RBN Rewards used to have a partnership with American Express. If you used an RBN agent to buy your house, you’d earn 1 Membership Rewards point for every $1 of the purchase price. Buy a million dollar house? You’d earn a million Membership Rewards points.
At some point that partnership ended, but a new one has sprung up in its place. You can now earn Virgin Atlantic or Virgin Red points with RBN Rewards, although the earning rate is only half as good as in the past.
With this new partnership, you’ll earn one RBN Rewards point for every $2 spent on a home purchase. Those points can then be transferred to Virgin Atlantic Flying Club or Virgin Red on a 1:1 basis. That means that if you buy, say, a $250,000 property, you’ll earn 125,000 Virgin points. There’s no cap on how many points you earn which is particularly good news for those buying more expensive properties.
This is a potentially great deal provided a) you get decent service from the RBN agent and b) the commission rate you negotiate isn’t substantially higher than the rate you’d have paid by going with a different agent. For what it’s worth, we first learned about RBN’s past partnership with Amex by a comment from Lee on this post. They mentioned that their friend had used RBN and it didn’t work out, so YMMV. To be fair, that kind of situation can happen with any kind of company you use, but I’ve not heard anything else either way regarding the quality of RBN agents. It’s therefore up to you to decide if you’d like to risk it with an RBN agent you don’t know in order to earn Virgin points or go with an agent you do know (if you actually know one in the first place).
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I tried using RBN awhile ago, but after filling out a questionnaire they said there were no agents nearby. That was very surprising to me as I live in a top ten metro. I did have to list the budget of the houses I was looking for, and I wonder if their agents don’t take people under a certain budget threshold.
A friend tried to use them and the same thing happened. No agents in the area. (Population 600k)
I used RBN to sell two houses and it worked out very well for me getting Amex points. The agent was decent, too!
How did you get points selling the houses? The post only mentions points when purchasing a house…?
This was in 2023 when Amex and RBN were affiliated and you could sell or buy and get Amex points 1:1.