warnings about redfin?

[forgotten_aria]

The rumor mill gave us a vague, "people are getting screwed by redfin" today, but searching the internet I can't find any horror stories. Anyone heard anything?

Comments

[allonymist.livejournal.com]

I haven't heard anything; we went with them to buy our current place (closed in July), and stuff went fine.

[forgotten-aria.livejournal.com]

Ooo! That's good to know. Which agent did you use? Anything worth sharing?

[allonymist.livejournal.com]

We used Adam; I think stuff went pretty well. We wound up looking at a bunch of pretty good houses indirectly via their search tools, though we found our current place through an open house. When we were ready to make an offer, stuff went pretty quickly.

There were several points in the process where I felt that we were handling things ourselves that a full-service agent would have done for us, and I felt that our agent was paying attention to us only when a) we asked him to, or b) it was time to move to the next part of the process. With that said, however, I don't think that getting more attention and reduced organizational load by going through a regular agent would necessarily have been worth several extra thousands of dollars in fees.

One piece of homebuying advice: get yourself a way to send and receive faxes from home/work if you haven't got one already. The whole process, from loans to lawyers, is heavily into faxes.

[gmpe.livejournal.com]

I have to add that we didn't use them, but that we had the same experience with a full-fee agent of feeling like we were doing stuff the agent should deal with. The whole story is super complicated and the really bad agents ended up being reassigned by the office and not getting a commission, etc. Still, my experience with non-redfin agents is that it totally depends on the agent and very few of them are as focused and proactive as we, or our friends, are likely to be. We gave up on having an agent represent us during the process because none of them were proactive enough and we lost deals because of it. The only reason the deal we finally made went through was because we had the seller's agent motivated to sell the house and make her commission and she knew she was getting all of it and not splitting it if she could keep the deal together. She worked her butt off dealing with the bank, etc. and totally earned her commission. If you are willing to stay on top of the listings and know houses well, I am unconvinced of the benefits to having an agent when you are the buyer.

just call redfin

[(Anonymous)]

It might be worth checking out the forums on redfin to see what customers and potential buyers/sellers are saying - i know that they're pretty active and open. http://forums.redfin.com/rf/

Re: just call redfin

[forgotten-aria.livejournal.com]

I've been reading their forums and their reviews on the redfin site, but hey have some control over that. So far they seem great, but it's always good to investigate disenting opinions, espeically on such a large purchase.