As the company reopens its iBuying division, Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman sees opportunity for iBuyers in beach towns.

Online real estate broker Redfin (NASDAQ: RDFN) has started to repopulate its employee ranks. At the time, Redfin put approximately 1,000 of its employees on furlough. Redfin is making these moves because of what it terms a "rapid rise" in demand for purchasing homes.

(Bloomberg) -- Americans are spending more time than ever at home. Seems like a good time to sell them a new house, according to Zillow.Zillow Group Inc. is preparing to fire up the company’s home-flipping business as robust search activity on the company’s websites shows that house-hunters are undeterred by social distancing measures or economic uncertainty.The company, which stopped purchasing homes in March, has seen consumers embrace virtual home tours and digital transactions, giving Chief Executive Officer Rich Barton confidence to start buying homes even as Covid-19 pandemic continues to rage.“My belief is that people are spending so much time at home they’ve discovered the shortcomings,”Barton said in an interview from a vacation house, where he’s holed up with his family. “I don’t have a home office. My kids are all over the house, using the WiFi. I’m in the bedroom. I don’t know, maybe I should have a house with an office.”Zillow shares jumped as much as 13% to $54.58 on Friday. That followed a double-digit surge on Thursday that turned the stock positive for the year.Zillow, best known for its home-search tools, has spent the last two years building a data-driven spin on home-flipping known as iBuying. In that business, it uses its website to make rapid offers to home-sellers; when the sellers accept, Zillow buys the home, makes some light repairs, and puts the home back on the market.The business loses money, but has grown quickly – it generated $770 million in revenue in the first quarter, more than double what the company took in through its core advertising business.Softbank-backed Opendoor, which pioneered the model, has resumed buying homes. Redfin Corp., another iBuyer, restarted activity this week in Austin, Denver and the Inland Empire east of Los Angeles. The company said it expects to sell the homes it bought before halting the service in March for about 2% less than it had originally assumed.Redfin Now, as the iBuying service is known, “performed better in a downturn than some had feared,” CEO Glenn Kelman said on an earnings call Thursday.Zillow finished the first quarter with 1,791 homes on its books, according to a shareholder letter on Thursday. But Barton said that he’s not concerned about adding inventory while there’s still potential for another round of shelter-in-place orders.“Even if a second wave comes, we have learned, and the industry has learned -- and the customer is beginning to learn – that the transaction can be conducted safely,” he said.(Updates share price.)For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

(NASDAQ: RDFN) — The effects of the coronavirus pandemic and subsequent shutdowns hit the housing market in full force in April—according to a new report from Redfin (www.redfin.com), the technology-powered real estate brokerage—with sales and listings both turning in historic declines from year-ago levels. In the past two months, the housing market has seen the fastest slowdown on record as it flipped from one of the strongest markets ever at the end of February to a near standstill in April.

The coronavirus pandemic sent shock waves throughout the real-estate industry. “It’s a good time to buy an investment property if you can find inventory at a good price,” said Daren Blomquist, vice president of market economics at real-estate website Auction.com. When the coronavirus pandemic began to trigger stay-at-home orders across the country, it upended the home-buying process.

The financial repercussions are only just beginning to be felt, as are the changes in long-term consumer and business activity. Such has been the case at small technology-driven real estate broker Redfin (NASDAQ: RDFN). Surprisingly, the rally in activity on its real estate platform since then has been just as dramatic.

When the coronavirus pandemic first forced states to issue stay-at-home orders, so-called iBuyer companies quickly stopped purchasing homes in anticipation of major upheavals in the U.S. housing market. Offerpad, a company that specializes in buying homes directly from sellers and then turning them around quickly to be resold, said that it will begin fielding offers from home buyers, sellers and real-estate agents again starting May 8 in more than 800 cities across the country. Another iBuyer, Opendoor, said Monday that it will begin buying and selling homes again.

Redfin Corporation (NASDAQ: RDFN) today announced that Chief Financial Officer Chris Nielsen will present at the following investor conference:

What happened Shares of Redfin (NASDAQ: RDFN) popped 8% on May 8, following the release of the discount brokerage's first-quarter results.  So what  Redfin's revenue surged by 73% year over year to $191 million.

(NASDAQ: RDFN) — The housing market in Oakland and suburban parts of the Bay Area is recovering at a faster rate than in San Francisco or San Jose, according to a new analysis from Redfin (www.redfin.com), the technology-powered real estate brokerage. While pending home sales and the number of new listings have begun to pick up throughout the Bay Area in early May after a drastic drop in April, homebuyer demand is strongest in Oakland, where homes tend to be larger and less expensive, with more outdoor space.

(NASDAQ: RDFN) — The number of newly built homes on the market fell just 10.5% year over year in April, the smallest decline in 2020 to date, according to a new report from Redfin (www.redfin.com), the technology-powered real estate brokerage. The supply of existing homes plunged 24% during the same time period.

(NASDAQ: RDFN) — The sudden shift to remote work, brought on by the coronavirus shutdowns will likely accelerate a major migration away from expensive coastal cities. According to a new survey of homebuyers and sellers featured in Redfin's latest report, 1 in 4 newly remote workers expect to continue to work remotely once shutdowns end, and over half of respondents would move if they never had to go into an office.

Redfin Corporation (NASDAQ: RDFN) today announced that Chief Financial Officer Chris Nielsen will present at the following investor conference:

(Bloomberg) -- It’s the surprise of a spring selling season that’s been anything but normal: Buyers returning to the housing market have been battling over the few available properties.While sales are way down, the lack of inventory has propped up prices and led to bidding wars, even as economic fallout from the pandemic mounts and real estate agents adjust to new public health guidelines that have made it more difficult to market homes.“Since the pandemic began, demand fell off a cliff,” said Taylor Marr, an economist at Redfin Corp. “What most people overlook is that sellers also pulled back.”The supply-demand imbalance meant that roughly 40% of homebuyers that Redfin agents worked with recently faced competition when they tried to purchase a home. The rate was even higher in cities like San Francisco, Boston and even Fort Worth, Texas, where more than 60% of properties the company’s clients bid on received multiple offers.The U.S. housing market went into the Covid crisis with a supply shortage that was driving up prices beyond the reach of many buyers, even with years of low interest rates. That problem hasn’t gone away, despite the economic uncertainty. The number of active listings shrank by almost a quarter in April, compared with a year earlier, according to Redfin.Still, the market has cooled. Sales of existing homes are projected to fall 20% in April from a month earlier, according to estimates compiled by Bloomberg. That would follow an 8.5% drop in March. Construction of new houses plunged by the most on record in April, with builders waiting out the virus. That means new supply will be slower to materialize. The market dynamics are a shock to some buyers. Kenzo Teves, a 24-year-old business analyst for a pharmaceutical company, decided to start shopping for his first house this spring, because interest rates were so low. He had money saved for a down payment and was secure in his job -- factors he thought would help him find a home near Boston.In late April, he made his first bid on a three-bedroom house in Chelsea, Massachusetts, that was listed for $420,000. The property got six other offers and even bidding $30,000 over the asking price wasn’t enough to cinch the deal.“It’s pretty strange,” he said. “I would have thought that it would have tipped more to my favor as a buyer.”The inventory shortage is being felt in smaller cities, too. Kim Park, an agent with Keller Williams Realty in Boise, Idaho, said her business is down about 20% because sales have slowed. But bargains are still hard to find.She’s working with a young family with two kids and a rental lease coming up for renewal next month. To buy a house for almost $300,000, they had to fight off three other bidders and pay $10,000 above asking price, Park said. They got it only because the winning bidder’s financing fell through.Homeowners in Boise are staying put, worried about about letting potential buyers in during the pandemic or upgrading to a more expensive property when employment is so tenuous.“It’s made our tight market that much tighter,” Park said.In Los Angeles, Sally Forster Jones said two of her clients bid unsuccessfully this month on two different houses. One was listed for about $800,000 and the other for less than $1.5 million. Each received more than 30 offers and are now in escrow at above the listed price. Jones declined to share specifics on the homes because her clients made backup offers and she doesn’t want to invite more competition.“I’m encouraging my sellers to put their property back on the market,” she said. “The fact that there’s limited inventory is to their advantage right now.”Not all real estate agents see cutthroat competition. Nina Hatvany, a luxury agent with Compass in San Francisco, said buyers are coming back to the market but the complications of showing houses during a pandemic has weeded out all but the most motivated people. And, even then, there’s sometimes a mismatch between what people think a property is worth.“I’ve got plenty of buyers saying, ‘I’m ready to buy if it’s a good price,’” she said. Meanwhile, “the sellers are worried about taking a big hit.”Home prices will hold up, at least through the summer, but declines are coming, said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. Once foreclosure moratoriums and forbearance programs end, lenders will start repossessions as unemployment persists. Ultimately, as many as 2 million homeowners will lose properties because of the the pandemic, he said.In the near term, buyers are going to have to slug it out, especially for the types of property that are most in demand. Redfin’s data show that houses listed below $1 million were the most competitive, partly because banks have tightened standards for jumbo loans, said Marr. With everyone sheltering in place, buyers are also more eager to buy single-family houses than condos.“Everyone wants a home with a yard,” Marr said.(Updates with drop in listings in the fifth paragraph.)For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

* * *According to Redfin (RDFN), the online real estate brokerage, homebuying demand has unquestionably emerged from the Covid-19 doldrums. For the week of May 17 demand was 16.5% higher than it was before the pandemic on a seasonally-adjusted basis, according to Redfin's latest weekly report.To handle the sudden demand uptick, Redfin has brought back approximately 350 of the 1,000 employees that were impacted by the furlough it carried out in early April.Mortgage rates have stimulated the housing market, with the average 30-year fixed rate mortgage at record lows of 3%. Additionally, in a recent Federal Reserve survey, 13% of respondents reported a job loss or furlough in March or early April, but that number was disproportionately represented by households with income less than $40,000, at 39%. Those with the means to purchase a home were less impacted by unemployment.Additionally, search data from Redfin.com suggests that in the wake of coronavirus and with remote employment on the rise, people are increasingly intending to migrate from expensive metropolitan ares to smaller and less expensive cities and suburbs.Tiffany Aquino, a Redfin agent in Virginia, said, "The pandemic has people re-evaluating their lifestyle and their goals. People who were considering a move two or three years down the line are pulling the trigger now. People are putting family priorities first."Technology might be a factor in this. Redfin said that 3D virtual home tours are rapidly becoming more prevalent, which for obvious reasons is an advantage during this period of "stay in place" mandates throughout the world.Investors have liked these recent developments, as Redfin rose by over 20% in the last week and 7.2% on Friday, to close at $29.48. TipRanks shows that analysts hold an overall moderately bullish outlook on Redfin. Stephens analyst John Campbell recently raised his price target from $19 to $26, saying that he remains a "big fan" of Redfin and that "it does appear as though the market is going to likely fare far better than we feared."  Yet with the stock running up of late, the 12-month analyst price target of $24.22 represents 18% downside from its current level. (See Redfin stock analysis on TipRanks).Related News: KB Home Declares Second-Quarter Cash Dividend Google, Apple Roll Out Coronavirus Contact Tracing Technology Apple is Said to Snap Up Startup NextVR For Virtual Reality Content; Top Analyst Sees Buying Opportunity More recent articles from Smarter Analyst: * Logitech Shares Lifted In Pre-Market On Share Buyback Plan, 10% Dividend Boost * Billionaire Ackman Exits Berkshire Hathaway, Blackstone To Fund Opportunities * HBO Max Launches, But Not Yet Available on Amazon, Roku Platforms * Apple Snaps Up AI Startup Inductiv, As Analysts Boost PTs On Store Reopenings

(NASDAQ: RDFN) — Pageviews of homes in small towns surged 105% year over year during the seven-day period ending May 1, an acceleration from the 85% gain that occurred during the week ending April 1, according to a new report from Redfin (www.redfin.com), the technology-powered real estate brokerage. In rural counties with fewer than 10,000 people, views climbed 76%, a sizable increase from the prior year but a deceleration from the 170% rise a month before.

(NASDAQ: RDFN) — 41.1% of Redfin offers nationwide faced competition in the four weeks ending on May 10, according to a new report from Redfin (www.redfin.com), the technology-powered real estate brokerage. In a handful of metros, the bidding war rate was above 60%.

(NASDAQ: RDFN) — New listings and home sales are seeing early signs of recovery in the U.S. housing market, even as some cities struggle to flatten the coronavirus curve, finds a new analysis from Redfin (www.redfin.com), the technology-powered real estate brokerage. It found that in areas where real estate has been deemed an essential service, both housing supply and demand is beginning to strengthen, even if the community has not yet experienced a peak in COVID-19 cases.

Good afternoon, and welcome to Redfin's financial results conference call for the first quarter ended March 31 2020. Joining me on the call today are Glenn Kelman, our CEO; and Chris Nielsen, our CFO.

(NASDAQ: RDFN) — This past week, Redfin's homebuying demand moved out of recovery mode and into growth mode, reaching a new peak. For the seven days ended May 17, demand was 16.5% higher than it was before the pandemic, on a seasonally-adjusted basis, according to Redfin's latest weekly report.