Frequently Asked Questions

Redfin is the first online real estate brokerage for home-buyers and -sellers. Our mission is to use the Internet to give home buyers and sellers more information with less hassle, better service, and new money-saving choices. Our website combines real estate listings with tax records and analytics on an aerial map of cities such as Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle and Washington, DC. Customers who are ready to buy a home can save money by using our electronic service to make an offer, with local Redfin agents handling negotiations and closing. We offer a similar service for sellers.

It's easy! Enter a location such as a city, neighborhood, ZIP code or MLS # in the search bar that appears in the top-left corner of every page on Redfin.com, then click Search Listings. We'll zoom to that location on our map and show you the relevant listings. To filter listings by criteria such as price or square footage, click the search box. This opens a panel of search criteria that you can adjust to filter the properties that Redfin displays on its map. You can also access this panel by clicking the Price, Beds... link to the left of the search box.

Redfin retrieves a maximum of 500 results in one query. If your query returns more than 500 results, you have to reduce the scope of your search result. The scope of your results depends on the area included in the map and the criteria set in the query form. You can narrow the range of your query by filtering on criteria such as minimum number of bedrooms or maximum price, or by zooming in on the map to see a smaller area in detail. As you zoom or pan around the map, Redfin will query its database for new results.

Redfin Direct for Sellers is an online service for listing a home for sale. Redfin will help you price your home and get it ready to put on the market. When you are ready to list your home, Redfin will register it in the local MLS and provide you with all the tools you need to sell including a professional yard sign, flyers, and a lockbox. Once you start receiving offers, Redfin will help you with all of the negotiations and paperwork through closing. Instead of a commission, Redfin charges a $500 processing fee when you sign the listing contract, and a flat fee of $3,500 at closing.

Redfin Direct for Buyers is an online service for making an offer on a home in California, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Virginia, Washington, or Washington, DC. You search online for homes and tour them on your own, then submit an online form that allows you to draft an offer. Your Redfin Direct Agent will review your draft offer and follow up with you by telephone to formalize the offer and complete all needed paperwork. Once you're ready, your Redfin Direct Agent will submit the offer to the seller. As part of our service, Redfin refunds two-thirds of its commission back to you, the buyer. This amount is usually 2% of the final home price, depending on the amount of the commission paid to Redfin by the seller, with an average savings for customers of over $10,000.

If you buy a property through Redfin Direct for Buyers, we refund to you two-thirds of the commission that we receive from the seller, as long as our fee exceeds our $4,000 minimum. The convention in most markets is for the seller to pay 3% of the final price as a commission to the buyer's agent, resulting in a Redfin refund of 2% of the final price for any listing selling for $400,000 or more.

My Redfin allows you to mark listings from the map and monitor their status via a My Redfin web pages. You can use saved searches to define a listing search and get daily email updates with new listings that meet your criteria. Redfin sends an email message every morning that includes updates on saved search results. To stop these emails, you can turn off saved-search notification or just click unsubscribe at the bottom of the email notification.

Visit Redfin Forums, our online message board for real estate do-it-yourselfers. You can get everything you need there.

Sweet Digs, my friend! The Sweet Digs blogs are written by local real estate mavens who know everything about their neighborhood, or are on their way to finding out. You'll find fresh insight and strong opinions there, and you'll find out what's going on in your market.

Nothing. Redfin offers registration only to support personalization, not as a lead-generation mechanism for our business or for our partners. Redfin does not send registrants solicitations from Redfin or its partners, and it does not share registrant details with any third parties. Occasionally, we will send selected users a customer satisfaction survey or ask for opinions on new features; you can opt out of all future surveys by replying to the survey email with REMOVE in the subject line.

To unsubscribe from Redfin Listing Updates either click the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email or follow these steps:

1. Click My Redfin
2. Select Saved Searches.
3. For each saved search, set notifications to "Never."

1. Sign out of Redfin by clicking Sign Out at the top right of the page.
2. Click Forgot your password? below the Password field in the "Already A User?" section.
3. Enter your email address and click "Submit."
4. Check your email for a message with a link to a form that resets your password.

David Eraker founded Redfin in October 2002. The company launched its real estate search site for Seattle in October 2004. After years of bootstrap operations, the company raised its first venture capital in September 2005.

Redfin makes money today in one of two ways:

• When customers make an offer on a home using Redfin Direct for Buyers, we earn a commission as their broker. We return two thirds of the commission to the customer, and retain one third for our services. Our minimum fee is $4,000. If the seller pays less than $12,000 in commissions, we still take $4,000 as our fee.
• When customers list their home using Redfin Direct for Sellers, Redfin earns a flat fee for the services we provide. You pay a $500 processing fee plus $3,500 at closing for complete support from listing to close.

We love to hear feedback from our customers, which you can submit through our message boards at Redfin Forums or by emailing us. Executives, agents and product managers monitor both Forums and email to understand how we can improve our business. Anyone who sends a solicitation via either method will be ignored.

Redfin has been funded through the investments of our employees, contractors, angel investors and several venture capitalists, including Madrona Venture Group, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Vulcan Capital and Brand Equity Ventures.

Redfin offers our local service in six states and Washington, DC. The states we serve are California, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Virginia, and Washington. In each state, Redfin service is available for the following counties:

Redfin is planning to expand to the tri-state area around New York City in 2009.

You may receive duplicate listings in your Redfin Listing Updates email if you are receiving updates from more than one saved search. This is because we display the results from each search separately and there may be overlap between your searches.

You may not receive a Redfin Listing Updates email every day because there are no updates for a given day.