Real estate. Don’t let those two words scare you away. Just because the market is ugly right now doesn’t mean that you should stop considering a future career in realty. First of all, you’re at least a year from graduation - market conditions will likely change (although not necessarily for the better). Second, we’re really good at finding you great internships in struggling industries - like how we told you to look at non-profit internships in finance. Third, a bad market almost always yields new opportunities for innovative companies. Redfin is a company that we’ve found that is insulating itself by using technology and price competition to take advantage of a weak market, and they’re still hiring interns.
So what exactly is Redfin doing that makes them so different? They offer many of the same services that a traditional real estate agency offers (they list your house online, aid in negotiations and contingencies, and assist with paperwork), but their rate structure is completely different. If you’re selling a house, you can do it for a flat fee. If you’re buying, Redfin will refund 2/3 of their commission (which is up to 3% of the sale price, so the refund is up to 2%). So while most real estate transactions result in up to 6% of the sale price going to real estate agents who sometimes don’t do much to really help their clients (read Freakonomics for more on how your realtor’s interests may not align with yours).
Beyond their game changing rate structure, Redfin also offers some really great web-based tools that are integrated within their house listings - a serious threat to traditional realtors. There’s also their Satisfaction Guarantee that shows how serious the threat is - we’ve certainly never heard of a traditional real estate agent guaranteeing that you’ll be happy with his or her service. How can something so simple be so innovative for an industry? If you’re intrigued by Redfin’s offerings, you can look a little deeper and read about how Redfin works. If it’s their business model that interests you, why not read their comprehensive first-year report. You might also want to look at the posts on TechCrunch that are tagged for Redfin.
We wrote about entry-level jobs at Redfin back in December on One Day, One Job, and CTO Mike Young left a couple comments on the post. Since Redfin doesn’t list individual internship openings on their excellent college recruiting page (which also tells you what to expect in an interview), we e-mailed Mike to make sure that they were still hiring. He said that they’re still taking interns in their Seattle, WA office, and might hire one more intern for their San Francisco, CA office. Interns at Redfin are given high level projects and are expected to participate in all areas of the business - from the software side to the marketing side.
There isn’t a ton of information about internships at Redfin on their website, so we did a little extra digging. We found a couple blog posts that should give you more insight into what a Redfin intern should expect (here and here). By the way, Redfin is big on blogging. Look at all their blogs: Corporate Blog, Development Blog, Los Angeles Blog, Orange County Blog, San Diego Blog, San Francisco Blog, and Seattle Blog. Just judging from the blogging, we can tell that Redfin is probably a really fun place to work. As long as you’re a college junior, you’re welcome to send a cover letter and resume to collegejobs@redfin.com in hopes of spending a summer with them.
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Tags: engineering, Internships, marketing, product management, real estate, software development
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