Frequently Asked Questions

Redfin is the first online real estate brokerage for home-buyers and sellers. Our mission is to use the Internet to give home buyers and sellers more information with less hassle, better service, and new money-saving choices. Our website combines real estate listings with tax records and analytics on an aerial map of cities such as Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Sacramento, San Jose, Seattle and Washington, DC. Customers who are ready to buy a home can save money by using our electronic service to make an offer, with local Redfin agents handling negotiations and closing. We offer a similar service for sellers. In outlying areas where our own agents cannot provide service, we refer customers to partner agents.

From a blog post written by Redfin founder David Eraker: "Back in 2004, when Michael Dougherty and I were choosing a name for Redfin, Michael came up redfin.com and identified that the word was a great empty vessel, short, and an anagram of finder and friend. In contrast, it reminded me of a highly aggressive shark fin. Despite the gap in our word associations, we ended up moving forward and purchasing the domain name."

It's easy! Enter a location such as a city, neighborhood, ZIP code or MLS # in the search bar that appears in the top-left corner of every page on Redfin.com, then click Search Listings. We'll zoom to that location on our map and show you the relevant listings. To filter listings by criteria such as price or square footage, click the search box. This opens a panel of search criteria that you can adjust to filter the properties that Redfin displays on its map. You can also access this panel by clicking the Price, Beds... link to the left of the search box.

Redfin retrieves a maximum of 500 results in one query. If your query returns more than 500 results, you have to reduce the scope of your search result. The scope of your results depends on the area included in the map and the criteria set in the query form. You can narrow the range of your query by filtering on criteria such as minimum number of bedrooms or maximum price, or by zooming in on the map to see a smaller area in detail. As you zoom or pan around the map, Redfin will query its database for new results.

Redfin offers a basic and premium service for home-sellers.. The basic service features personal service from a Redfin agent, pricing analysis, professional photography, a yard sign, flyers, home tours for unrepresented buyers, and an extensive online marketing campaign with measurable results. The premium service adds to that an in-home consultation on pricing and staging, two Redfin-hosted open houses and a postcard-mailing campaign. The basic service costs $5,000 and the premium service costs $7,000, with $750 up-front for both and the rest when the property sells. In a $500,000 home sale, you would usually save $8,000 using our basic service, $10,000 using our premium service. If you buy and sell a home through Redfin, we reduce our fee by an additional $1,000. If you work with a partner agent on a listing in an outlying area, we offer you a refund of 15% of his standard fee, usually worth between $1,000 and $2,000.

Redfin's service for buyers connects you with an agent who represents you from start to finish, explaining the whole home-buying process, exploring what you can afford and where to look, then representing you in offer negotiations and through the closing process. When you're done you get a refund of half our commission, usually a savings of $7,500 or more. You can see as many homes as you like, with no sales pressure. During the negotiations, we work together to get the best possible price. In outlying areas, Redfin cannot serve clients with its own agents, but offers instead to connect clients with a partner agent, who offers a smaller refund: 15% rather than 50% of his commission.

Who are Redfin's Partner Agents?
Redfin partner agents are real estate agents working for traditional brokers who are willing to share data about their performance and refund part of their commission with Redfin clients. We recruit partner agents to serve outlying areas beyond the reach of our own agents.

As a company known for fanatical customer service, we have been careful to choose only the best partner agents:

• We interview each partner agent
• We check at least three customer references
• We ensure that each partner has completed at least 15 transactions in your area

How We Ensure Great Service

More important, every agent must adhere to our principles:

• We publish location and price data for every transaction
• We survey every client, and publish every response
• Our agents earn more when you are satisfied
• We refund 15% of the commission, usually worth $1,000 - $2,000

If you buy a property through one of Redfin's own agents, we refund to you half of the commission that we receive from the seller. The convention in most markets is for the seller to pay 3% of the final price as a commission to the buyer's agent, in which case you would get 1.5% of the purchase price as a refund. We have refunded nearly $100 million in commissions.

Our minimum fee is $5,500, so if the total commission is less than $11,000, we still keep $5,500 and refund to you the rest.

If you buy a home through one of Redfin's partner agents, we refund you 15% rather than 50% of the buyer's agent's fee. The partner agent may provide services that Redfin's own agents do not. The website will always be clear about whether you are requesting service from one of our own agents or one of our partner agents.

My Redfin allows you to mark listings from the map and monitor their status via a My Redfin web pages. You can save personal notes to help you keep track of properties. You can also use saved searches to get daily email updates with new listings that meet your criteria. Redfin sends an email message every morning that includes updates on saved search results. To stop these emails, you can turn off saved-search notification or just click unsubscribe at the bottom of the email notification.

Unfortunately, Long Island, New York MLS rules require that you have a registered Redfin account with a verified email address to be able to view the addresses of all the homes for sale. Registration on our site is free and we'll never spam you. Once you sign up, we'll send you a welcome email with a link to verify your email address. You can then return to your search and see all the addresses.

• There are three ways to get you real estate questions answered:
• Contact one of our Redfin agents: their email address and telephone number are available on their profile pages.
• Take one of our local home-buying classes.
• Visit Redfin Forums, our online message board for real estate do-it-yourselfers.

Nothing. Redfin offers registration only to support personalization, not as a lead-generation mechanism for our business or for our partners. Redfin does not send registrants solicitations from Redfin or its partners, and it does not share registrant details with any third parties. Occasionally, we will send selected users a customer satisfaction survey or ask for opinions on new features; you can opt out of all future surveys by replying to the survey email with REMOVE in the subject line.

To unsubscribe from Redfin Listing Updates either click the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email or follow these steps:

1. Click My Redfin
2. Select Saved Searches.
3. For each saved search, set notifications to "Never."

1. Sign out of Redfin by clicking Sign Out at the top right of the page.
2. Click Forgot your password? below the Password field in the "Already A User?" section.
3. Enter your email address and click "Submit."
4. Check your email for a message with a link to a form that resets your password.

If you'd like to delete your account with Redfin, just send an email to Redfin TechSupport to let us know and we'll make sure your information is erased from our database.

You can change your account's email address, password, forums username, and update your subscriptions to our announcements on your account settings page. If you have any problems, just send an email to Redfin Techsupport and we'll help you out.

David Eraker founded Redfin in October 2002. The company launched its real estate search site for Seattle in October 2004. After years of bootstrap operations, the company raised its first venture capital in September 2005. We first launched our home-buying service in February 2006.

Redfin makes money today in one of three ways:

• When customers make an offer on a home using Redfin, we earn a commission as their broker. We return half of the commission to the customer, and retain one half for our services. Our minimum fee is $5,500. If the seller pays less than $11,000 in commissions, we still take $5,500 as our fee.
• For customers listing their home, Redfin offers sellers two levels of service, basic and premium. Our basic service costs $5,000: $750 in advance, $4,250 at closing. Our premium service costs $7,000: $750 in advance, $6,250 at closing.
• When customers in outlying areas want to work with a partner agent that we've profiled on our site, we earn 30% of that agent's commission for the referral, and refund to you half of that, or 15% of the commission.

We love to hear feedback from our customers, which you can submit through our message boards at Redfin Forums or by emailing us. Executives, agents and product managers monitor both forums and email to understand how we can improve our business. Anyone who sends a solicitation via either method will be ignored.

Redfin has been funded through the investments of our employees, contractors, angel investors and several venture capitalists, including Madrona Venture Group, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Vulcan Capital and Brand Equity Ventures.

Redfin offers our local service in seven states and Washington, DC. The states we serve are California, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Virginia, and Washington. In areas currently beyond the reach of our lead agents, Redfin partners with other high-performing, service-minded real estate agents to expand our ability to bring Redfin's customer service-focused approach to even more areas. In each state, Redfin service is available for the following counties:

In 2009, Redfin is planning to expand to Portland, Phoenix, and Atlanta.

You may receive duplicate listings in your Redfin Listing Updates email if you are receiving updates from more than one saved search. This is because we display the results from each search separately and there may be overlap between your searches.

You may not receive a Redfin Listing Updates email every day because there are no updates for a given day.