Lao shi, thanks for your response. I did a bit of research on Redfin too; and find this article as attached. Could you please look at it and give your comment? Thank you and wish you a great weekend! http://www.marketwatch.com/story/six-things-to-know-about-the-real-estate-brokerage-redfin-before-it-goes-public-2017-07-05 (谈股论金)  595次阅读

作者: 珍惜 , 发表于: 2017-08-11 (2664天前) @ 雅歌

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/six-things-to-know-about-the-real-estate-brokerage-redfin-before-it-goes-public-2017-07-05

Six things to know about the real-estate company Redfin before it goes public

By Caitlin Huston
Published: July 17, 2017 1:38 p.m. ET

5
Redfin employs real-estate agents in addition to the online listings for which it’s best known
Bloomberg
Glenn Kelman, chief executive officer of Redfin Corp.
Redfin Corp. is ready to test its online-offline business model, which combines modern technology with a corps of traditional real-estate agents, on Wall Street.

The Seattle-based Redfin RDFN, -2.32% has filed for a public offering to raise up to $129 million, with a public market capitalization of up to $1.1 billion. Redfin set a range Monday of $12 to $14 a share and plans to sell 9.23 million shares in the offering.

The company has applied to list its common stock on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker symbol “RDFN,” with Goldman Sachs GS, -0.58% and Allen & Co. listed as the lead underwriters on the offering.

Here are six things to know about the company — which enables home shoppers to browse online listings on the Redfin.com site and then book an agent to bring them to see desired properties — as it prepares to go public:

Growing revenue and paring losses

Redfin recorded revenue of $267 million in 2016, up from $187 million in 2015 and $125 million in 2014.

The company is still unprofitable but pared back its losses in 2016 to $22.5 million from $30.2 million in 2015 and $25 million in 2014. However, its net loss for the first three months of 2017, during which time Redfin started two new verticals, is $28.1 million.

Overall, the company has an accumulated deficit of $613.3 million.

Redfin is highly susceptible to economic conditions, including interest rates, credit markets and consumer confidence, which can make its business seasonal and cyclical.

The company is in 80 markets in the U.S., with the majority of revenue coming from metropolitan areas including Boston, Chicago, San Francisco and Seattle.

The online-offline model

Redfin combines an online model, in which consumers can browse homes and take virtual tours, and an offline model, in which real-estate agents whom the company employs meet with the home shoppers and take them to tour properties.

Redfin builds its own brokerage software and uses machine learning to recommend listings and answer users’ questions. The site also gives sellers advice on marketing their residences and uses its algorithms to calculate what the home is worth.

Competitor Zillow Group also combines its online model with offline agents, but it does not employ the agents directly.

Redfin says its process ends up cheaper for customers, as it rebates part of the sales commission when property purchases are closed, with an average of $3,500 per sale going back to a consumer. It also says it has a lower overall commission rate of 1% to 1.5% rather than the traditional 2.5% to 3%.

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Redfin says it can afford to do this because it does not face high marketing costs to acquire customers, who come to the brokerage in the process of browsing online listings rather than via traditional advertising. (Marketing costs have been increasing, though, reaching $28.6 million in 2016, up from $19.9 million in 2015.)

The company said it had more than 20 million average monthly visitors to its website and mobile application in the first quarter of this year.

Cutting out the middleman

Redfin is trying to fill in other gaps in real estate and in the first quarter of 2017 it began originating and underwriting loans, with the intention of selling the debt on to third-party financial institutions, ultimately aiming to make the process of closing on a home entirely digital.

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This year it also started an “experimental” service in which the company buys homes from home sellers and then lists them on its site. So far that service may not be benefiting the sellers financially. “Customers who sell through Redfin Now will typically get less money for their home than they would listing their home with a real estate agent, but get that money faster with less risk and fuss,” the company said in its prospectus.

Neither business has had a material impact on Redfin’s operating results, but the company warns that it could invest more in these areas in the future.

Venture capital

The company has raised multiple rounds of private funding from venture-capital investors including Greylock Ventures, its biggest shareholder with a 12.4% stake before the offering, Madrona Ventures, whose pre-IPO stake is 11.4%, and Draper Fisher Jurvetson, which owns 10.2%.

It is not yet known whether the venture investors or company executives intend to sell shares in the offering.

In several rounds, Redfin has sold redeemable convertible preferred stock to its investors, receiving $167.5 million in return.

Only one data center

Redfin currently hosts its website at a single facility in Seattle, which means that its website and mobile applications could experience outages if anything were to happen in that area.

“Should this facility experience outages or downtimes for any reason ... we could suffer a significant interruption of our website and mobile application, which would harm our business,” the company says in its prospectus.

Geekwire has reported that Redfin appears to have recently switched to that facility, having previously run its operations on Amazon Web Services AMZN, +0.07% .

The problem with agents

Redfin counts its agents as employees, rather than independent contractors. These agents tend to earn less per transaction than traditional property agents, as the company tries to keep commissions low, which the company notes could cause it to struggle in attracting and retaining talent.

The company, though, has also encountered issues with the licensed third-party agents it uses when demand is particularly high or it does not have an agent in a given area. Redfin said it has entered into agreements to settle three lawsuits over class or representative claims from these agents and is awaiting court approval.