Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman Interview on ActiveRain - Take Your Best Shot

Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman to be interviewed on Monday October 17th at 9am Pacific Time on ActiveRain. Click here to join us online.

 

In case you missed it, Redfin recently caused quite a stir here on ActiveRain and across the real estate blogosphere when they began displaying sales statistics for real estate agents in the markets in which Redfin does business. Called the 'Agent Scouting Report', the Redfin blog says the purpose was to allow consumers "to look up stats on any agent — where he sold homes, how quickly, at what prices, with how many price reductions — all on a map, with pictures of every sale".

The goal? "......help consumers make informed choices about which real estate agent to choose.”

There was a flurry of people calling 'foul' for a variety of reasons. (Just search 'redfin' on the search bar here on ActiveRain and you'll see what I mean) Everything from invasion of privacy to inaccurate data was sited as reasons that Redfin shouldn't be allowed to display this data on it's website. Agent Scouting Report 1.0 would last just under a week online before Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman and his team would make the decision to pull the feature down from the Redfin website.

In his blog post announcing the decision, you can see that Glenn has no fear of bringing innovations to the real estate industry that have the potential to be disruptive. In fact, taking risks is part of the culture at Redfin. You know this if you've been following along since they came on the scene in the real estate industry in 2005 when they hired their first employee.

Along the way, they've raised a decent amount of venture capital and every so often, released a product that has the potential to be a game changer in the real estate industry. Their last flurry (prior to Agent Scouting Report) was over publishing Redfin agent comments about other agent's listings on their website for Redfin clients to see.

None of this matters if Redfin didn't have one of the best home searches in the industry. Consumers pay attention because Redfin has given consumers a great home search tool........oh, and there's that whole commission rebate thing.

At the helm all along the way has been Glenn Kelman. His resume is pretty impressive and prior to stepping in as the CEO at Redfin he had never been in the real estate industry. So how does a guy from the software industry end up in real estate with what seems to be a goal of disrupting the status quo?

We'll let him tell that part of the story.

Nikesh and I are thrilled to have Glenn joining us on Monday October 17th at 9am Pacific Time for a discussion about Agent Scouting Report, Redfin, disruption in real estate and the future of an industry that has been attempting to turn away these outside disruptions since the first IDX feed went live.

And since there were so many of you that had some really strong feelings about the Agent Scouting Report, we want to invite you to let us know what you'd like us to ask Glenn. I have a ton of questions and could probably conduct the entire discussion without any help from our members. I love this guy's moxy. If you read his blog, you can tell he's fearless. It's people like Glenn that flush out inefficiencies in whatever industry they chose to enter. We happen to have him in our industry and love Redfin or hate Redfin, you have to respect someone willing to stand in there and take the punches. That's been Glenn since I first saw him on stage at Inman's Real Estate Connect conference in San Francisco in 2007 (I think it was 2007......time flies when you are having fun) debating traditional real estate brokerage versus discount brokerage with Lennox Scott.

So let's have it, give us your best shot and I'll do my best to try to knock Glenn off his game! (Nikesh is too nice, so we'll let him ask the easy questions....haha)

If you'd like us to ask Glenn something, make sure you leave a comment below and we'll do our best to get in as many questions from ActiveRain members as possible.

~Bob