Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman apologized today for the poorly conceived launch of Scouting Report, a new online service designed to provide vital statistics on more than one million real estate agents across the country. As we reported last Friday, Redfin suspended the service in Washington, D.C. after the company’s MLS data provider raised questions about Scouting Reports.
Now, in a blog post today, Kelman says that they are disabling the service in Sacramento, Atlanta and parts of the San Francisco Bay Area.
Kelman lays out a series of problems with the service, apologizing for what he classified as “big mistakes.” He writes:
“Surfacing millions of records that have never seen the light of day before is always a bit like opening Pandora’s Box. But it’s worth it in the end if you can get it right. That’s what we’re trying very, very hard to do, working late in the night and through the weekends. Again, we are sorry for all the ways we screwed up in presenting data from dozens of feeds, based on thousands of rules.”
Kelman has always been quick to admit mistakes, but the series of blunders around Scouting Report appears to be taking a toll on the online brokerage service.
Some of the problems were of a technical nature, and Redfin is taking steps to correct those errors. But the company also miscalculated whether it could access the data from its MLS providers.
The Scouting Report service is used to show statistics for real estate agents such as the number of homes sold; the average number of price drops for each home sold; the median sales price; the range of prices; how often the agent represented buyers and sellers and more.
One agent lambasted Redfin in the comments of the blog post, dubbing the roll out of Scouting Report a “disaster.”
“I’d have been ok with my stats being published if this had been accurate from the beginning, but it’s far from it, and you’ve burned a lot of bridges with the agents about whom you’ve published inaccurate information,” the agent wrote.
