I’ve been lurking on Redfin for quite some time now. What is Redfin? It’s an online real estate company with an easy-to-use website that lets you search/filter/find real estate for sale. It also provides some cool analytics for looking at market trends. It’s nice and web2.0-like, what with custom RSS feeds and other pretty robust tools to make your real estate hunting super easy.
But that’s only part 1 of what they do. They’re also a discount brokerage firm that provides the full service you’d expect from a good agent representing you during a home purchase. The difference being that Redfin refunds you half of the buy-side real estate fee after closing. In our case, that’s going to be a check for $5,500.
We’ve been working with a Redfin agent for over a week now and have been pretty impressed. She did an excellent job representing us through the back-and-forth negotiation process as well as constantly keeping us up-to-date on which forms were needing to be signed by when, etc.
And now… we will be home owners in August! It’s hard to say how this whole ordeal might have gone down without Redfin. Oh wait, actually it’s pretty easy to say:
It would have been more difficult to find the place / compare it to market trends. It would have likely cost $5,500 more. And last but certainly not least, it would have not come with this kind of service (love the quick turnarounds with iPhone email responses during off hours).
For more info on Redfin, see TechCrunch’s extensive coverage.
Congrats! We just bought a house with Redfin too – closing tomorrow. It's pretty amazing.
Congrats! We just bought a house with Redfin too – closing tomorrow. It's pretty amazing.