range is information, produced from public records and recent sales, and it can be wrong. You decide what stays with the house, what goes, and what you offer a buyer’s agent. You decide which showings to allow, which offer to accept and whether to counter. Deadlines shown on the service are calculated from the dates in the offer as it was entered. The contract you sign governs. Check every date against the signed contract; a date on a screen is a reminder, not the deadline itself.
7 · Owners of record
Every name you enter when asked who owns the home is your own statement. It is recorded as such and does not become the owner list. Before a listing can publish, the owners of record are confirmed against the recorded deed — by an automated county-record check where one is connected, or by one of our operators reading the deed by hand — and every owner on that list signs the listing agreement. If the deed shows an owner you did not name, the listing waits until they have signed. If title is held by a trust, a company or an estate, or is subject to probate, divorce or a dispute, the service routes you to a professional rather than pretending the situation is simple.
8 · Showings and access
Nothing is confirmed until you confirm it. Which requests you approve, when, and how a visitor gets in are your decisions. The service provides no lockbox and books none; whether you host in person or use one of your own is your call. The hours you set can be as narrow as you like, but they apply to everyone. Federal and Colorado fair-housing law applies to you exactly as it applies to a licensed agent: you may not approve, decline, price or condition anything on a person’s race, colour, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, familial status, marital status, ancestry, creed or source of income, or on any other protected characteristic. The service will not help you do so and using it to do so ends your access. Where a phone check is in use, a buyer types back a code sent to their phone before their showing request can be approved. That is a safety check that a person answers at that number. It is not identity verification and the service never describes it as such.
9 · For buyers
A buyer joins a listing through a private link the seller turns on. Joining is free and stays free. Once joined you can read what the seller has chosen to show — the address, the kind of home, the list price and the seller’s disclosure — request a showing, message the seller and make an offer. You see only your own requests, messages and offers, never another buyer’s. Before an offer can be submitted you attest your full legal name. At contract, the partner brokerage checks government identification against that name. Where a verification provider is connected, its step replaces the attestation. A false attestation is a breach of these terms and may be a crime. You can bring an agent, and your agent can join the listing for you through the same link, as your side of the sale. If you do, the service records their name, brokerage and licence as they state them, and any compensation you ask the seller to pay them is a separate term of your offer, never folded into a concession.
10 · Offers, counters and contracts
The service records the terms of an offer, a counter and an acceptance, in the order they arrive, and shows every live offer to the seller side by side in identical columns. It never ranks, sorts, scores or features an offer, and it never withholds one. Whether and when an accepted offer becomes a binding contract is governed by Colorado law and by the contract form the parties sign — the Colorado Real Estate Commission’s approved Contract to Buy and Sell Real Estate — not by a status on a screen. The service is a record of what each side said; it is not the contract and it does not sign for you. Accepting an offer on the service records that the two sides have agreed terms; the other live offers stay open as backups, and each of those buyers is told. The home is shown as under contract only when the seller records the signed contract — its dates, and a copy if they upload one — and that is when the service closes the remaining live offers and tells each buyer. Either side may attach a signed copy of the contract to the sale; it is kept with the sale and readable by the two parties and nobody else. A copy on the service is a convenience, not the original, and the signed contract governs over anything a screen shows. Buyer letters — a personal message to the seller about who the buyer is — are not passed on. They invite decisions on protected characteristics, and the service withholds them entirely rather than showing them with a warning.
11 · Automated features
Three features are generated automatically by software rather than written by a person, and each is marked ✦ wherever it appears. The thinking partner answers a seller’s questions about their own sale. It is built to help you think and it is built never to recommend: not a price, not a counter, not a term and not which offer to take. Recommending those is substantially what a licensed broker does, and this is software. If it strays into a recommendation anyway, the answer is shown with a caution so that you can see the boundary was crossed. It is available to signed-in sellers only, takes turns from an hourly budget, and is not offered to buyers at all. The photo reviewer looks at how a listing photograph was taken — light, framing, tilt — and never at what is in the room. A comment on the contents of a photograph is suppressed rather than shown, because listing photographs are a fair-housing surface. Colorado’s automated decision-making law (SB 26-189, effective 1 January 2027) gives you rights where an automated system materially influences an outcome for you. Nothing on the service makes a decision about you; its outputs are information for you to weigh, and nothing is applied to you without your say-so. Where the law gives you a right in respect of an automated output, that right is yours and nothing here waives it. We do not set out those rights on the screen beside each output, and nothing here is a channel for exercising them. The routes that exist today are the ones the service already gives you: the working behind an output is shown on the screen that produced it, the data behind it is your own entry and yours to change, and a licensed Colorado broker from our panel can review anything with you. [COUNSEL: whether the service is in scope at all; if it is, we must BUILD and then name an explanation route, a correction route and a human-review route, and insert the statutory deadline for an explanation after an adverse automated outcome, the retention period for automated-processing records, and the timing of the notice relative to use. Confirm in writing. Do not fill them in from memory.] The short notice appears at the point of use; this section is the fuller version. At the start of each sale you are shown three short screens — the fair-housing rules, your disclosure duty, and what the service is and is not — and asked to confirm you have read each; we record each confirmation, the version of the text you saw, and when. At the end of the disclosure interview you attest that your answers are true and complete to the best of your knowledge, recorded with a fingerprint of the answers as they stood; and at closing you confirm that you verified the wire instructions by phone. None of these is a certification of compliance or legal advice. The listing-copy drafter writes a first draft of your public remarks from facts you type about the house, and from nothing else. It describes the property and never a buyer. Its draft is checked against known fair-housing wording before you see it and withheld if it slips, and it reaches your listing only if you put it in your listing copy and save it, at which point the service checks the wording again. Whatever you write or save as listing copy is yours: you are responsible for it, and the check is a check on known wording, not a legal opinion.
12 · Agent consultations
You can ask a licensed Colorado broker from our panel to talk with you by the hour. The service introduces you; it is not a party to what follows. The broker advises only. They are not your listing agent, they cannot sign or negotiate for you, and no agency, transaction-broker or other brokerage relationship with you is created by the introduction — the broker gives you their own brokerage-disclosure form before they advise. The broker is paid for their time at the hourly rate shown, never a share of your sale. That rate is set by us as a condition of being on the panel, so it is the same for every seller and every broker on it. THE BROKER’S BROKERAGE BILLS YOU DIRECTLY. Nothing for a consultation is charged through this service, we never hold or handle that money, we take no share of it, and we accept no referral fee or other payment from a broker for the introduction. Cancellation and refunds are between you and the broker’s brokerage. [COUNSEL: confirm the panel arrangement — a set rate, no compensation to us in either direction — against C.R.S. § 12-10-201 et seq. and RESPA § 8.]
13 · Attorney communications
Conversations with your own attorney do not run through De/commission. There is no attorney role on the service, no channel addressed to one, and no place to store one, by design: a platform holding a privileged communication is a privilege-waiver fact pattern even if nobody at the platform ever reads it. Do not paste advice from your attorney into a message, a note or the thinking partner. If you do, you may have waived privilege over it, and that is not something we can undo.
14 · Money, and why we never touch it
We never receive, hold or disburse settlement funds, earnest money, proceeds or any other money in your transaction. Earnest money is held by the escrow holder named in the contract; proceeds move through the title company at closing. The one payment we take is the $599 software fee, through a payment processor; we never see or store your card number. The brokerage’s own fee is paid to the brokerage, not through us. The service never sends wire instructions and has no field that could hold them. If you receive wire instructions that appear to come from De/commission, they are fraudulent. Confirm every wire by phone, on a number you looked up yourself, before sending anything.
15 · Messages
Messages between a seller and a buyer are kept in a thread on the seller’s property. They are added to and never edited or deleted, and each one is stamped by the database with who sent it and when. A seller sees every thread on their property; a buyer sees only their own. Do not send banking details, wire instructions or anything you would not want on the permanent record of the sale.
16 · Text messages
Where text messaging is connected, we send text messages only with your consent and only about your own sale: a phone-check code, a showing confirmation, a deadline reminder. Consent is not a condition of using the service; you can decline and still use every feature by email. Message frequency depends on your sale. Message and data rates may apply. You can withdraw consent at any time by replying STOP, or by any other reasonable means, and we keep a record of when you consented and when you withdrew.
17 · Your transaction record
Every material act on your sale — an answer given, a price set, a signature, a showing approved, an offer received, countered or accepted — is written to a transaction record that is added to and never rewritten. It exists so that, if a question is ever raised about what was disclosed and when, you have the answer. You can read it at any time, and we will give you a copy on request. The record is kept on a clock that starts at closing, not at your last sign-in or the closing of your account, and it outlives the period in which a claim could be brought against you. The period is stated in the privacy policy once counsel has confirmed it. Closing your account does not delete it, for the same reason.
18 · Acceptable use
You may use the service only for a sale or purchase you are genuinely party to. You may not misrepresent who you are or who owns the home, use the service to discriminate, scrape or copy listing data, probe or interfere with the service’s security, attempt to reach another person’s data, or use it for any unlawful purpose. We may suspend an account that does any of these; the transaction record of any sale it touched is kept.
19 · What we do not promise
The service is provided as it is and as it is available. To the fullest extent Colorado law allows, we make no warranty that it will be uninterrupted or error-free, that the calculated range, county data, recent sales or any ✦ output are accurate or complete, that a deadline shown on a screen matches your contract, or that your home will sell at any price or at all. Public records can be wrong and we pass them on as we receive them. You are responsible for checking anything you rely on.
20 · Limits on our liability
[COUNSEL: limitation-of-liability clause to be drafted. Draft position: to the fullest extent Colorado law allows, our total liability to you for any claim arising from the service is capped at the fee you paid us for the listing concerned, and we are not liable for indirect, incidental, consequential or special damages, lost profits or a lost sale. Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot be limited by law, including for fraud or for death or personal injury caused by negligence.]
21 · Ending things
You can stop using the service at any time and can ask us to close your account. We can suspend or end your access if you breach these terms, if we are required to by law, or if we stop offering the service, and we will tell you why unless the law prevents it. Ending your access does not end the listing agreement you signed with the partner brokerage, does not unwind a contract you have entered, and does not delete your transaction record.
22 · Changes to these terms
If we change these terms we will post the new version here, with its date, and tell account holders by email before it takes effect. A change does not apply to a sale already under contract unless the law requires it. Continuing to use the service after a change takes effect is acceptance of it.
23 · Governing law and disputes
These terms are governed by the law of the State of Colorado. [COUNSEL: venue — draft position is the state and federal courts sitting in Denver, Colorado — and whether to include an arbitration clause, a class-action waiver, or neither. Draft position is neither, pending advice.] If any part of these terms is found unenforceable, the rest still applies. These terms and the privacy policy are the whole agreement between you and us about the service.
24 · Contact
Questions about these terms: [CONTACT EMAIL], or [LEGAL ENTITY NAME], [MAILING ADDRESS]. Last updated: [DATE]. Version: [VERSION].