Seven Redfin Agents Ranked in the Top 250 Nationwide

Last year, Glenn recognized five Redfin agents who were included in the Wall Street Journal’s list of the nation’s top-producing agents. We thought we couldn’t be more proud. Turns out, we could…and we are.

This year, seven Redfin agents made the Wall Street Journal and Real Trends’ list of the nation’s top 250 real estate professionals based on 2010 sales volume. We know them as Redfin’s top dogs in the DC, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston and Seattle markets, so it warms us up to see them get the recognition they deserve as among the industry’s best.

Here’s the list of agents and their stats:

# 112, Brad Le, San Francisco Agent, 4.8 stars, 128 reviews, at Redfin since 2008
# 151, Marshall Park, Northern Virginia Agent, 4.8 stars, 285 reviews, at Redfin since 2008
# 193, Frank Wong, San Francisco Agent, 4.7 stars, 129 reviews, at Redfin since 2009
# 208, Joyti Goundar, Los Angeles Agent, 4.6 stars, 365 reviews, at Redfin since 2007
# 217, Kameron Eliassian, Los Angeles Agent, 4.6 stars, 162 reviews, at Redfin since 2009
# 239, Nancy Roos, Boston Agent, 4.5 stars, 137 reviews, at Redfin since 2009
# 250, Febe Cude, Seattle Agent, 4.5 stars, 313 reviews, at Redfin since 2008

This list is based solely on transaction volume. Volume is important at Redfin, because by working with buyers and sellers every day, our agents accumulate the knowledge and experience they need to build strong negotiation skills.  But we care a lot more about customer service, which is how we typically rank our agents.  We survey every customer and ask them to rate their experience working with their agent. Every review is posted on our website, as is each agent’s customer satisfaction (or “star”) rating. Read our top agents’ customer reviews, and you’ll see that customer service was by no means a cost of achieving award-winning sales volumes.   

Congratulations to Brad, Marshall, Frank, Joyti, Kameron, Nancy and Febe, and to their hard-working and dedicated teams who have helped them stand up and be counted among the best in their profession.

Redfin Wins Startup of the Year!

Hauling myself out of bed this morning, I jabbed my foot into a sharp piece of plastic. I peered into the gloom to see what it was and remembered that Redfin just won the Seattle 2.0 award for “Best Startup.” Our trophy had started the night in bed and then been cast aside — until I stepped on it.

And now the trophy is in our office near Pike Place Market. We’ll treat it like the Stanley Cup, letting everyone on the team take it home for one night to use as a dinner plate or a magnifying glass. There are many cliches appropriate for this occasion, all of them true. Any success we’ve had so far is because of other people, not me. The award seems silly compared to the magnitude of the challenges we face in making Redfin the world’s best place to work, in serving our customers, in creating a lasting business.

And it is important for others to remember that we could still screw up; we are already keenly aware of this. In fact, every pore of our skin has become less attuned to the typical sensations of warmth, hardness, dryness than to the zillion, seething ways we are screwing up right now. But we’re confident we’ll figure out how to stop screwing up, mostly faster than new screw ups can occur.

And it’s nice for a moment to take stock of how far we’ve come from David Eraker’s sweaty summer-time apartment at 10th & Roy in Seattle. We had a website running on one computer, built from a map of Seattle hand-stitched together when Google or Microsoft had no online mapping services; we had a few hundred thousand dollars in capital and plenty of bills. Two other startups had raised millions from two of the Valley’s best firms to launch national real estate search using open technologies.

In my first week, I walked out of the apartment and into the stairwell to call our sole investor, Madrona. My message was simple: “Holy shit.” Our competition had far more money, more engineers, and executives that had built publicly traded consumer Internet giants. I came home that night and communicated to my wife in the most meaningful language available to the two of us, citing Han Solo’s comment to Princess Leia before escaping the Empire’s fleet with a jump into hyperspace: “Sure hope that tractor beam’s out of commission, or this is gonna be a real short trip.”

Somehow, the tractor beam was out of commission, and our little ship escaped into deep, open space. Later that week, we decided against running real estate ads and instead became a brokerage, hiring real estate agents and serving customers. It was a feel-good decision to make because of all the ways we wanted to make real estate better, but I also remember feeling a shadow of pain — “as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.” We knew in becoming a customer-service business not only that ours would be a far longer and more complicated journey but that we were largely the kind of people with the compulsions to delight and to grind that we would need on that journey.

And then we got back to work.

Many thanks to our founding team of David Eraker, David Selinger, Michael Dougherty, to all the folks who worked for free but especially the last two — Savan Kong and Bahn Lee — to all the folks at Redfin past and present who pour your guts out for Redfin, and to all our fanatical, roof-raising customers. Thanks too to this community. Without your advice and support, we’d have never made it this far.