Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman on the cash buyer advantage

Today’s HousingWire Daily features a crossover episode with RealTrending. In this episode, Tracey Velt, editorial director at RealTrends, an HW Media company, interviews Redfin CEO and President Glenn Kelman, who talks about Redfin’s business model and discusses the company’s next steps. 

Additionally, he shares some insight into how brokerage leaders can benefit from figuring out how to turn all homebuyers into cash buyers. 

Here is a small preview of the interview. The transcript below has been lightly edited for length and clarity:

Tracey Velt: Are there any changes in the brokerage environment that have changed the way Redfin operates now? Maybe a change that would cause you to add new services, how you deliver your services or build customer flow for instance.

Glenn Kelman: Well, I think there are three major trends at least that have impinged on my thinking. The first is consolidation. So Rocket just decided to build its own brokerage. Better.com, another lender, decided to build its own brokerage. They all see the writing on the wall that the refi boom is going to end, and that the only source of purchase applications is going to be buyers’ agents. You’ve seen the same thing with the iBuyers who have started getting into the brokerage business.

There’s just this massive vertical integration where everybody feels like you’ve got to have a website, got to have a bunch of real estate agents, got to have a lender, got to have a title company, have to be able to offer some kind of cash deal to people who want to sell right away. And that is just going to put a bunch of pressure on everybody running a brokerage to do a lot very fast to keep up with this competitive environment. And we’re not just trying to keep up, we’re trying to push the pace. So I think we’re at the front of the race running as hard as we can, but it’s still pretty tiring.

HousingWire Daily examines the most compelling articles reported across HW Media. Each afternoon, we provide our listeners with a deeper look into the stories coming across our newsrooms that are helping Move Markets Forward. Hosted by the HW team and produced by Alcynna Lloyd and Elissa Branch.