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Redfin

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The profile

In April 2020 Redfin furloughed most of the agents it sent home and leaned on the federal government to carry them: chief executive Glenn Kelman wrote that about 75 percent of the departing field staff lived in states where the CARES Act's $600 weekly unemployment supplement would pay them more than Redfin did. The company took no PPP loan. It claimed $1.3 million of employee retention credits and deferred $13.6 million of payroll taxes under the CARES Act, raised $110 million from investors, and finished 2020 with revenue up 14 percent, at $886.1 million.

  • Category: real estate technology
  • Pandemic-layoff role: Additional sourced company
  • Last updated: 2026-11-01

In the archive

Founders, executives and investors

Kelman has been chief executive since September 2005 and a director since March 2006, according to Redfin's annual report for 2024. Before Redfin he co-founded Plumtree Software. Redfin went public in August 2017.

Business before the pandemic

Redfin runs a real estate brokerage whose lead agents are its own employees, and a listings website that sends them customers. GeekWire reported that it had 3,377 employees at the end of 2019, including more than 1,500 lead agents. Kelman wrote that Redfin had hired about 25 percent fewer agents each year than its website demand could support, so that a 25 percent fall in demand would still leave the workforce fully productive. Redfin had also been buying homes directly through RedfinNow.

What the pandemic did to the business

"Now housing demand is down much more than that," Kelman wrote on April 7, 2020. The drop did not last. Redfin's revenue for 2020 was $886.1 million, up 14 percent from $779.8 million; brokerage revenue rose 22 percent while revenue from the homes it bought and sold, its properties segment, fell 13 percent. It earned an operating profit of $0.8 million, against an operating loss of $79.2 million in 2019, and its net loss narrowed to $18.5 million from $80.8 million.

On April 1, 2020, as demand fell, Redfin sold 4,484,305 shares of common stock at $15.61 a share and 40,000 shares of convertible preferred stock at $1,000 a share, for gross proceeds of $110 million. The preferred stock pays a 5.5 percent annual dividend.

Relief: no PPP loan, a payroll-tax deferral and a small credit

SBA's PPP loan data list no loan to the Seattle company. The CARES Act reached Redfin in three other ways. Its annual report for 2020 says Redfin claimed $1.3 million of employee retention credits, which partly offset $7.9 million of direct costs of its response to COVID-19, "primarily from severance payments." It elected to defer eligible payroll taxes beginning in April 2020, to be paid in two equal installments in 2021 and 2022; at the end of 2020 it carried $6.8 million of the deferred taxes as a current liability and another $6.8 million as a noncurrent one.

The third was unemployment insurance. The CARES Act added $600 a week to state unemployment benefits, and Kelman wrote that this was one reason Redfin chose furloughs: it estimated that three in four of the departing field staff could collect more than their Redfin pay. The estimate was Redfin's own. It assumed every state opted in, and it did not account for workers whose history disqualified them or who would not get the maximum. "No matter how much unemployment insurance the government pays, letting people go, even temporarily, is an unnatural act that we hate having to do," Kelman wrote. He ended: "We'll fight like wild animals to bring everyone on furlough back."

Layoffs

On April 7, 2020 Redfin sent 41 percent of its agents home, most on furlough until September 1, and laid off 7 percent of its staff; headquarters staff took temporary salary cuts of 10 to 15 percent. How Redfin handled layoffs →

After the first shock

Redfin decided in November 2022 to wind RedfinNow down and finished selling the inventory in the second quarter of 2023. For 2024 it reported revenue of $1.04 billion, a net loss of $164.8 million and 4,778 employees.

Since 2025

Rocket Companies, the Detroit-based owner of Rocket Mortgage, completed its acquisition of Redfin on July 1, 2025. The companies introduced Rocket Preferred Pricing the same day: buyers who use a Redfin agent and a Rocket Mortgage loan get a one-percentage-point cut in their interest rate for the first year, or a lender credit of up to $6,000. The release quoted Kelman as Redfin's chief executive. On January 13, 2026 Kelman said on LinkedIn that he was leaving Redfin after 20 years, and Rocket's chief executive, Varun Krishna, took over as Redfin's interim chief executive while a successor was sought (MortgagePoint, January 13, 2026). Redfin's blog now describes Kelman as its former CEO.

Sources

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