Redfin

Redfin was founded in October 2004 in Seattle by David Eraker, Michael Dougherty, and David Selinger as a map-based real estate search site. Eraker had left medical school at the University of Washington for software design; Dougherty held electrical engineering and international studies degrees from Yale; Selinger, a Stanford alumnus who had led R&D for Amazon's data mining and personalization team, joined as the third co-founder and first CTO, building Redfin's mapping and analytics engine. In September 2005 the founders brought in Glenn Kelman, a co-founder of enterprise-portal company Plumtree Software, as CEO — a role he held for over 20 years. Redfin launched home-buying and -selling services in Seattle and the Bay Area in 2006 and expanded through the late 2000s to Southern California, Boston, Baltimore, and Washington D.C., built around flat-fee seller pricing and commission refunds for buyers that undercut traditional brokerages.

Redfin raised roughly $167.5 million in preferred equity across Series A through G rounds between 2004 and December 2014, from investors including Madrona Venture Group (Series A; Paul Goodrich board seat from 2005), Greylock Partners (Series D; James Slavet board seat from November 2009), Globespan Capital Partners (Series E; Andrew Goldfarb board seat from 2013), Vulcan Capital, Tiger Global, T. Rowe Price, DFJ, Glynn Capital, and Annox Capital (Robert Mylod). In 2011 Redfin briefly published agent sales-history performance data, later discontinued after data-accuracy criticism. Product innovation continued with the Redfin Estimate automated valuation tool and Book It Now on-demand touring (2015), and in June 2017 the company piloted RedfinNow, an iBuying (home-flipping) division, entering direct competition with Opendoor and Zillow Offers.

Redfin went public on the Nasdaq Global Select Market (ticker RDFN) on July 28, 2017, raising $138 million and pricing at a valuation of roughly $1.73 billion; shares surged more than 44% on debut, with Kelman famously calling Redfin "the Apple of real estate." As a public company Redfin diversified aggressively: acquiring Walk Score (2014, pre-IPO), then RentPath (rentals listings — announced at ~$690M in February 2021, completed for ~$608M in April 2021, forming what became Rent.) and Bay Equity Home Loans (mortgage lending, $137.8 million, April 2022) to build a vertically integrated "one-stop shop" spanning search, brokerage, rentals, mortgage, and title (Title Forward). It also partnered with Opendoor (2019) to route iBuying offers to Redfin site visitors, and in 2019 let buyers submit offers directly to Redfin's own listing agents without a buyer's agent.

Business model

Full-service, technology-enabled real estate brokerage. Employs salaried/bonus-based (not pure-commission independent-contractor) real estate agents ("lead agents"); also operates a mortgage lending arm (formerly Bay Equity, integrated into Rocket Mortgage post-acquisition), title/settlement services (Title Forward), and, until a 2025 exit, rentals listings (RentPath/Rent.).

Real estate brokerage commissions (buy-side and sell-side) net of commission refunds, partner-referral fees from non-Redfin agents, mortgage origination revenue, title/settlement fees, and (through Feb 2025) rentals advertising revenue; since Feb 2025 receives a fixed fee from Zillow as exclusive multifamily rental-listings partner instead of direct rentals ad revenue.