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Real estate site Redfin files for IPO

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Re: Real estate site Redfin files for IPO

#141

Post by notyourday »

jasode wrote: post #61
ferentchak wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see some of the expertise coming into play on the selling side. Can you give me a few examples of what kinds of value one gets while buying? From what I can tell the main service that my realtor offered when I buying my place was access to the MLS. We found the houses we wanted to look at and he gave us access. Dollars per hour he was doing very well working with me, although I might be an exception.

>Can you give me a few examples of what kinds of value one gets while buying? If a buyer is unfamiliar with the area (e.g. job relocation), a competent agent can point out the desirable & the unpublicized undesirable aspects of particular neighborhoods. The agent knows the area intimately and that knowledge can be worth paying for to avoid buying the wrong house. If I'm living in the same house for 20 years and I see…

> If a buyer is unfamiliar with the area (e.g. job relocation), a competent agent can point out the desirable & the unpublicized undesirable aspects of particular neighborhoods.

This is just utter rubbish. Buyer's agent has absolutely no incentives to publicize undesirable aspects as the agent is still paid half of the commission on the sale price which means that the agent has all the incentives to inflate the price.

But lets pretend that this is the exclusively buyers agent? Well, the thing is - if this buyer's agent is not working for buyers only brokerage he or she is still going to be not on a right side because the brokerage needs cooperation of the sellers agents. In fact, the customer of a buyers agent is seller's agent, NOT the buyer. Even worse, where a buyer can do 2-3 transaction via agent ( unlikely really but possible ) the agents that represent the other side are likely to do dozens of transactions with him or her.

It is even worse for the buyer only brokerages ( they do exist but they are super rare ).

This entire agent industry needs to be destroyed.

Re: Real estate site Redfin files for IPO

#142

Post by harrumph »

eric_the_read wrote: post #130
harrumph wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What marketing plan is going to sell a house in a week? None at market value. Do not agree. Markets are only collections of people, and brokers know people, some of whom are buyers and a few of whom are the perfect buyers. Reaching those people is the marketing plan. Also, this is not buying airplane tickets, this is the single most costly and complicated process buyers and sellers will likely go through in their w…

Depends entirely on your market. A former co-worker sold his father's house for tens (possibly hundreds, I don't want to oversell this, but I can't recall for sure) of thousands of dollars over list in Denver in less than 3 days. If you count closing, it's definitely more than a week, but a contract was signed very quickly.

I hear you -- I'd only say the marketing, showing, offer and acceptance took three days but selling of the house, by any meaningful/legal definition, took much longer.

Re: Real estate site Redfin files for IPO

#143

Post by notyourday »

Balgair wrote: post #104
notadoc wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The entire process is filled with random quagmires OK, but why is that? And how many of those "random quagmires" are coming from realtors? The real estate industry reminds me of the tax preparation industry or car sales in the USA. My opinion is they are all (by design) intentionally annoying, cumbersome, overly complex, overly expensive, and excessively time consuming, seemingly for no reason other than to protect…

They usually come from City Councils, county boards, school levies, HOAs, insurance requirements on page 192.PGP.168, etc. that are changing all the time. Depending on where you are in the US, it really can be that bad very quickly. Ever buy a house? The contract you sign is literally thousands of pages of legalese that may or may not contradict everything else in it. The Real Estate Agents (REAs) give you 'cover' an…

> The contract you sign is literally thousands of pages of legalese that may or may not contradict everything else in it. The Real Estate Agents (REAs) give you 'cover' and smooth out all bumps. Joan knows Frank on XYZ council, therefore you'll never ever catch any flack.

That's why you pay for real estate lawyer to go with you to closing. That's the only person qualified to help you. It is the only person who represents you if you pay them.

Re: Real estate site Redfin files for IPO

#144

Post by te »

zaroth wrote: post #119
existencebox wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We got, unfortunately, MULTIPLE realtors through redfin; some on our own request, some when they simply would disappear from the company/stop answering our emails. There was neither quality nor consistency, and we had marginal ability to impact that choice on our own, whereas with a personal realtor we went with someone highly recommended from work peers. I absolutely agree the individual realtor impacts the experien…

I've never used a buyer's agent and always written into my offers that the 3% buyers agent fee is to go back to the seller (and of course adjust the top-line offer accordingly). I've never tried to buy in SF, but this strategy has always worked for me and saved a lot of money over the years. Frankly I can't understand the purpose of a buyers agent in this era, and taking 3% off the cost of a house is very substantial…

So you reduce the top-line offer by 3%? Or, if your written offer specifies 3% back to you, how does the seller's agent manage to take 4% in contradiction to the offer? Not sure what jurisdiction you're operating in, but I wasn't aware that offers could dictate chagnes to the terms of a pre-existing listing agreement between the seller and their agent. Would love more details on how to effect something like this.

Re: Real estate site Redfin files for IPO

#145

Post by ferentchak »

wavefunction wrote: post #72
ferentchak wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The money from the seller isn't free. For example there is a chance that I could get them to sell the house to me for less than what I am buying it for. If for example the seller met me half way on those fees that's a decent amount off of cash. When I was buying my home the loan person I worked with is family so she helped me more than my realtor. Looked into neighborhoods for me etc. It could be that they were looki…

Yes, your loan person was definitely going far beyond what service any normal customer would receive from their loan person.

I'll make sure and call her and tell her I love her!

Re: Real estate site Redfin files for IPO

#147

Post by jjppott »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #16
notadoc wrote: post #3

I'm still waiting for someone to completely eliminate the realtor and charge a reasonable flat fee ($1000?) to buy/sell a house and handle all the related details. Why do we need realtors at this point? Everyone finds houses themselves online nowadays. Why does anyone need to pay a whopper commission to some middle-man?

"I'm still waiting for someone to completely eliminate the need for a software engineer and charge a reasonable flat fee to bolt together some libraries and handle all the related details. Why do we even need software engineers at this point? Everyone can find the libraries and open source tools they need online nowadays. Why does anyone need to pay a whopper paycheck to some middle-man?" You're paying for someone's…

I generally have a different opinion. I am somewhat in the industry (construction side) and I feel that generally most realtors dont really have much knowledge of what they are selling. Furthermore, it is relatively easy to get a real estate license (at least where I live) and the handful of acquaintances that have gotten their license really dont know more than the average person.

I actually find the lack of knowledge of most realtors very surprising (not that there arent some really good ones out there). When we were working with one to find a home, we would walk into a place and our realtor would look through the listing sheet and be like "oooh they supposedly have a good quality insulation in their walls", I would then need to explain to him what an R value means and that no they truly didnt have good insulation and what they were using as a marketing point was in fact the minimum required by code. I would then point out a few other items (jump ducts, hollow core doors, etc) that would make me feel like I was walking into a Habitat for Humanity type of home, not a $600,000+ residence.

Buying a home is the largest single investment people are likely to make in their lifetime and they have almost 0 knowledge about what they are buying and do almost no research into it other than the location. They then rely on input from someone regarding what they are buying that has very little additional information other than comparable sales and "knowledge" of the market. I wrote a business plan a little while around this, but never took past just putting some ideas on paper.

Re: Real estate site Redfin files for IPO

#148

Post by jxi »

existencebox wrote: post #92
bkjelden wrote: post #12

I hope this company sees nothing but success. I bought my house through Redfin last year, and not only did I save ~$5k in commissions compared to a conventional realtor, I also felt the process was much smoother and more pleasant than other times I've interacted with a conventional realtor. It's simply absurd that in an era where any buyer can view photos of a house for sale online real estate agents still expect to…

Let me offer a different viewpoint. Redfin absolutely serves a purpose, but in some markets, notably for my case very hot markets, it's a significant impediment. I really wanted redfin to work, shopping in seattle 2 years ago. I tried for almost a year, but they would consistently be not as contactable or prompt as we wanted, and gave us very erroneous advice when it came to crafting offers on some houses we wanted.…

I don't think this is really Redfin's fault. You just got a bad agent through them. Were they an official Redfin agent or one of the affiliate ones? Also, I bought a house through Redfin in Seattle 5 years ago, and that agent was one of the most responsive people I've ever worked with. He even bought me a really nice gift basket when I closed.

Re: Real estate site Redfin files for IPO

#149

Post by existencebox »

IshKebab wrote: post #131
aetherson wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bought a house in SF three years ago through Redfin. The realtor that Redfin gave us was prompt, aggressive, and thorough in the bidding/closing process. What he didn't do is drive us around to open houses or suggest places to us. Which we didn't want anyway. I suspect that the individual realtor you get through Redfin has a big impact on your experience with the site. It sounds like you got a bad one and were unha…

This is really confusing. I just bought a house in the UK, and the process is as follows: 1. Look for house on Rightmove or Zoopla. 2. Call the estate agent or private seller to arrange a viewing. 3. Show up at the appropriate time. Look at house. 4. Make an offer. Offer gets accepted/rejected/they want more. Repeat until you get it or get outbid or give up. 5. Offer agreed (hopefully). Now do all the actual buying t…

I can only speak of hot markets in America, which are VERY different than many others, but at least within that:

A "reasonable" house goes on the market. ("reasonable" defined by A real estate agent helped me in multiple steps of the above.

- Having an offer ready ahead of time with lots of contingencies/tradeoffs well understood so we could tune it quickly and get it out and under the wire.

- Knowing how and where to look for houses before listing, IMMEDIATELY after listing, and that may have been listed ages ago/at bad prices.

- Able to get us contacts with the sellers if an open house time won't work/if we need to ask questions.

- When our BOA agent left us high and dry, he hooked us up with a trusted local lender with a good reputation and used his prior working relationship with her to get our file pushed through in a ridiculous timeline over a weekend so that we could put in a competing bid. (as I said, timelines are nutso)

- Gave us advice on what parts of our offer would have what impact, to what sellers. e.g. 5k vs 3k vs 10k escalation steps? What other caveats? Should compromise on preinspection? etc.

- If anything went wrong, if we had followup questions, needed contacts, he would be extremely accessible, would give us contiguous care (and thus knew what our preferences were, what we were looking for, what offers we were comfortable with/what our finances were) which saved time in rehashing that every few weeks with a new agent; and given that you WILL lose most of the offers you make, this process can go on a very long time so continuity is nice. (we were on the market 1-2 years)

Re: Real estate site Redfin files for IPO

#150

Post by totalrobe »

existencebox wrote: post #92
bkjelden wrote: post #12

I hope this company sees nothing but success. I bought my house through Redfin last year, and not only did I save ~$5k in commissions compared to a conventional realtor, I also felt the process was much smoother and more pleasant than other times I've interacted with a conventional realtor. It's simply absurd that in an era where any buyer can view photos of a house for sale online real estate agents still expect to…

Let me offer a different viewpoint. Redfin absolutely serves a purpose, but in some markets, notably for my case very hot markets, it's a significant impediment. I really wanted redfin to work, shopping in seattle 2 years ago. I tried for almost a year, but they would consistently be not as contactable or prompt as we wanted, and gave us very erroneous advice when it came to crafting offers on some houses we wanted.…

I had a similar experience, although I caught on very quickly that the Redfin process was not going to work for me.

We were first time home buyers relocating and were looking for a house in a new area. Wife and I looked for months online and actually found a house on Redfin. Contacted them to put in an offer and I get back "well, why don't you schedule some time to come down and look at some houses". On top of that, the guy I actually spoke to was a remotely located coordinator that knew nothing about the area, and said we would be handed off to someone else local once we actually scheduled a viewing. Here I am wanting to put in an offer now and there was zero sense of urgency. In a hot market, I'm going to pay a little bit extra to be able to actually get the house we want.

I called a local traditional agent and we got an offer in the same day.

Another coworker that relocated had the same experience; tried Redfin, agent didn't even show, got a traditional local agent and closed quickly.

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