Reply to How many years until realtors are replaced by Redfin/Uber/Zillow/etc?

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Reply to "How many years until realtors are replaced by Redfin/Uber/Zillow/etc?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Redfin agent here. The whole goal of Redfin is to put the consumer's best interest first. Yes we refund part of the broker's commission and agents are paid a salary but the bulk of our pay comes from bonuses that are directly influenced by customer's responses to a one question survey after closing, if a customer is unsatisfied or even just marginally satisfied it has a huge impact on our pay. We are also paid to tour with our clients which is meant to make our clients never feel like they can't reach out to us, that and it seem to curtail much of the pressure to sell sell sell. The average Redfin agent in California is closing on average about 36 deals a year, top agents are around 60, anywhere between 3-9 times many as the average agent depending on what numbers you look at which completely shatters the argument our competing traditional agents try to argue which is that we are not experienced. A lot of these "old boys club" types sell their 6 properties a year and have been doing it for 20 years, a Redfin agent is hitting the same number in roughly 3 years. I always use the analogy of that surgeon who is a couple years away from retiring, been doing it for 30 years and uses the same techniques as when Eisenhower was President once every other month compared to the guy using the lasers and robot arms doing a surgery every week who doesn't have the shakes. We have to be far more efficient because we are doing far more business. Our agents also specialize in either the buy side or listing side, so while traditional agent X closed 4 buy side transactions and 2 listings a Redfin agent closed 30 buy side transactions, furthering the gap between the two models. An independent survey shows that we score 22 points higher than traditional agents in customer satisfaction. Our list side charges 4% commission compared to the 5-6% through much of the country. Our listings get twice as many views as listings with other brokerages on the internet which many of you have argued is why you don't need an agent, well if one agent could give you twice the views on your home would you use them? Our website gets it's information directly from local MLS services and updates every 15 minutes, the only other site that can make this claim is realtor.com.

There's a few reasons we've been slow to grow, for one we simply did not cover much of the country until fairly recently, we now cover somewhere north of 80% of the US population, name recognition and public education of our product is by far our biggest hurdle. Secondly, we have done almost no marketing or advertising of any kind, the instances when we did we couldn't keep up with demand. We've stuck to social media, word of mouth and constantly working on the website making it as attractive as possible as a search option for consumers, the website probably accounts for 90%+ of all of our business if I had to guess. Third, we still get a lot of push back from traditional agents, they like to brand us as a discount brokerage which connotes that we are not a full service brokerage. Not only is that not true I feel that we offer way more services and also better technology compared to the traditional brokerage all the while giving the client back some money. Reason enough for a traditional agent to trash Redfin. Hell my own father who has been a traditional agent for 25+ years almost disowned me when he heard I went to work for Redfin.

I'd be happy to answer any other questions. [/quote]

What happened to David Le?[/quote]

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