Redfin Upgrades Listing Service, Supports Short Sales

SEATTLE, March 25 /PRNewswire/ -- Redfin today launched a major upgrade to its listing service, with in-home listing consultations, online systems for capturing tour feedback and monitoring web traffic, and hosted open houses and private tours. In select markets, the company is also supporting short sales for the first time in two years. Separately today, the company announced its expansion into Phoenix.

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The new service replaces two offerings for home-sellers, one priced at $5,000 and the other at $7,000, with $750 of that amount charged up front. The fee for the new service is 1.5% of the home price, half the fee typically charged by a traditional listing agent, with a $5,500 minimum and no up-front charge. Redfin structured the pricing to match what it already charges Redfin's home-buyers, which is also usually half the commission. As always, Redfin pays its agents a bonus that varies based on customer satisfaction, not on the price of the house.

Local Service, Personal Accountability

The new offering is part of an increasing emphasis on personal service. After organizing its agents into local teams last December, Redfin focused the listing-service upgrade on giving customers complete personal accountability from a local Redfin agent. Supported by her team, one agent now handles pricing, tours, open houses, local marketing, weekly updates and negotiations.

That agent reviews the property in person, to see what needs to be done to improve its appeal, and to develop an opinion on pricing. Each agent has a network of stagers, gardeners and handymen to spruce up a property before putting it on the market.

As before, Redfin hires professional photographers at our own cost to increase the listing's online allure. In place of the generic Redfin yard sign, the company is rolling out a new yard sign featuring the direct contact details of the local Redfin agent. To complement the sign, Redfin now prints and delivers flyers to each listing customer.

Online Feedback Systems Track the Competition

Redfin pairs this new level of personal service with proprietary online tools, including a private website for monitoring the volume and origin of online visits to the listings, so the customer immediately knows when buyers have shifted their attentions elsewhere.

Redfin also uses online systems to solicit any agent hosting tours for his buyers' feedback on the property's condition and pricing, which is then delivered by email directly to the customer, allowing the customer to know if pricing is off or if a room is showing poorly. Beyond the brokerage sites that draw directly on Multiple Listing Service data, Redfin promotes the listing on 30+ websites, including Realtor.com, Craigslist, Trulia and Zillow.com, for maximum online exposure.

Existing Redfin listing clients will get the service upgrade at no additional cost.

"Because we've built a website for home-buyers, our brokerage business has overwhelmingly focused on home-buyers," said Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman. "Now we're trying to change that, first by using the local teams we put together last winter to deliver a higher level of personal service. And second by developing online tools so our customers always know how their properties are competing in the market. Long-term, the reason people are going to list with us isn't just because of our online presence, but because we have the best local agents. We're finally getting to the size where we can be local in many of the markets we serve."

Redfin Now Supports Short Sales in Many Markets

In addition to upgrading its listing product, Redfin is now offering support for short sales, which are properties whose sale depends on bank approval because the price is lower than the mortgage amount.

In Seattle, Portland, the Bay Area, Sacramento, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Phoenix, customers can now tour short sales via Redfin field agents. The tours, which can be scheduled in the regular way via Redfin's website, entail no cost to the customer and no obligation. Other Redfin markets plan to support short-sale tours in the next three months, depending on when Redfin can hire enough field agents to satisfy the anticipated demand.

But even in markets now touring short sales, Redfin's own agents still do not handle most offers on short-sale properties. Instead, Redfin refers these offers to agents in our partner program. Redfin screens partner agents to ensure each has at least 15 successful transactions, and it surveys each of the partner's recent customers, publishing the results to our website. As is standard for all partner-brokered deals, the savings on a short-sale transaction is 15% of the commission.

About Redfin

Redfin (www.redfin.com) is the real estate industry's first online brokerage, combining a customer-focused team of real estate agents with online tools for making the process of buying or selling a home easy. Redfin's agents handle every facet of a transaction, including tours, pricing analyses, negotiations, inspections and closings. Redfin is the only major search site to feature listings direct from broker databases as well as for-sale-by-owner and foreclosure properties from across the Internet. The company pays its agents customer-satisfaction bonuses, not commissions, and surveys every client, publishing each survey alongside the agent's complete deal history. Redfin's service is available in the metropolitan areas of Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Seattle, Phoenix, Portland, Washington DC, Baltimore, New York's Long Island and Westchester County as well as most of California, including the San Francisco Bay Area, Southern California and Sacramento. To keep track of our daring exploits, subscribe to blog.redfin.com or our Twitter feed @redfin.

SOURCE Redfin