Redfin Has a New CEO. His Résumé Tells You What Rocket Really Bought.
When a mortgage company spends billions acquiring one of the country’s best-known real estate portals and brokerages, you’d think the person it chooses to run that business might know something about real estate.
Rocket apparently had something else in mind.
The new CEO of Redfin is Alessio Sanfilippo, most recently Vice President of Insights for Meta’s Reality Labs. His background isn’t brokerage, mortgage lending or housing. It’s data science, analytics, artificial intelligence and understanding how people behave when they use technology.
At first, that struck me as an odd choice.
Then I started looking at what Rocket actually bought.
And it stopped looking odd at all.
Follow the Consumer
Redfin isn’t simply a brokerage. It’s a place where millions of people reveal something potentially much more valuable long before they’re ready to transact: what they’re thinking about doing.
They search for houses. Change price ranges. Save properties. Return to particular neighborhoods. Look at the same listing repeatedly. Abandon searches and come back months later.
Taken individually, those actions may mean very little. At enormous scale, they can become signals of consumer intent.
Now put Redfin at the front of a company that can potentially encounter the same consumer through brokerage, mortgage, title and mortgage servicing.
That’s when I went down the rabbit hole.
I started reading what Redfin itself says about the information it collects. Then Rocket’s descriptions of its data and AI strategy. Then I looked at the combined data holdings, the companies now sitting inside the organization, the privacy disclosures and some of the litigation surrounding parts of this ecosystem.
Eventually the real-estate acquisition started looking like something considerably larger.
The House Is the Beginning of the Relationship
Real estate people naturally think of a home search as the beginning of a transaction.
Rocket appears to be thinking about the beginning of a consumer relationship.
A house search can lead to an agent. The agent can lead to a transaction. The transaction can lead to a mortgage and title services. The mortgage can lead to years of servicing. And somewhere along that path may come refinancing, another purchase, another sale or another financial product.
Every interaction also produces more information.
That makes the nearly 50 million monthly visitors Rocket said Redfin brought to the combination especially interesting.
So does the résumé of the man Rocket chose to put in charge.
I Think We Need to Look at Redfin Differently
I don’t think Rocket hired a Meta data executive because Redfin needed somebody to explain how to sell houses.
Redfin already has people who know how to sell houses.
I think the much more interesting question is what Rocket intends to learn from all of the people who come to Redfin looking at them.
I unpacked the whole thing on my website, including exactly what Redfin says it collects and infers, how Rocket describes the combined data operation, where Mr. Cooper fits, and why I think this appointment tells us quite a lot about what Rocket believes the future value of Redfin really is.
And yes, by the end of it, Granny gets involved.
Read the full article: Rocket’s New Redfin CEO Doesn’t Want to Be Your Real Estate Broker. But He Does Want Your Data.