Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman Steps Down After 20 Years

Redfin’s longtime CEO Glenn Kelman is stepping down.

Kelman, who has helmed the firm for the last 20 years, announced the decision in a LinkedIn post on Tuesday. The move comes less than six months after Rocket Companies closed on its nearly $2 billion acquisition of Redfin.

“Redfin just completed our first phase as a Rocket company, integration,” Kelman wrote. “We’ll start the second, much-longer phase at next week’s all-company meeting, which is much-greater scale. Approaching that, I had to decide whether to be at Rocket for years.”

Kelman’s last day will be Jan. 16, according to the post, and Rocket Companies CEO Varun Krishna will fill in for Kelman as the company searches for its next CEO.

Redfin brought on Kelman as CEO in 2005, one year after its inception. Kelman oversaw Redfin’s rise to prominence as a low-commission brokerage option and listing platform. The firm experimented with paying agent salaries in lieu of commissions, an idea it eventually scrapped in 2023.

Kelman oversaw the company’s 2017 initial public offering and its plunge into — and pullback — from iBuying in 2022.

Kelman also served as a foil to Compass CEO Robert Reffkin’s push for private listing networks. He repeatedly touted the importance of transparency in the homebuying process and announced a listing policy similar to Zillow’s that threatens to ban listings not uploaded to the MLS.

Rocket’s acquisition of Redfin has followed a trend of consolidation in the residential real estate space as larger companies try and build out their vertical integration.

“For most of Redfin’s history, our website expansion was slowed by our brokerage, and our brokerage expansion was slowed by employing our agents,” Kelman wrote on Tuesday. “Now with portals, lenders and brokers racing to stitch together their services, our patient approach has turned out to be the best way to help people all the way home.”