Dan Galloway, 24, decided to become an agent in the Washington, D.C., area after he graduated from college. He and his partner bought a home in 2014, using an agent from Redfin, and the process made him decide to get into the business. He took a course with Redfin, which helped him learn the craft. He said the recent, epic housing crash didn’t deter him.
“It’s something that I had been considering for a long time. I like the entrepreneurial aspect of it. That’s something I think my generation has, a very entrepreneurial spirit. With the new way the economy works, you really have to go out and make your own way,” said Galloway.
Dont care about Redfin anymore…Dont have to be nice to Glen anymore…Always thought they were out of touch with real world, stuck in Seattle. …funny how the Seattle forum was so weak…If Redfin had its headquarters in the BA it would have done better…Zillow is eating their lunch…
Zillow isn’t even the same type of company though. Zillow isn’t a brokerage. They are just another website that make money of advertising. Redfin makes it’s money of representing buyers/sellers in transactions. They compete with ReMax, Century 21, etc.
Redfin says they are a tech company…The money is in internt ads not brokerage…Redfin makes no money…they keep having down rounds…they spend all their money on marketing. …Zillow is sucking marketing money out of sucker realtors. .much better business model.
Redfin is trying too hard to be a tech company. Their CEO appeared in recruitment ads for programmers but not real estate agents. That’s just screwed up priority IMO. So after 10+ years in the market they still have a tiny fraction of the market. In the mean time other brokerages zoomed past them, most notably Pacific Union and Deleon.
Their agent pay structure is just not competitive to retain the star agents. Real estate transactions is still a low volume, human-to-human kind of affair. Good tech helps, but only up to a point. It still falls on the agents to negotiate, to find deals, to guide clients etc etc.
So if you became a successful agent, why would you stay in Redfin? If you bring to your license to another brokerage you can easily double or triple your pay, overnight.
I’m not convinced that the pay is not sufficient to retain good agents. I don’t want to get into details, but I do know at least one agent who left and returned. There’s something nice about getting a salary (plus bonuses), and they do indeed have a high volume. Sometimes too much volume writing offers for the agents to handle. What they’re doing makes a lot of sense, but it’s true that DeLeon focusses on advertising–at bus stops, in Atherton on a major routes. Redfin would really benefit from some of the same.
I think Pacific Union dominates the SF market, at least the higher end, and Deleon does the same in Peninsula.
What I have seen so far is that, Redfin is slowly getting some market share in the low end. In SF they still have a super tiny share, and most of those listings are <1M. Because commission is a fixed percentage of price, I don’t know how their cashflow can sustain their big, expensive tech staff, and pay a good salary to their agents.
My redfin agent left. He’s on his own now with Keller-Williams. I’m on his mailing list. He was top 100 in the nation last year. I’m sure he’s making more now. He also matches the cash back redfin does. I’d use him over redfin.
The one thing I really like about redfin was being able to schedule tours online. The downside was they weren’t great about telling you if properties weren’t available at your desired time. I showed up thinking I was going to look at 5, and we’d look at 3.
Is this a valid business model: have a Uber-style agent open-door service. You pay that agent a small fee, maybe $25 a house? Or just a lump sum $200 all-you-can-see within a 2 hours window. You then ask the listing agent to double dip on your behalf.
There are different reasons: other agent didn’t respond, time didn’t work for the owner, property has tenant and is only shown at open house, etc.
That’d be an interesting model. I think that’s sort of how redfin works. The agents showing you the home have a real estate license, but they have usually just passed the exam… However, once you go to write an offer you work with a more experienced agent. That way the grunt work is down by lower paid staff. It’s similar to some realtors hire assistants to hold the open house for them.
Was that for just 1? I was trying to look at multiple during my lunch. I’d show up and learn we weren’t going to see them all. That was back in 2010 though. Maybe it’s gotten better since then.
No, I might book 1-4 (never generally had 6) and specifically note the ones I REALLY needed to see, and they would generally tell me if we could or couldn’t see those, and then if they were calling me anyways, they’d tell me whether the others were tenant occupied or if they didn’t need to get permission. This was in 2012-2013, and I agree that as time went on, communication improved.
Real estate is local…I have always hated big national brokerages, like CB, the evil Empire,Deleon was a wunderkind at the right place at the right time…Redfin never understood the local BA market…Deleon is hands on, goes to the open houses, talks to everyone, makes his own welcome door mats…old fashioned style real estate marketing in the tech epi center…made more money than any RE individual in the country…
DeLeon acts like selling a house is a party. I’ve gone to DeLeon open houses just for the latte’s, and brought a friend. Of course that only works if you only take the top 25% of the houses around. But it works.