An Update to Redfin’s Values

Dear Redfin,

As promised at Redferno, Redfin is updating our values for the first time in 15 years. Many of our values are unchanged: to do the right thing, to put the customer first, to change the game, to treat everyone with respect, to never say “I.” What’s new is our emphasis on profits and performance. Here are the values new and old, side by side:

The Same Mission: Redfin is Real Estate Redefined in Consumers’ Favor 

This email reviews the key changes to our values, but we should note first that our mission is unchanged. That mission, to redefine real estate in consumers’ favor, is stronger than ever! The primary way we want to make the world better isn’t via occasional acts of corporate philanthropy or activism, but through our daily work to make housing more accessible, affordable, sustainable and fair.

That Mission is More Important Than Ever

People who lose half the equity in their home every time they move should pay lower fees. Families whose whole lives are in transition need someone completely on their side. When we overturn industry efforts to control the information about a home for sale, everyone can have a shot at buying it, and everyone can make better decisions about what it’s worth. 

Our Goal: Values We Can Use to Make Decisions

But now let’s discuss the values update, highlighting the new values and how we think about each. Redfin’s improving profitability is one rationale for this update, but mostly it’s a reframing of what our values are for: not just an expression of what we care about, but also a basis for decisions we make about employees. When our chief human resources officer, Anna Stevens, set about to develop a consistent, Redfin-wide approach to performance reviews and hiring decisions, her starting point was our values.

Our Values Can’t Just Be Aspirational; They Have to Be Useful

I’ve revered those values as if they were Grandma’s fine china, but Anna wanted to eat off them every day. And she didn’t understand how we could use our values to decide whom to hire, fire, reward or promote if the values didn’t mention results. Our goal with this update is to make Redfin values-driven where it really counts: when we make decisions that affect your career.

Putting Customers First: Results, Not Just Priorities

We’ve always made those decisions based on results; we just never said so in our values. This is why, when the new values talk about putting the customer first, it isn’t just an ethical imperative to prioritize the customer’s needs above our own. It’s now also a referendum on our performance: beyond good intentions, did our software or our service actually create a competitive advantage for our customer?

Creating a Competitive Advantage for Our Customers, Not Just Ourselves

Since housing is the only form of commerce in which customers routinely compete with one another, we have to be able to imagine that, but for a Redfin employee, a customer might not have won her dream home. Whether as an agent, a coordinator, a lender, a title specialist, a designer or an engineer, if you work your whole career here without ever having had that impact, it gets harder to conclude you were a success.*

Finding a Way to Win: An Entrepreneurial Brokerage

Getting results for our customers depends on a cultural transformation championed by our brokerage leader, Jason Aleem, to imagine every agent as an entrepreneur. In Redfin’s first decade, we created a system based on software and training for selling a home. But what’s even more important than the system are the people in the system, who have to find a way for our customers to win.

We Judge One Another on What You Get Done, Not How

There’s a reason real estate is the most entrepreneurial industry in America: every home and every sale are different. Instead of telling you as employees how to do your jobs, we want to set you free, judging you on results rather than effort, so long as the way we get the result is honorable. We added a new value, find a way to win, to express the entrepreneurialism that Jason has brought to Redfin.

To Broaden Decision-Making, Broaden Responsibility for Profits

This entrepreneurialism is crucial to our profitability. In Redfin’s early days, most of our business ideas ran through a handful of execs, who were responsible for deciding which ideas would pay off. But now we’ve grown to the point where many of us make decisions about how we spend our time and money, and anyone making those decisions has to have the same understanding of which ones are profitable. This broad responsibility for profits is why profits is now a company-wide value.

An Instinct for What Will Make a Difference

Contributing to our profits doesn’t require a degree in finance, since the costs and benefits of most bets are too speculative to be calculated in a spreadsheet; what’s more important is knowing what customers will pay for, and which efficiency gains would benefit Redfin the most. This value is equal in importance to our mission, because it funds our mission. As anyone who has been involved with a cause knows, what limits the reach of almost any mission is its ability to sustain its own growth.

Culture of Dissent, Bias for Action

And then to be profitable, we have to be fast and frugal. That is why this values update also codifies our culture of dissent, to make sure it includes a bias for action. A culture of dissent never appeared in our original values, but it has been often cited since as core to our culture. Redfin has been founded and run by contrarians, and so as we grow, we continually have to make room for contrarians, to explore unpopular ideas and to speak truth to power. I often find myself trying to make sure that the restless, obnoxious punk I once was could thrive at the company I now run.

Identify Solutions, Not Just Problems

But that punk also has to grow up. As important as it is to identify a problem no one wants to talk about, we can’t stop there. Talking about a problem without proposing a solution is just complaining. Dissent without action is paralysis and despair. The best way to solve a problem is to unite behind a decision, even when it’s controversial.

United Behind the Solution

As important as it is to give everyone a voice, we also have to make it easy for a leader to choose a course of action, and clear the way for her tiny team to get the job done. Often when I’m answering questions at an all-hands meeting, I feel like the first half of our culture of dissent has worked better than the second, which is a bias for action. We can do both!

Heart & Soul We meet customers after the death of a parent or the birth of a child, at the beginning or end of a relationship or a career, giving them safe passage to a new life. The energy to do all this can only come from joy and love. Like any job, Redfin can be a grind. But the people of Redfin are full of love.

Heart and Soul, After Three Layoffs

The final addition to our values is about heart and soul. After three layoffs in ten months, I wondered if leaving out the gooey part was the only honest thing to do. It has always seemed obscene for a CEO to talk about her company as a family when firing people is part of her job. Redfin is a business, not a family, but it can still be a caring business. As I’ve written before, we could become cynical after a layoff and stop trying to care altogether, or even more cynical and say we only pretended to try.

Our Caring Culture Has Somehow Endured

But those of us still here are united by a now-ancient belief that what’s smaller can become bigger, that the only thing more inevitable than love’s failures are its triumphs. I couldn’t update our values without accounting for these facts: 

• Our caring culture didn’t come from me. 

• It has been the fundamental way the job has changed me. 

• After all these years I’m still surprised by it; after all our setbacks, I can’t believe it’s still alive. 

BUT IT IS. Every time we talked to employees about different proposals to update these values, that last heart-and-soul value was the one that everyone said we couldn’t leave out.  

Thank You And What’s Next

Many thanks to the folks in human resources and the 50+ employees across the company who contributed to this update to our values, especially Arin Bryan. You made it a reflection of all of us, not just me. Stay tuned for updates to our awards programs, promotion criteria and performance reviews, and as always you can call, text or email me with any questions or comments! We’ll talk more about the values update in Wednesday’s all-hands meeting, and we’ll also post this message to our blog.

Best, Glenn

* One note on creating a competitive advantage for our customers, for the people who don’t directly serve our customers. Many employees at Redfin, including me, work in roles supporting other employees. We have to be just as resourceful and results-driven in our work. Our goal is to make a difference to our customers, even if that customer is an employee, even if we can’t always calculate its impact on Redfin’s ultimate customer.