Redfin (RDFN +0.00%) has grown impressively in recent years by leveraging technology and charging far lower selling commissions than its competitors. However, the stock has taken a beating in recent months, along with many other growth-focused companies. In this Fool Live video clip, recorded on Nov. 19, Fool.com contributors Matt Frankel and Jason Hall, along with editor Deidre Woollard, discuss whether Redfin might be a stock that patient investors should take a closer look at.
Matt Frankel: Redfin is the only major company that combines brokerage and the iBuying business, to the extent that they do anyway. One of the things I asked Glenn Sanford, who he sees his biggest competitor as because I would think it's Redfin. They're the only tech-focus brokerage. Redfin's more of a marketing play. Their strength is online marketing and really bringing the whole process online, whereas eXp still wants to serve the customer, still wants to provide in-person customer service. Really, it's a traditional brokerage, but with tech focused tools is the way he put it. Do either of you have thoughts on Redfin? I know the stocks down a lot lately. Do you think they'll keep going with iBuying? Do you think their brokerage has legs? I know they have about a 1% market share right now. What are your thoughts on Redfin?
Deidre Woollard: I think Jason and I and a whole bunch of other Fools, including Tim Beyers are card carrying members of the Glenn Kelman fan club. The leadership there is really great. Glenn Kelman was cautious about iBuying a long time ago and stressed the problems with getting the algorithm right and things like that. I like Redfin for so many reasons. Part of that is that they have all of these different ways that they can monetize the transaction. They, like so many others, are on that path to try to figure out how to get the whole transaction online. I think they're closer than some others. They have been tweaking their discount commissions. They were doing one percent in some markets and certainly a lot of traditional agents weren't so thrilled with that. It didn't turn out to be as profitable as they may have hoped, so they continued to tweak their model a bit.
Jason Hall: For me, the thing about Redfin is, and I'm going to admit there's just a little bit of a price bias over some of the larger players in this space, thinking about the valuation of the business. I just thought it has been a little bit more appropriately valued for the opportunity for most of the past year or so. But Deidre, you're exactly right. I'm a huge fan of its CEO. I think he is super humble and I think he's real too. I don't think it's an act at all. I just think that's who he is. I think he has taken a far more conservative approach to the iBuying business.
Also, at the end of the day, I think it's just maybe an acknowledgment that because it is so market-driven and if you do business in 30 markets, you have 30 different realities. As an iBuyer and staffing, it is challenging, finding the right contract. All of those things are really, really challenging. So taking a really conservative approach, obviously, considering what's happened over the past couple of months in this space, has worked out. I really think so. Here's another thing. I have a confession. I haven't said this before, but when we found out back in June that we were going to be moving to Massachusetts, I only used the Redfin app. That was the app that my wife and I ended up using. I'm still not completely sure why. We used several different ones, but that was the one that we came back to. It just was one that we liked the best and worked the best. It seemed to be the easiest to use and share houses and that kind of stuff. That spoke to me as a consumer, that I was drawn to its app the most, and I think that's really important for this business. It's not the biggest, doesn't have the most traffic.
