At the same time Redfin filed to go public in late June, the Seattle-based online brokerage announced it was testing Redfin Now, a service in which Redfin buys homes directly from sellers and resells them to buyers.
“Customers who sell through Redfin Now will typically get less money for their home than they would listing their home with a real estate agent, but get that money faster with less risk and fuss,” the filing said.
Founded in 2004, Redfin said its revenue grew 44 percent year over year to $59.9 million in the first quarter of 2017, and posted a net loss of $28 million, against a net loss of $24.4 million in the year ago period. Last year, the company saw revenue grow by 43 percent to $267 million and its net loss decrease to $22.5 million from $30.2 million in 2015.
Redfin claims that is pairs “our own agents with our own technology to create a service that is faster, better, and costs less. We meet customers through our listings-search website and mobile application, reducing the marketing costs that can keep fees high.”
Adding: “Our goal is to build the first large-scale brokerage that stands apart in consumers’ minds for delivering a unique and consistent customer experience, where the value is in our brokerage and its technologies, not just a personal relationship with one agent.”
“We use machine learning and artificial intelligence to answer customers’ most important questions about where to live, how much a home is worth, and when to move. We draw on cloud computing to perform computationally intensive comparisons of homes at a scale that would otherwise be cost prohibitive. We use streaming technologies to quickly notify customers about a listing. And we embrace new hardware, such as three-dimensional scanning cameras that let potential homebuyers walk through the property online.”
Source: SEC Filing