If you are house hunting, you know that, as a buyer, that you are essentially paying the commission. On a sizable property that can be a chunk of change. So if you noticed a Realtor advertising a refund on commissions, you’d certainly pursue investigating it.

When online broker, Redfin, offered a 66% commission refund, fellow Realtors became unhinged, mounting a campaign of name assassination, refusing to work with Redfin buyers. The old guard in the industry were going to drive the lesson home that they didn’t appreciate the new tweak to the commission game.

Though CEO Kelman’s first instinct was to keep the conflict below the radar, he went for his next best instinct which was to blog about it. Today that is called “radical transparency” and in the case of Kelman and Redfin, it won the day. Odd thing how ‘truth’ can do that.

“His enemies got nervous. All this intestinal spew seemed masochistic. Worse, it was probably bad for business. Everyone’s business.

But customers loved it. More and more signed on to use Redfin, and by the beginning of this year, Kelman and his crew were closing several deals a day. “Instead of discouraging customers, being open about our problems radicalized them,” Kelman says. “They rallied and started pulling for us.”

The fact that one of the category headings listed on the Redfin blog is “Real Estate Controversy”, is an excellent example of the utilization of blog marketing to manage criticism and controversy, simultaneously gaining a type of clean and raw brand recognition, differing from traffic responding to PR ploys, but fueled by consumers who feel they have participated with a company based on a mutual agreement of values and objectives.

“… Customers become working partners. Kelman used to spend valuable work time arguing why the real estate business had to change; now his customers do battle for him, wading into Redfin’s online forums to haggle with old-school agents.”

Source:Wired/Clive Thompson

Tags: blog, Blog Marketing, category_headings, kelman, online_broker, real_estate, redfin, transparency

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