Redfin

Amazing, Amazing, Amazing! Redfin helped me to buy my first home at an awesome price. I loved my agent, and he was also amazing. I even received a portion of the commission back which I used to put in my hardwood floors. I highly recommend Redfin. Try to go to their free dinner, I learned so much and even found my Redfin agent.

I felt compelled to write this review after I read Melinda C’s review below. Unlike her, I had a great experience with Redfin and my agent, Dillon. This was my second home buying experience, and compared to the first experience I had with Julie Partain with Lyon Real Estate of Davis (in 1999), it was a night and day experience.
I, too, am a busy person, but I found that Redfin definitely helped me save time during my home search in a competitive market. Their website has the most up to date info on current and new listings. I received push alerts on my phone when a new listing in the area I was searching came on market, followed by an email within the hour. A day or two later, I would get the same alerts via email from Trulia and Zillow. Because of this notification advantage, ultimately, I was able to submit a strong offer ahead of most people because I toured the home within 24 of it coming on market. And when you see a home you want to tour, you just click on the «Tour It» button and someone in the office gets to work right away. Versus a traditional agent, who you’re lucky if you can get a hold of, I doubt few could respond and arrange for a tour as quickly. Because Redfin works as a team, Redfin coordinators set up the tours and confirm that your agent will be there at the time you requested or will send another agent in their place so again, you’re not stuck waiting on your contracted agent.
Melinda nailed it when she alluded that Dillon is personable. He is also responsive and proactive. I didn’t set out planning to use Redfin or Dillon as my agent, but after he tirelessly and enthusiastically led us on several home tours, he won us over. Never once did I feel Dillon or Josh Martin, the two agents I’ve had contact with, were ever disinterested or annoyed when I asked questions. I even appreciated that they let us explore each property on our own instead of hovering over us constantly.
Because of the area Redfin covers, I think it’s understandable that an agent would not necessarily have full knowledge of each property shown. Plus most of the info I was curious about IS covered either on the Redfin website/​app. I was impressed that Dillon had advised me of relevant market stats and trends for the area where I was searching and Josh had offered advice on how to craft a strong offer based on our unique situation.
When we finally found the right home for us, it was Easter weekend, Dillon and Josh worked together to make sure they took care of us. Because Dillon was out of town, Josh took us on the home tour and offered insight on our offer. Even though Dillon was out of town, he was proactive communicating with us and helped us write the eventual winning offer.
I wish Redfin was around 16 years ago when I purchased my first home. Back then, my agent was hard to get a hold of and never returned calls in a timely manner, especially after my offer was accepted. This time, I found it exponentially easy to stay in touch. Dillon and I readily communicated via phone, text and email throughout the process. I knew he was still giving home tours throughout the Sac area, but he was always available for consultation or replied with minimal delay.
Sure, if you really desire a specific neighborhood and property, could there be a boutique real estate office and agent who knows it better than anyone else? Of course there will be. However, if you’re like me and feel it is important to do a little homework of your own when it comes to purchasing a property, and you appreciate convenience, good use technology, and great customer service, then you’ll probably enjoy your Redfin experience!

You have to do a lot of the work yourself. The agent will not help much when looking for a home. The redfin app is superb.

After having a terrible experience with ReMax, which resulted in much frustration over poor communication, we gave Redfin a try. We worked with Matt Jones, who had only moved to Sacramento a couple of weeks earlier. When we met him for the first time at our first showing, we were soooo impressed. First, he arrived early in the neighborhood to scope it out and had some great insight into the neighborhood. (Our ReMax agent was always at least 15 – 20 minutes late so being on time was a nice bit of professionalism we lacked before Matt!)
Then, when we were deciding between a few houses, he was great and talked important details such as price per square foot for each home and how it compared to the neighborhood as a whole, the ratings of nearby schools off the top of his head, potential resale, etc. it was everything we lacked and craved with our old agent. It really helped clarify our decisions. Ultimately, the sellers rejected our full price offer in favor of airBnB (which Matt called… Prior to the listing on airBnB… He has great intuition).
We still had issues collecting our deposit check from our ReMax experience and while Matt wasn’t involved in those shenanigans, he was a great resource for us as we tried to get our money back.
In the end, we found a great house and Matt was wonderful to work with. Quick to return our emails and texts, great at keeping us up to speed on where we were at in the process.
We were his first sale in the Sacramento area and no doubt he will be a huge success. We strongly recommend him. Thanks Matt!

I first heard about Redfin from a friend who used their app. I wasn’t in the market to buy at that time, however, their app was a great tool to use to see what the market was like. The amount of options you get on their app make it real easy to narrow down your search. I later received an invite from Redfin to attend one of their New Home-​buyers classes that they hold in the Sacramento Area. While attending this class I was able to meet both Lindsay Martin and Nikki Lawrence. At the time, my wife and I were months away from being ready to buy our first home in the Roseville area.
Moving from the Bay Area was suppose to be a challenging transition, however, Lindsay Martin made our first buying experience so simple! Lindsay was very accommodating during the whole process, which began with touring, and then ultimately making an offer on our first home. Never had purchased a home before, we leaned on Lindsay’s expertise during the whole buying process. In a time where most people were offering over asking price, Lindsay helped us to get our home for below asking and we closed within 45 days. All the back and forth communication with the buyers agent was made simple as Lindsay was always keeping us in the loop and was always available if I needed to call, email or text message with questions. Living 1 ½ hours from where we were buying did not make matters easy, but Lindsay was always able to be at the house on our behalf until we could make it there for all the inspections, re-​inspections, walk-thru’s, ect… If Lindsay could not make it, other Redfin agents Nikki Lawrence and Heather Harmon, were there to fill in. There was never a moment we felt we were doing this on our own and we knew we could always rely on Redfin.
Unexpectedly, we were in need of selling our home after just 1 year 4 months of living in it. Luckily, I knew who to call to get this done. Lindsay and her Redfin team worked hard on getting us top dollar on our home. Lindsay met at our home with fellow Redfin Agent, Cecilia Gomez-​Prado, and discussed how the whole selling process works and went over in great detail all the things that were going to take place in the coming weeks. Redfin brought in a professional photographer, who I may add, took amazing photos. I have seen some very poor house listings and I just have to say that having a professional take the pictures makes a huge difference! Redfin coordinated our Open House, which produced a huge turnout, and we were able to accept an offer less than 1 week from putting the house on the market. Selling the home just a little over a year of purchasing it was not ideal for me and was a difficult pill to swallow, but Redfin made the process so smooth and we were even able to make a little change on the sale! The house was put on the market and literally sold the following month and it was because of all the hard work Lindsay Martin and the entire Redfin staff put in to what they do!!!
I will continue to swear by Redfin to all my friends and family. I am not in the market at this time, but when I am ready, I sure know who to call!

Redfin is a great website, has a great app and easy to navigate and definitely has the best user experience hands down. It is an added bonus that you get some of the commission paid to you but as the cliché goes, you get what you pay for so expect to be doing a lot of the coordinating an agent usually handles on your own. I actually left RedFin to work with another Realtor who was great but had to come back when a house we put an offer on had a fall through with the first buyer and contacted our agent again. Unlike the other reviewers, I had a terrible time working with Heather Harmon (who is no longer with RedFin thankfully). She was not quick to respond, was not helpful or nice, had us ridden with anxiety most of the time, and left (don’t know if this was by choice) Redfin in the middle closing our deal. She did not work around our schedule and implied I shouldn’t be sending her emails after working hours because she had to «turn off» at some point. She was never available to talk during the day. Her departure was actually when RedFin got good, we worked with Lindsay Martin for the remainder of the deal and she was actually great, very helpful, extremely nice and responsive. If it weren’t for her taking over the deal, I would have given this review 1 star for all the heartache and agent induced stress. We did get the check at the end which was nice, but I would have easily paid it to avoid having to figh so hard. All in and all, we got the dream house, but I wouldn’t go back to them if I had to move again

Redfin as a website to look for homes is great. However, if selling your home in Sacramento I absolutely do NOT recommend them. Our experience in attempting to sell our home through Redfin was a complete disaster as they terminated our agent in the middle of our sale without any back up plan whatsoever, nor any communication to me. This resulted in our buyer pulling out of the deal. The complete lack of professionalism on behalf of Redfin was appalling as was their response to my justified complaint letter. If zero stars were an option that is what I would give Redfin.
That being said, we ended up following our former Redfin agent to her new brokerage firm and she helped us sell our house for over asking. Because of her diligence, we received a second offer (cash) within a few days of Redfin bumbling our first sale. If I was not clear enough DO NOT use Redfin in Sacramento to sell your home.
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In response to CEO Glenn K.‘s reply below.
4÷24÷14
Dear Glenn,
I appreciate you taking the time to reply and apologize, however I must comment on a few things. I wrote a letter to Redfin upon the sale of my home and the reply I got was as equally ridiculous as the treatment I received from Redfin during their bungled handling of my sale and removal of my agent. It wasn’t until I received the letter response that I wrote my original Unilocal review. You say that you have retrained your management team on the protocol because of my review, but it took 5 months for you to respond to me. In all honesty that doesn’t give me much confidence that Redfin is looking out for its customers any different than they were last year.
I did not think Redfin’s response to my complaint was vague because they would not tell my why my agent was terminated. In fact, I never used the word vague in describing my issues with Redfin. I was aware of the situation with my agent and I found out because I called Redfin. Had I not called them who knows when they would have gotten around to telling me anything. I am glad you have retrained your staff with regard to handling of this situation, but I would also question why any training was even necessary. It seems pretty obvious that if a company is going to pull a customers agent in the middle of a real estate transaction they would have a plan, which Redfin absolutely did not.
So thank you for your reply, but it seems to me you are a day late and a dollar short.
Sarah Oliver

I just purchased a home in Sacramento with Heather Harmon from Redfin. I love that
is easy to use, up-​to-​date, and has a lot of helpful information about the home buying process. Once I started touring homes with Heather I found her to be very knowledgeable, professional, and extremely quick to respond to any questions or issues that I was having. I ended up falling in love with a house that had a difficult seller who tried to weasel out of our contract so that he could go with another (presumably higher offer) after he had accepted my offer and we were more than half way through escrow. Heather really fought for me and was meticulous with her paperwork and attention to detail and managed to pull the deal through despite the best efforts of the slime-​ball seller and his horribly amoral real estate agent.

We loved Redfin as home-​buyers, but with conditions.
We loved that because Redfin works as a team (versus traditional agents where you work with one agent) you could pretty much see a home when you want to, because there’s almost always someone available. The downside to this, however, is that you sometimes are working with agents who may not be as great, standards vary.
We absolutely LOVE and would suggest working with Heather Harmon and Lindsay Martin for the Sacramento-​Folsom areas. They were timely, professional and made the process enjoyable. They were patient with our needs and we looked forward to viewing homes with both of them! We miss working with them!
There were other agents, who I would not suggest working with, as the process seemed to slow and not be as enjoyable due to their professional standards.

Worked with them to buy our house. It was an extremely easy process (well as easy as it can be). Our agent was great and helped tremendously getting us into properties as fast as he could. He even on one occasion went out and took pictures for me since I wasn’t in town to personally look at the place.
As for their web site– It is the only site I truly found up to date info on and the latest listings.

I have not used their services, but this review is for their homebuying seminar. We woke up at 6:30 AM to drive the 2 ½ hours to attend their homebuying seminar. I was disappointed for couple of reasons. I am never hungry when I first wake up, and the ad for the seminar said they would provide food and drinks. Since it was held at the Cheesecake Factory, I figured they would provide a plate of danish’s or something appropriate for breakfast (it was held at 10AM). What did they provide as food? tiny slivers of cheese cake, and it tasted slightly off like the CF had given them a nearly spoiled cheesecake to serve at a discount. My stomach did get upset on the drive home. I don’t mean to look a gift horse in the mouth, but cheesecake at 10AM? That is not «food «as advertised, that is dessert. The 2 women who held the seminar were very nice, but the seminar was more about using their service, than about educating a person on the process of homebuying. I have been to 2 other homebuying courses 30 years ago, and thought I would take another one as a refresher, so I could learn more about buying foreclosures. This seminar is definitely not for first time buyers, no educational info is provided, this is only a seminar to sell you on using Redfin. The other disapointment was that they only handle purchases of 200K or more. I wish they would have stated this upfront, because I wouldn’t have wasted my time. After I sell my home, I am setting aside 200k cash, and want to find 2 foreclosures for that price, so I guess I will have to work with a company that is open to all levels of buyers, not just the elite over 200k class. The one thing I do like about Redfin is they do have the best overall website for viewing homes for sale. But, next time be more upfront about what your seminars are really about, and don’t promise food and provide rancid cheesecake at 10AM in the morning. I would have been happy to stop on the drive up and eat breakfast, but I figured since you offered, and I spent over half a tank of gas driving up there, I would just eat what was provided. Sorry, that my 200k cash is not good enough to work w/​your company.