With Redfin in the news with the company being featured on 60 minutes last night, I figured I would share my experience. Last fall, I bought my current house using Redfin in large part because of the comission rebate after having played with their site for the prior year as my wife and I considered a re-model vs. buy a new house debate. (Ed. note – redfin’s website for tracking homes for sale is by far the best site i used – the visualization of homes for sale and comparable historical data kicks butt).
Here’s the rub: works as promised – you get 2% back as a cash rebate. Unfortunately mortgage companies won’t let you apply the rebate against the purchase price, but you could always apply against the mortgage after closing. We got a dedicated agent – Kelly Engel – who was available by phone or email as much as we needed her. Kelly was knowledgable and professional and compared at least on phone to any other agent i’ve dealt with (can’t compare to in person as we never met face to face). Redfin has a separate field agent who represents you at walk throughs, inspections, etc. Now we knew the house we wanted so can’t say if Redfin can help with you that but I guess that’s what the website is for. Great value on the buy side – can’t imagine why anyone would not use Redfin.
Now on the sales side, my wife and I decided to use a traditional agent. From my perspective, the Redfin sales side is really meant to appeal to someone who is a DIY’er or has a house that want need much of a push to sell – neither of these were us. I bet our decision seems odd given who enthusiastically I just endorsed Redfin on the buy side, but our house we expected to need some real local pricing knowledge and aggresive marketing because it had a lot of quirks (old house, unusual layout, need for upgrades from new residents, etc.). We did try and negotiate the commission to no avail in case you are wondering. Our agent did put in a lot of work – personally visiting every comparable house that went on the market in the three months leading up to our listing, helping us determine appropriate pre-sale fixes and repairs, staging help as well as promoting the sale aggresively to local real estate agents. The house sold for the asking price in a slightly softer market (Seattle’s is still decent but not what it was a year or two ago) in literally 27 days from listing to sale (folks in Las Vegas and Miami will cry when they read how fast our sale was). Did we get fair value from our agent? In this case most likely. For our current house which was new construction would we use redfin or traditional agent? We’d likely use redfin as it lacks the quirks and should be able to sell itself.
