Allie's 1-Star Reviews

Allie was too busy to be able to give us good service. Here is what happened in our situation. In the process of negotiating, Allie called and left me a voicemail telling me what the counteroffer was and that I should respond asap b/c our deal was through a relocation compamy that was located on the east coast that closed at 2 PM our time and that Allie wanted to get back to them asap. I got back to her by the time she asked me to and got her voicemail saying she was in a meeting for the rest of the day and would be returning calls in the evening or the next day. That was frustrating b/c I rushed to get her what she needed at her request, and she wasn't available when she said she would be. Also, when we originally scheduled the inspection--10 days before we had mutual acceptance (b/c we needed to make sure it would be at a time that we could attend), we told Allie when it was. A day or two before the inspection she had someone from Redfin call our inspector to change the time from 10 AM to 2 PM. He couldn't do it at the later time. (And neither could we, but Redfin didn't ask us.) After finding out that they tried to change the time and that they might have to cancel it b/c they couldn't find someone to be at the house to let the inspector in, we called the listing agent and asked him if he could do it and told Redfin that we had asked him directly. Redfin then found someone who could do it, and asked how long it would take. I told Allie that the inspector had done a few inspections for us, was very thorough, and had estimated that it would take 4-5 hours. Allie thought it shouldn't take that long. It seemed that she wanted it to be shorter, but I told Allie that in my experience (two previous inspections) with this guy that was how long it was likely to take. In the end, Redfin had Dorcas come and she was pleasant and helpful and stayed the whole time, but we didn't know until the night before whether or not someone would be there to let him in. It was stressful for us b/c we have a professional relationship with this inspector, and I was afraid that I would have to cancel on him at the last minute. After we got mutual acceptance, Dorcas sent us an email with important dates and timelines. I was told the dates and timelines were calculated by Allie, our agent. The date for the deposit of our earnest money was wrong, and it took me a few phone calls, emails, and conversations with people to sort it out. One of those calls was to her assistant Corey b/c Allie was in meetings for two days in a row and couldn't be reached. He returned my call and said that I shouldn't worry about the due date for the deposit of the earnest money because he has rarely seen a deal fall through b/c the earnest money was late. I was shocked by that response. It's not professional. And the deal may not have falled through b/c our earnest money was late, but it was our money and it is not always easy to get earnest money returned if the deal doesn't go through. I had every right to expect Redfin to propoerly calculate that date and look it up for me to verify it if I thought it was incorrect. I asked Dorcas to find someone to look it up on our contract and figure it out and call us back. Dorcas, again, came through for us and clarified it. (It was incorrectly calculated by Allie.) We had our inspection on Saturday 9/12. We got our report that night and forwarded it to Allie on Sunday night asking for her advice on what to get secondary inspections on and what we could reasonably ask the sellers to give us money off for. She emailed on Monday morning saying we should talk later in the week about it. We kept calling and emailing her asking for advice, but she was in meetings all day Monday and Tuesday and didn't get back to us. She didn't get back to us until Thursday, 9/17 and then only did after we had talked to Dorcas and her boss and asked them to have her call us back. We had until Friday 9/18 to respond to the sellers about the inspection, and if we hadn't gone ahead on our own and asked a contractor to come in and inspect everything listed in the inspector's report and give us quotes for it, we wouldn't have had time to do it after hearing back from Allie! We were looking for advice from Allie and didn't get it soon enough to act on it. After complaining to Allie's boss about our experience with her, her boss said that Redfin was growing quickly and didn't have enough employees to properly handle the client load. We experienced that. In the end we got the house and a refund of 1.5%, so it worked out. And because there are so few competitors offering 1.5% back on the purchase of a home, it is likely we would use Redfin again if the situation were the same. That said, it was not an easy or pleasant experience, overall.

Our overall experience with Redfin was extremely poor from a customer service perspective. They did ultimately help us to close the deal and were quick with the refund, however there were MANY gaps in the overall experience and would never recommend using this service. Twice Allie never responded to an email and multiple times was slow to respond to email. There were multiple times she was not accessible by phone and again sometimes slow to respond. During the entire process, there was an overwhelming feeling of not knowing what is going on. We felt more like she was doing a some sort of favor rather then we were paying her for service. I was never even told that there were be yet another person to close the deal (Corey). We kept getting passed from person to person which left such an inpersonable experience. The amount of unneccesary stress we had due to not knowing what our status was in addition to the consistent amount of documents that we had to keep signing was far beyond what we expected. This really left a bad feeling with us.