Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman popped by the TechCrunch offices earlier today to talk about the company’s new Collections photo service, which we wrote about earlier. But that’s not what caught our attention.
For the first time that I can recall, Kelman disclosed the company’s annual revenues, noting in the interview that Redfin will do north of $50 million this year.
“We think this can be a very large independent company over time,” said Kelman, adding that “there’s a lot of headroom” for Redfin to expand in real estate.
Just how does $50 million compare to some of Redfin’s publicly-traded rivals on the real estate search side?
Well, Zillow, for example, posted $31 million in revenue for the third quarter, while Trulia tallied record revenue of $18.5 million for that same period. Kelman also downplayed comparisons to Zillow or Trulia, noting that Redfin doesn’t really overlap with the media companies, which he must get to 100 million monthly visitors in order to be real businesses. (Zillow stands at just over 30 million monthly uniques).
“Part of what make us special is that we have the best real estate search site on the Web, but we want to do whole friggin’ thing, and take people through the whole transaction, with a real estate agent you can trust,” he said.
He continued, noting additional differences between his company and Zillow and Trulia.
“When people talk about what’s going on with the consumer Internet, they just assume that the consumer Internet consists exclusively of media companies. And there’s got to be more to what we are doing in Silicon Valley than just running ads for other people. Like the reason I came here was to change the game, to be disruptive, to walk down the street, and make traditional industries shake in their boots. And I think if you are just a media company, it is harder to do that…. Both are great businesses, I just think this one is more fun, and it can be a lot bigger.”
Kelman also said that an IPO is something that could occur, adding that they have no intention to be acquired. You can watch the full TechCrunch interview with Kelman here.
