In a long LinkedIn post Jan. 13, Glenn Kelman, the 20-year CEO of Redfin, announced he was stepping down. Titling the post ‘Unemployed, In Greenland,’ Kelman said Jan. 16 will be his last day in the office, following Rocket Companies officially acquiring the firm July 1, 2025. Rocket CEO Varun Krishna will fill in as Redfin CEO until a successor is chosen.
“The time has come for me to leave Redfin,” he wrote. “Redfin just completed our first phase as a Rocket company, integration. 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. Instead, I want to try finding another mission-driven enterprise outside of real estate. I’m grateful that Rocket has turned out to be such a good owner of Redfin, and that Varun has been such a kind leader. I’ll be available through April 1 to support Varun.”
The post, addressed to Redfin employees, included Kelman’s personal thoughts as well.
“I’ll be friends with the people I’ve gotten to know through the years, and to everyone else here I was still hoping to meet,” he wrote. “I haven’t deserved to work with so many good people for so long, and now I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to repay you for it. Any one of you could show up at my door with a new baby or after a flat tire in the rain, or just to say hi. In my mind, you’ll say one word, REDFIN, and I’ll say COME ON IN. Love, Glenn.”
In a Q3 earnings call Oct. 31, 2025, Rocket CFO Brian Brown said that the integration of Redfin was exceeding expectations.
“These early results reinforce our confidence in achieving $60 million in revenue synergies over the course of 2026, with full run-rate realization expected in 2027,” he said.
Brown added that 13% of the company’s mortgage purchase pipeline is coming from Redfin clients.
During the call, Krishna provided additional detail on Redfin’s performance just four months after closing. The company has added a prequalification experience to every listing on Redfin, creating millions of access points across the platform. As a result, the amount of clients starting mortgage applications doubled from 250,000 in July to 500,000 in September.
“This is the start of what we think is a very (good) performance funnel,” Krishna explained, noting that these leads represent long-term client relationships that extend over months as buyers move through the purchase pipeline.”
