Redfin Reviews

If it were not for the stubbornness of my wife the buyer's agent we would have left 60K on the table listening to our Redfin agent. Do not get me started on their very pathetic efforts at open houses. Again you have to work much harder to bring a buyer because the Redfin team does near to zero. Used Redfin on the buy side too. We had to do all the work to find a home. The only also they promise refunding back a portion of the commission and that is just not true. Also my agent was not paying attention and attempts to negotiate did not go well, they push affiliates, but who doesn't right? Anyway, I got the house I wanted buy. I did all the searching and all the leg work. All Redfin did was have someone who you don't know show up to open the door. Very, very impersonal. My advice go the old fashion way.

We agreed to amend the price from $345,000 to $340,000 netting us a loss of $5,000 on the sale of our home that we ALREADY HAD A PURCHASE AGREEMENT ON. The inspection on the purchased property had already been done and paid for. Jenny assured us for over a week that we would not be losing the house, and that we did not need to sign the cancellation agreement. The stress during this time was incredible. We looked for our "perfect retirement home" for a year and a half and it looked like we could be losing it. We had ZERO intention of moving until we found the perfect home! After all was said and done, we had sold our home and had no home to move into. We were dividing our belongings into 3 parts.

One part that could go into a POD for storage (things that could freeze), one part that had to go into a heated storage unit, and things that we would have to bring with us into our temporary housing while we started a new home search. This was another highly stressful situation; looking for places to store all our things, pricing it, figuring out how to move it and not knowing how long we'd be without a home. We found a home, but it is NOT the home we would have chosen if we did not need a house immediately. Because we already had a deadline to be out of our home, we did not have time to get an inspection on the new home. Redfin reduced some closing fees by $2500. We are still out $3000 (house reduction price and inspection).

We asked Redfin to pay us the $3,000 that we lost due to their realtor's error. We also asked  Redfin pay for an inspection on the home that we had to buy so we would have somewhere to live. We are particularly concerned about radon since this home has a well and a basement.  We have gotten NO responses to our requests to get our lost money returned! This was a gross error on her part and we are still in shock that we are in a home that isn't the perfect home for us simply because we needed a place to live. It is unconscionable that we could lose a home and our hard-earned money through absolutely no fault of our own, but due to a professional's error. We are still heartbroken every time we look out a window and see a neighbor instead of the 4 acres of woods and the river that we had originally purchased. User's recommendation: Do NOT use Redfin, especially Jenny **

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.