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Comment by paulie_a | Hacker News Reader

Redfin didn't exactly do anything interesting or unique. It was literally yet another real estate app/website. It's not surprising.

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To be fair, Redfin is a technology focused MLS member and agency, not just a listings aggregation app. You're entitled to your opinion if you don't think that is interesting or unique, but their offering is far more than just a website and app. Interesting data on their agent stats and comp here: https://www.redfin.com/blog/2018/01/how-much-do-redfin-agent...

I worked in that industry. It really is a pretty "meh" company.

Also there is no MLS, there are a lot of them.

Though the MLS is pretty distrubuted, these days you can consider it as a single entity for the most part, though the shenanigans from the early 2000s still happen every day.

Shenanigans from the early 2000s?

There's windows that you have to put a property up in (e.g. 72 hours), but if your company can act as both buyer and seller you can double(ish) your commission, so you either:

1. Try and get an offer before that window is up.

2. Put the listing up with enough wrong information that you get 2-3 more days to try and sell the property.

Apart from that, there's a lot of minor lying when it comes to these listings. Maybe the lot was 2 acres before it was subdivided, so you say on the listing that it's 2 acres. Maybe you jiggle the handle on the listing for the first week or so so it shows up as new/updated every day. Maybe you say that the listing has "central window unit AC" to try and confuse people into showing up.

It's mostly a lot of light treason against buyers and sellers. Real estate is a bit of a dogfight and much of it falls into the "technically illegal but not worth suing" bucket.

You absolutely cannot consider it as a single entity. It is not distributed, it is fractured. There is zero consistency. I got out of that industry a while back and I still have the local MLS phone number memorized.

It's a complete shit show as of 2013. Basically anything that is on any MLS I've seen is probably incorrect.

Yeah it was pretty bad 5-10 years ago, but working with it as recently as Tuesday, I can say that the major benefit of sites like Zillow and Redfin is that MLS companies have had to adapt fast to stay competitive. The realtor I'm working with has changed MLS platforms three times in the last year alone.

When I was selling my condo last year I asked for it to be kept off of Zillow. That site is incredibly innacurate for integrating data. Their cute name for pricing is always way off in my experience.

They seek to decrease the realtor fee for homes by employing rather than commissioning realtors, as well as decreasing the information search costs to buy and sell homes. It's a solid approach if they play the details right -- become a platform for home sales.

Actually, they're very different from most others, in that they're a vertically integrated brokerage rather than just connecting you to random brokers who advertise through them a la Zillow.

I worked in the technology side of real estate for a decade, they really are nothing special. It's marketing buzz and same old thing.

What did you work on, specifically? I was the founder/CEO of one of the real estate apps that you claim they're not too different from, and I disagree.

I know there's not much that's sexy from a technical perspective about running what is effectively a tech-heavy discount brokerage at scale, but it allows them to offer a fundamentally better UX than Zulia or any of the pure leadgen sites can. And there's a huge amount of code involved in running the ops on an organization like that, which a pure search app doesn't have to write/maintain.

It's really selling them short to say their only difference is marketing.

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