Redfin

Redfin

Screenshot of Redfin map browser
Industry	Real estate
Founded	Seattle, Washington, US (2004 (2004))
Headquarters	Seattle, Washington, US
Area served	Atlanta, Austin, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Indianapolis, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Orange County, Phoenix, Portland, Sacramento, San Diego, San Francisco Bay, Seattle, St. Louis, Richmond, Washington, D.C, Cleveland and New Jersey
Key people	Glenn Kelman (CEO) Bridget Frey (CTO) Chris Nielsen (CFO) Scott Nagel (PREO)
Number of employees	214 as of April 2011
Website	www.redfin.com

Redfin is a residential real estate company that provides web-based real estate database and brokerage services. The firm was founded in 2004, and is based in Seattle, Washington. Redfin first launched its home buying and home selling services in 2006. Glenn Kelman is the CEO.

When working with homebuyers, Redfin refunds a portion of their commission, thus offering a rebate and saving commission fees. In Missouri, Oregon, and Tennessee, state law prevents them from offering a refund to homebuyers. Redfin charges a 1.5 percent listing fee for home sellers, which is less than the traditional 3 percent fee.

Redfin employs its agents directly and pays them a salary, departing from the commission-based compensation structure of traditional realtors, and ties bonuses to customer satisfaction. The company's agents are reviewed after every transaction, successful or failed, with all reviews posted on the site under the agent's online profiles.

Redfin was founded in 2004 by David Eraker, Michael Dougherty, and David Selinger. David Eraker, who had dropped out of University of Washington's medical school for a career in software design, was inspired by his own real estate misadventures and founded Redfin with hopes of upending the traditional brokerage model. Unlike the other major real estate web portals (Zillow, Trulia or Realtor.com), which get the majority of their earnings from advertising and lead generation, Redfin operates as a brokerage and makes money when users buy or sell homes with its real estate agents.

Redfin began offering online, map-based real estate search when David Eraker who was working out of his apartment in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood, and his partner, Michael Dougherty, an electrical engineer with a degree from Yale. This was before the introduction of Google Maps or Microsoft's Bing Maps. Redfin combined satellite maps with real estate information, and helped overcome the limitations of online real estate search systems at the time. David Selinger, who had previously led the research and development arm of Amazon's Data Mining and Personalization team joined Redfin as the third founder and the CTO. Selinger helped build Redfin's mapping and real estate data analytics engine.