Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today, we are
opening up a file that I think a lot of us have
a, well, a deeply personal, almost addictive
connection to. Even if we don't fully understand
the massive business machinery grinding away
behind the scenes. Oh, yeah. We are talking about
Redfin. It is absolutely a household name. In
fact, for a certain demographic, it's practically
a hobby. It really is a hobby. Exactly. I mean,
let's just be honest about how people actually
use this product. For most of us. Redfin isn't
just a real estate brokerage. Oh, not at all.
It's the app you open on your phone at 11 .0
PM on a Tuesday when you can't sleep. You're
scrolling through photos of mid -century moderns
you absolutely cannot afford. Or maybe, you know,
you hate scrolling through your neighbor's listing
to see if they updated that hideous kitchen before
they put it on the market. The Zestimate stocking.
It feels like a utility or a game almost. It's
the ultimate window shopping experience for sure.
But when you actually dig into the stack of articles,
the financial filings, and just the sheer history
we have on the table today, it is so much more
than just a digital map or a gallery of photos.
It really is. It's the story of a 20 -year war,
a struggle to drag. A very old school, very physical
and very guarded industry residential real estate
into the digital age. Kicking and screaming,
I imagine. Kicking and screaming. And it's a
story with a beginning, a middle, and as we now
know, a very specific end. That's the key context
here. We need to orient ourselves, right? We
are recording this in February 2026. Right. And
looking back from where we sit now, the landscape
has completely shifted. As of July 2025. Just
last year, Redfin is no longer the independent
disruptor it used to be. It is now a subsidiary
of rocket companies. Which is a massive development
that we are absolutely going to have to unpack.
We have to view this entire timeline through
that lens. We're looking at a company that started
as a scrappy, you know, thumb your nose at the
establishment startup in 2004 and ended up being
acquired by a massive lending giant two decades
later. So the question we're trying to answer
today is, did they win? Did they actually change
how we buy and sell homes? Or did the industry
eventually just change them? That is the million
-dollar question. Or given where home prices
are in 2026, maybe the $2 million requirement.
Fair point. And the cast of characters here is
just fascinating. We aren't just talking about
your standard real estate agents in blazers.
We've got a medical school dropout, a Yale engineer,
and a data miner from Amazon. It sounds like
the setup to a very nerdy joke, doesn't it? A
doctor, an engineer, and a data scientist walk
into a bar. It does. It absolutely does. But
that mix is exactly why this story goes the way
it does. So our mission today is to deeply unpack
this journey. We're going to look at how Redfin
tried to break the brokerage model, where they
ran into massive walls, both legal and financial,
and what this sale to rocket companies actually
means for the future of real estate. Let's get
into it. Okay. Let's start at the very beginning,
the origin story. Because, like I said, this
doesn't start in a Century 21 office with someone
handing out business cards. It starts with some
very unlikely founders in Seattle. We have to
talk about David Eriker. David Eriker is such
a fascinating figure to start with because his
background is the furthest thing from selling
houses. He was actually a medical school student.
At the University of Washington. At the University
of Washington, yes. Wait, hold on. actively in
med school he was and he didn't just graduate
and then switch careers he dropped out he left
a path that is arguably one of the most stable
prestigious and high -income careers you can
choose to go into software design and eventually
start a startup That speaks to a serious, almost
irrational appetite for risk. I mean, leaving
med school is not a small life decision. Not
at all. You've got the sunken cost of the education,
the expectations. It just suggests he saw an
opportunity or maybe a problem that was just
too big to ignore. It was a problem born of personal
frustration. The story goes that Eriker was trying
to buy a home himself in Seattle. And you have
to remember, this is the early 2000s. Right.
The Internet existed, sure, but... Real estate
was still operating like it was 1985. He found
the process just opaque, frustrating and incredibly
inefficient. He felt like the agents held all
the cards, specifically the data, and he was
just begging for scraps of information. So it
was the classic scratch your own itch founder
story. Yeah. But he couldn't fix it alone. He
had the vision, but he wasn't a coder. Right.
He needed technical muscle. And that's where
Michael Dougherty comes in. He's the second founder
holding degrees in electrical engineering and
international studies from Yale. So now you have
the visionary dropout and Ivy League engineering
backbone. But then there's the third piece of
the puzzle. And looking at the notes here, this
feels like the secret sauce that differentiated
them from just being another website. David Selinger.
David Selinger is absolutely key to understanding
why Redfin wasn't just a digital brochure. He
was a Stanford alum, but more importantly, look
at his resume. He had previously led the R &D
arm of Amazon's data mining and personalization
team. Let's pause on that. Amazon data mining.
In 2004. Yes. That feels light years ahead of
where the real estate industry was. Oh, it was.
Think about what Amazon was doing in the early
2000s. They were pioneering collaborative filtering.
Right. The people who bought this also bought
this thing. Exactly. They were figuring out how
to use massive amounts of data to predict what
you wanted before you knew you wanted it. People
who bought this book also bought this blender.
Selinger brought that specific mentality. That
data is a predictive asset to real estate. curb
appeal baking cookies for open houses and you
know firm handshakes these guys are thinking
about data analytics personalization engines
and collaborative filtering precisely bringing
amazon level data mining to real estate in 2004
was a paradigm shift it signaled that redfin
wasn't just building a brokerage they were building
a data engine they weren't just trying to sell
houses they were trying to structure unstructured
information and that leads us to their first
big innovation Which seems so simple now, but
at the time was huge. Yeah. The map. The map
-based search. They launched this in Seattle
in 2004. Now, I have to play devil's advocate
here. For anyone listening today, especially
the younger generation, this sounds ridiculous.
Oh, they put houses on a map. Big deal. Right.
Every app does that. I can see a map of where
my pizza delivery driver is right now. Why was
this such a heavy lift? We take it for granted
now because we live in a world of Google Maps
APIs where you can drop a map into an app in
10 minutes. But in 2004, this was a technical
nightmare. So Google Maps didn't exist in the
way we know it. Google Maps as a platform barely
existed. They couldn't just plug into it. So
how do they do it? They had to scrape tax records.
You have to understand, real estate data was
fragmented across thousands of county clerk offices,
often on paper or in ancient mainframe systems.
It wasn't digitized. They had to ingest all that
raw data, normalize it, and then physically plot
it onto satellite imagery that they had to license.
That sounds excruciating. It was. And remember
the user experience before this. If you were
searching for a home online, if you could even
do that effectively, you were looking at lists.
Yeah, just a list of addresses. A list of addresses,
maybe some thumbnails. 123 Maple Street, three
bed, two bath. If you wanted to see where that
was relative to a park or school or the highway,
you had to get out a physical Thomas Guide map.
Or maybe use MapQuest if you were tech savvy
and cross -referenced. Right. Or you had to rely
entirely on an agent. The agent held the book,
the big physical book of listings. The agent
knew the neighborhoods. You're driving blind
without them. Exactly. The agent was the gatekeeper.
Redfin took that power, the power of spatial
context, and gave it to the user. Putting everything
on a satellite map was a foundational shift in
user experience. It turned the user into an explorer.
It turned the consumer from a passive recipient
of information into an active explorer, yeah.
You could drag the map and see home prices pop
up. That was revolutionary. It effectively democratized
the wear. But they didn't stop at just showing
the houses, did they? They decided that just
being a search engine wasn't enough. They wanted
to get involved in the actual transaction. And
this is where things get a little spicy. Let's
move to section two, disrupting the brokerage
model. This is where the rubber meets the road.
It's one thing to show data. It's another thing
entirely to mess with people's money. Right.
And in real estate, the money is in the commissions.
So in 2006, Redfin launches buying and selling
services in Seattle and the Bay Area. But they
didn't just hire a bunch of agents and say, go
forth and sell. They fundamentally changed the
employment model. Can you explain the difference
between how a traditional agent works and how
a Redfin agent works? This is the crucial economic
differentiator. In the traditional model, Coldwell
Banker. Remax, Keller Williams, you name it.
The agents are almost always independent contractors.
1099 workers. They are 1099 workers. They eat
what they kill. They don't get a salary. They
don't get benefits. They only get paid when they
close a deal. Which incentivizes them to close
deals at all costs, right? to get that paycheck
theoretically yes it creates a very high pressure
sales driven environment redfin flipped this
they made their agents w -2 employees so they
were on staff they got a paycheck every two weeks
exactly salary health benefits paid time off
and their bonuses were based on customer satisfaction
surveys not just the commission amount of the
deal that sounds great for the consumer you get
an agent who isn't desperate to force you into
a house just to pay their rent But it also sounds
incredibly expensive for Redfin. It is more expensive
in terms of fixed costs. You have to pay that
salary whether the market is hot or cold, right?
Right. But the tradeoff was supposed to be efficiency.
Because Redfin had the website, the map, they
had a firehose of leads. Traditional agents spend
half their time marketing themselves, knocking
on doors, sending out calendars. Redfin agents
didn't have to do that. the app gave them the
customers. So the theory was? So Redfin's theory
was, our agents will be 5x or 10x more productive
than a normal agent so we can afford the salaries.
And because they were theoretically more efficient,
they could attack the price. Let's talk about
the refund. The commission refund. This was their
battering ram. Historically, real estate commissions
are rigid. Typically, 6 % of the sale price split
50 -50 between the buyer's agent and the seller's
agent. So 3 % goes to each side. 3 % goes to
the person helping you buy the house, which on
a $500 ,000 house is $15 ,000. That's a lot of
money. A ton of money. It is. Redfin said, we
don't need all that. We'll take a cut, but we'll
refund a significant portion of that 3 % back
to you, the buyer, at closing. So I buy a house
and I get a check for $5 ,000 or $10 ,000 to
help with closing costs or furniture. That was
the pitch. They were compressing fees in an industry
that relies on those fees to survive. That must
have made them incredibly popular with homebuyers
and incredibly unpopular with every other real
estate agent in the country. Unpopular is a very
polite way of putting it. It was a declaration
of war. You have to understand the psychology
here. Traditional agents viewed Redfin not just
as a competitor, but as an existential threat.
They argued that Redfin was devaluing the profession,
treating it like a fast food transaction rather
than a high stakes consultation. I can imagine.
There were stories of traditional agents refusing
to show Redfin listings or telling clients that
Redfin agents were incompetent part timers. And
despite the pushback. It worked for the consumers.
By 2007, they were expanding rapidly. Southern
California, Boston, Baltimore, Washington, D
.C. And steering the ship during this expansion
was Glenn Kelman, right? He was named CEO in
September 2005. Yes, Glenn Kelman. He became
the face of this disruption. And he was perfect
for it because he was very articulate, very fast
talking. And he wasn't afraid to go on television
and say the emperor has no clothes. The way we
sell houses is broken. A good frontman. He positioned
Redfin. as the consumer advocate against the
cartel of traditional real estate. Speaking of
cartels, we have to talk about the data wars.
Because if you come at the king, you best not
miss. And the king in this scenario was the MLS.
The Multiple Listing Service. For our listeners
who might not know, what exactly is the MLS?
Is it a government database? No. And that's a
very common misconception. The MLS is not a public
utility. It is a private member owned cooperative,
usually owned by the local association of realtors.
Is it a private club? It's a private club, a
walled garden. To get access to the data, to
see the listings, you have to be a member, which
means you have to be a licensed agent and pay
dues. It's a monopoly on the inventory. So Redfin,
as a brokerage, joined the MLS to get the data.
But then they started using that data in ways
the MLS didn't like. I'm looking at this fine
from 2007. The Northwest MLS fined Redfin $50
,000 in May 2007. $50 ,000 is a lot for a startup,
but the principal seems bigger. What did they
do wrong? They launched a feature called Sweet
Bigs. Basically, they allowed users to post reviews
of homes on the market on the Redfin website.
Like Yelp for houses. This kitchen smells like
cat food. Two stars. Essentially, yes. They wanted
to add a layer of subjective, crowdsourced truth
to the listing data. A layer of transparency.
I can see why buyers would love that. Don't bother
visiting this one. The foundation is cracked.
But I can see why sellers would lose their minds.
Oh, the sellers were furious. If you're trying
to sell your home, the last thing you want is
a permanent digital record of random strangers
criticizing your carpet or your landscaping.
It devalues the asset. It absolutely devalues
the asset. But the MLS's argument was legal.
We gave you this data to sell homes, not to disparage
them. It highlights the tension, doesn't it?
Between a tech company wanting Yelp -style...
radical transparency and the guarded, protective
nature of traditional real estate. And in this
case, the industry won. Redfin was forced to
shut down the reviews. They paid the fine. It
was a reality check. You can disrupt the tech,
but you are still operating on the industry's
rails. But they didn't stop trying to push the
envelope. In 2011, they launched a tool showing
a real estate agent's sales history. This was
another fascinating attempt at transparency.
They called it scouting reports. The idea was.
How do you choose an agent? Usually it's a recommendation
from a friend, right? Or a face on a bus bench.
Or a face on a bus bench, exactly. Redfin wanted
to make it data -driven. They wanted to show
you exactly how many homes an agent had sold,
in what neighborhoods, and crucially, their price
drop stats. How often did they list a house too
high and have to lower the price? That sounds
incredibly useful. If I'm hiring someone to sell
my biggest asset, I want to know their track
record. It is useful in theory, but in practice,
it backfired. Badly. Right. The data wasn't clean
enough. The MLS data doesn't always perfectly
link an agent to a sale in the way an algorithm
can easily read. Sometimes there are co -listing
agents. Sometimes the names are spelled differently.
Got it. So Redfin ended up publishing profiles
that were inaccurate. They might say an agent
sold zero homes when they actually sold 10. Oof.
That is liability territory. It is. You are messing
with people's livelihoods. And that's a critical
lesson here. In Silicon Valley, the motto is
move fast and break things. If your social media
app has a bug, it's annoying. But if your real
estate app tells the world that a top performing
agent is a failure because of a data glitch,
you are causing real financial harm. The failure
of the 2011 tool showed the limits of data scraping
without rigorous quality control. They eventually
had to discontinue it. So they took some hits
in the transparency wars. But they also had some
massive wins on the tech side that stuck. In
2015, they launched two features that I think
we now consider standard. The Redfin estimate
and BookItNow. Right. The Redfin estimate was
their answer to Zillow's estimate. It's an automated
valuation model, or AVM. Which is that number
at the top of the listing that tells you what
the algorithm thinks the house is worth, regardless
of the list price. Exactly. And while agents
hate these numbers because they are often off
by 5 -10%, Consumers love them. It anchors the
conversation. It challenged the idea that you
needed a human appraiser to give you a rough
idea of value. And book it now. That was purely
about speed. It was an on -demand service for
scheduling home tours. Again, think about the
consumer expectation in 2015. You could order
an Uber instantly. You could order dinner on
Grubhub. Why did it take three phone calls, a
voicemail, and a day of waiting just to get the
code to see a house? Right. Redfin said, click
this button and an agent will meet you there
in an hour. That is that instant gratification
shift. They were successfully pushing the industry
toward automation. So by 2015, they're a serious
player. They've got the tech. They've got the
brokerage in multiple cities. They have the employees.
It's time to level up. Let's move to section
three, going public and getting physical. The
IPO. July 28, 2017. They ring the bell. They
raise $138 million. This marks the transition.
They are no longer a scrappy startup. They are
a major publicly traded company. They have shareholders
now. They have quarterly earnings calls. And
with that cash infusion and that pressure to
grow, they decide to make a very bold and, in
hindsight, very risky move. A very risky move.
We're talking about Redfin now. Redfin now, launched
in June 2017. This was their entry into iBuying.
Okay, let's unpack iBuying. Because this seems
like a fundamental shift in what the company
is. Before, they were a platform. They connected
buyers and sellers. They took a fee. They were
asset light. Right. If you are a broker, you
don't own the house. You just facilitate the
trade. You have zero inventory risk. But with
Redfin... Now they are actually buying the house.
Exactly. They are moving from being a platform
to being a principal. They are buying the asset
directly from the seller, putting it on their
own balance sheet, paying for the utilities,
paying for the taxes, doing light renovations,
and then reselling it. Why on earth would they
do that? Real estate is heavy. It's expensive.
It breaks. Why take on that liability? The logic
was consumer friction. The traditional process
of selling a home is miserable. You have to stage
it. You have to leave your house every time someone
wants to see it. You have to negotiate. The financing
might fall through. It takes months. The pitch
of iBuying was, we will write you a cash check
right now. You can close in seven days. No showings,
no hassle. So they were selling convenience.
They were selling certainty. And for that certainty,
they charged a higher fee, usually 7 % or more,
plus a service fee. The idea was that they could
make money on the fee and maybe a little on the
home appreciation. They wanted to be the market
maker. They wanted to turn houses into stocks.
They wanted to turn real estate into a liquid
asset, like a stock. Yeah. It sounds great for
the seller. But for Redfin, that means they are
suddenly holding. millions, eventually hundreds
of millions of dollars of real estate. And that
is a capital intensive model. To buy homes, you
need debt. You need massive lines of credit.
And you are exposed to market fluctuations. If
the housing market drops 5 % while you are holding
those homes and you're operating on thin margins,
you are underwater. You are losing money on every
transaction. We'll see how that plays out later.
But they were also making other moves to capture
more of the market. They acquired Walkscore way
back in 2014, which I love, by the way, checking
if I can walk to coffee. It's a great feature.
And in 2019, they partnered with Opendoor. Right.
Acknowledging that they couldn't buy every house
themselves. So they partnered with Opendoor to
offer instant offers to more people, sort of
hedging their bets. And then in 2021, they dropped
a massive amount of money, $608 million. To acquire
RentPath? This was a huge strategic play. RentPath
-owned apartment guide. Rent .com. Lovely. So
why buy rental sites if you're a real estate
brokerage? Renters don't pay commissions. It's
all about the customer acquisition cost, or CAC.
Think about the life cycle of a person. You graduate
college. You rent an apartment. Five years later,
you get married. You rent a bigger apartment.
Three years later, you buy a starter home. Seven
years later, you buy a bigger home. So Redfin
wanted to own the funnel from the very beginning.
Exactly. Lease to deed. If they can get you using
the Redfin ecosystem when you're 22 and looking
for a studio, they have a relationship with you.
When you're 30 and ready to buy, you're already
in their database. They were attempting to capture
the entire journey of a resident. It makes sense
on paper. But as they got bigger and as their
algorithms got more influential, they started
attracting a different kind of attention, legal
attention. And this brings us to Section 4, the
fair housing controversy. This is a really critical
chapter in their history, and it requires us
to look at the intersection of, well, math and
civil rights. In November 2020, several fair
housing organizations sued Redfin. What was the
specific accusation? They accused Redfin of violating
the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Specifically, they
alleged that Redfin was engaging in a form of
digital redlining. Redlining historically being
the practice where banks would literally draw
red lines on maps around minority neighborhoods
and refused to lend there. Correct. The accusation
here was that Redfin was offering fewer services
to home buyers and sellers in minority communities
compared to white communities. And what was the
mechanism? Were they explicitly saying we won't
go to this zip code? No. And that's why this
is so complex. It wasn't explicit racism. It
was policy based on home price. Redfin had a
price minimum. They said, essentially, we cannot
sell a home for under a certain dollar amount,
say $150 ,000, because the commission we would
earn isn't enough to cover the cost of our agent's
time and salary. OK, stop there. From a Business
101 perspective, that sounds logical. If it costs
you $5 ,000 to sell a home and you only make
$3 ,000 in commission, you go out of business.
It's margin protection. That was Redfin's defense.
This is just math. We are a business. But the
plaintiffs argued that the result of that math
was discriminatory. Exactly. This is the legal
concept of disparate impact. Because of decades
of historical racism and segregation, homes in
minority communities are disproportionately lower
priced. So if you draw a hard line and say, we
won't serve homes under 150K, you are effectively
drawing a line around those minority communities.
You are denying them the superior Redfin service,
the lower fees, the better photography, the marketing
solely because of the price, which serves as
a proxy for race. That is a fascinating and difficult
ethical knot. If an algorithm optimizes for profit
and the underlying data reflects historical inequality,
The algorithm will replicate that inequality.
Precisely. And in housing, which is a regulated
human right, you can't just say the algorithm
made me do it. The lawsuit showed maps where
Redfin offered best service in white neighborhoods
and no service in adjacent minority neighborhoods.
It was visually very stark. They settled in 2022.
Redfin paid $4 million, which is a relatively
small amount for them. But more importantly,
they implemented policy changes. They agreed
to remove the strict price. minimums in many
areas and implemented a new internal monitoring
system to test for fair housing compliance. So
they essentially had to subsidize the lower cost
homes. In a way, yes. Or they have to find a
way to make the service cheaper to deliver. It
really highlights that tech companies in regulated
spaces like housing face challenges that, say,
a video game company doesn't. You can't just
optimize for profit. You have to optimize for
compliance and equity. So we move into 2022.
And if you follow the economy or if you tried
to buy a house recently, you know, 2022 was the
year everything changed. It was the year the
music stopped. Section five, contraction and
the end of flipping. It started with optimism,
though. In April 2022, Redfin acquired Bay Equity
Home Loans for nearly $138 million. Again, vertical
integration will help you find the house and
will give you the mortgage. It's a smart play.
The mortgage is where the real money is in the
transaction. But then the Federal Reserve stepped
in. Inflation spiked and the Fed raised interest
rates faster than they had in decades. Mortgage
rates went from 3 % to 7 % in a matter of months.
That is a violent shift. What did that do to
Redfin's business model? It froze. the market
just put it on ice Buyers couldn't afford the
monthly payments, so they stopped buying. Sellers
didn't want to trade their 3 % mortgage for a
7 % one, so they stopped selling. Volume plummeted.
And remember, Redfin has high fixed costs. They
have all those W -2 employees. Exactly. They
have to pay the salaries even if nobody's buying
houses. And crucially, they were also holding
hundreds of homes in their Redfin now flipping
division. And this is where the principal risk
we talked about earlier explodes. Yes. If you
bought a house for $500 ,000, thousand dollars
in march hoping to sell it for five hundred and
twenty thousand dollars in may but by may the
market has cooled and the house is only worth
four hundred and eighty thousand dollars you
are in trouble you're losing money just holding
it we are losing money now multiply that by hundreds
of homes in june 2022 they laid off eight percent
of their staff a warning shot the first sign
of trouble and then in november 2022 the big
one Another massive round of layoffs, 13 % of
the staff and a huge strategic pivot. They announced
the death of Redfin now. They announced the wind
down of the home flipping unit. This was a massive
admission of defeat. They essentially said, we
cannot make this math work. Why did they kill
it completely? Why not just pause it? Because
it was an existential threat to the company's
solvency. They needed cash. They couldn't have
hundreds of millions of dollars tied up in depreciating
assets. They had to liquidate the portfolio,
sell the homes at a loss just to get the cash
back to survive. It was a failed experiment in
being a market maker. So they retreat. They go
back to basics. They focus on the website, the
brokerage, and the software. They lick their
wounds. And that brings us to the final chapter.
The exit. July 2025. Redfin is acquired by Rocket
Companies. The parent company of Rocket Mortgage.
So as of today, February 2026, Redfin is a subsidiary.
The independent journey is over. The stock ticker
is gone. It is. And if you connect the dots,
this acquisition makes perfect, almost inevitable
sense. How so? Break down the synergy force.
Think about what Rocket Companies is. They are
a lender. They are a bank, essentially. They
process loans. That is a commodity business.
Their biggest cost is finding people who need
loans. Customer acquisition. Right. They spend
billions on Super Bowl ads and direct mail. But
where is the customer before they need a loan?
They are on Redfin. They are looking at the map.
Exactly. Redfin has the eyeballs. They have the
intent. They have millions of people signaling,
I am thinking about buying a house. By buying
Redfin... Rocket secures the ultimate top -of
-funnel lead generation machine. Redfin becomes
the front door to the Rocket Mortgage Factory.
It's the ultimate vertical integration. Rocket
doesn't care if they make money on the real estate
commission. They want the loan. Correct. The
lifetime value or LTV of a mortgage customer
is huge. If Redfin breaks even as a brokerage
but feeds Rocket 100 ,000 loans a year, the acquisition
is a home run. But looking back at the legacy
here, Redfin started with an innovator award
in 2006. They were the rebels. They wanted to
kill the traditional broker. They wanted to make
it cheap and easy. Did they succeed? I think
we have to reference that Bloomberg article from
way back in 2013, why Redfin haven't killed off
real estate brokers. The answer is no. They didn't
kill the broker. In fact, to survive, they had
become the broker. They hired agents. They joined
the MLSs. They even started a partner agent program
where they referred leads to traditional REMAX
and Coldwell Banker agents because they couldn't
hire enough of their own people. They became
part of the establishment they tried to disrupt.
In many ways, yes. But I would argue they also
forced the establishment to change. Look at Zillow.
Look at Realtor .com. Look at how traditional
agents use tech now. The industry is significantly
more transparent and digital because Redfin pushed
it. They forced the MLSs to open up data. They
forced the creation of better digital tools.
So they lost the war to dominate the industry,
but they won the battle to modernize it. That's
a fair assessment. They proved you can digitize
the search for a home. The search is now perfect.
It's fun. It's fast. It's data rich. But the
transaction, the actual buying and selling, that
remains a messy, emotional, regulated, human
heavy process. You can't algorithm your way out
of a correct foundation or a difficult negotiation.
And here's a final provocative thought to leave
you with. Now that Redfin is owned by Rocket.
a giant financial institution. Does the mission
of the commission refund survive? Or was that
just a growth tactic for a startup that has now
grown up? That's the real question. When a disruptor
gets acquired by an incumbent, does the innovation
continue? Or does Redfin just become a really
nice, really expensive lead generation funnel
for Rocket Mortgage? Does the consumer advocacy
DNA survive inside a massive lending conglomerate?
Something to think about the next time you're
scrolling through mansions you can't afford on
your lunch break. The map is free, but the machinery
behind it is expensive. Thanks for listening
to this deep dive into Redfin. We'll catch you
on the next one. Goodbye everyone.