While Redfin has been around for a while now, their buyers rarely migrate from the Eastside (Bellevue, Redmond, Kirkland) or Seattle down to my neck of the woods, South King County. For those of you who didn't see a post I made about them in response to another agent's blog post, they are purely a brainchild of the Internet crossed with the engineer's desire to tinker. To buy a home through Redfin, the buyer goes out and asks listing agents to show them their listings. If they locate one that they like, they contact Redfin and use their buyer's agent. Most of the commission is rebated back to them at closing. If they ask the Redfin agent to show houses to them, they pay a flat hourly rate to Redfin. Sellers who contract with Redfin also get the barebones service and incur costs for contract negotiation. You get the idea.

My friend has a listing near my office. His office is in Pierce County so it was inconvenient for him to show a buyer who called in on his listing so he asked if I would show the listing for him and hopefully, pick up the buyer. This is a good friend, so I did it, rearranging my schedule with my buyer so that I could make it out to the house quickly. (The buyer was in the driveway.)

After I showed the house to the buyer, he began to get more confrontational with me and said that he would offer, if he wrote up the home, about 30K under market value and that he would fill out the forms himself as he had all of them or contact the listing agent directly or use Redfin. I explained a few times that it may seem that just filling out the forms is enough but there's a lot of other things that go on with a transaction that he might be unfamiliar with. I also told him that I frequently save my clients a lot more money than is owed on my commission and that he was not liable for the cost of the commission. Clearly, he did not want to use my services at all and did not deem them to be of any value, despite my sharing market knowledge and conditions, local pricing, etc. He just wanted to use me to get into the house and then be on my way.

 This is a trend locally with buyers that started a few years back who will work only with the listing agent to try to get the commission rebated from the buyer side. They also employ Redfin as another means to cut commissions as well. They are frequently software engineers or other technical professionals.  Unfortunately, they are also doing themselves out of the service of an agent like myself who will negotiate for the best deal, do market pricing checks on their behalf, make sure they're getting a good value on their loan, decent home inspection, etc. In listening to this fellow, I heard more than enough to be certain he would scuttle most deals he attempts to negotiate. I did notify my friend of what was likely to happen since he, not me, was more likely to get a call from the buyer.