Redfin

Our agent was very hard working. She put in a lot of hours & worked 7 days per week. But she worked under & strongly supported a system which is highly flawed, especially in a hot market. The system is meant to enable Redfin to reduce its commissions by reducing its expenses. This is done by having their agents handle many clients simultaneously. I never found out how many, but for our agent it seemed to be limitless. She was very rarely able to speak on the phone, since she was always busy with another client or property. I think she answered the phone once during the several months of me calling. I was expected to text or email her for everything and she would text or email back, generally avoiding a phone call. On occasion, she would schedule a phone call, but sometimes it didn't happen until the next day!

My wife was out of town for the summer, so I was left to look at the properties for sale. I looked at about 13 condos during June & July but our agent never came with me to see any of them & yet she was supposedly advising me what to do. (As a matter of fact, we never met our agent in person until we put our condo on the market to sell in August. I'm sure that if we didn't have something to sell, we would have never met her!) Other "agents" were sent to view the properties with me. That's all they were allowed to do. I found out later that they are contractors, not actual Redfin employees. They were generally different each time, so there was no continuity. After the showing, they would report to our agent & I was never allowed to speak with them again!

In July, I saw an older condo in Hudson which seemed to have many of the things we wanted. Redfin sent an agent to view it with me. The kitchen & master bath of the unit had been updated, but the rest of the place was in poor condition (mostly cosmetic, but probably about $10k to fix). We decided to make a "must take it now" offer to preempt any other buyers or an open house. Our agent advised us not to require a home inspection (a poor piece of advice for a 34 year old house), to put down a large, non-refundable deposit & to offer a huge amount of money above the listing price ("if the money doesn't make any difference to you, just offer it!", she said.)

The listing price was $385k. I told our agent that no unit had ever sold for even $400k in the community & that the high condo fee ($699) was a big problem for people looking for places under $400k. I was thinking about $405-$410k. She suggested we move it up to $425k. Unfortunately, we took her advice. The buyer accepted our offer. My wife came home & when we did our final walkthrough with our agent, my wife cried because of the condition it was in. Our agent said that the condition was exactly what she expected! We thought about backing out, but we had a big, non-refundable deposit. So we bought it. We estimate that we paid about $40k more than we should have.

When we put our house on the market in August, we finally met our agent. She came over with the photographer. She did a market analysis & came up with a value of $590k to $610k. We thought that was way too high, so we listed it for $559k. Her listing, to be blunt, was poor. We had to rewrite it to make it usable. We were not impressed with some of the photos that were taken, either. We got a low offer, which we were going to counter offer. But our agent said that it was a good offer & to take it. She said to wait for the house inspection & if anything comes up, to use the price reduction to refuse to do any repairs. But the inspection didn't show anything wrong, so we lost the opportunity to counter offer. That probably cost us $7500 & even with that, it was about $50k below the market analysis. Our agent didn't even attend the closing.

That's a summary of our experiences with Redfin. We are very dissatisfied with the way that they represented us, both for buying & selling. We feel that, at the very least they should refund all the commissions they received for both. Our advice to everyone who is thinking about using Redfin is to use someone else, unless you like:

5. Having to write your own listing to have a decent one when selling.

We experienced all of these when we bought & sold our houses with Redfin. Instead of saving money on the commissions, our agent's poor advice for both buying & selling cost us about $50k.

Furthermore, Redfin continued to downgrade my valuation, while Zillow continued to show the correct valuation trend. Today, twenty months after closing, my house is valued at $716,000 on Redfin, while it is valued at $777,000 on Zillow. I am dismayed by the blatant racist discrimination based on the color of my skin. I hope that one day someone will investigate this issue and hold them accountable.

In support of their lowball contention they showed a comp which had recently sold for $960,000. That comp happened to be the house next door which was smaller than mine and slightly older and which had previously shown on my appraisal in 2018 as worth $390,000. About a week later, they sent me another notice proclaiming that they would be able to sell for more than the house next door and that they might be able to get $457,000 for mine. What's more they would only charge me a 1% commission! Such a deal.