Redfin case study

Background: Redfin builds a custom AI virtual assistant to help customers find the information they care about within a home’s listing details

Redfin is a tech-powered real estate company and runs the country’s #1 real estate brokerage site that helps people find a place to live with brokerage, rentals, lending, title insurance, and renovation services. Redfin’s goal in introducing a virtual assistant was to help house hunters get fast answers to questions about for-sale homes.

To address this challenge, Redfin first introduced an Ask a Question service, enabling consumers to ask Redfin team members questions about a home. Recognizing the potential to improve user experience based on engagement with this feature, Redfin developed Ask Redfin, an AI-powered virtual assistant that helps users quickly find information about listings, local market conditions, touring availability, and more.

Objectives of building an AI virtual assistant for real estate

Redfin’s objectives for implementing a custom virtual assistant were to:

• Automate & accelerate response time: Implement an AI virtual assistant to quickly and accurately deliver listing information.

• Overhaul the user experience: Transition from traditional text and phone calls to a modern, cross-platform, easy-to-deploy chat system with a custom AI virtual assistant.

• Fast-track chat development: Prioritize enhancing the AI virtual assistant’s answers rather than developing basic chat functionalities.

Requirements: A chat platform & an intuitive custom AI virtual assistant

To achieve this goal, Redfin looked at a partner that could provide a:

• Chat platform: A reliable, real-time chat service capable of supporting tens of thousands of users across web and mobile.

• Chat interface: A versatile chat interface that supports various message formats, including custom responses, quick replies, and rich media-like images.

• UGC content moderation: Automated content moderation tools for maintaining professional communication standards.

Enterprise-level support: Prompt and expert support for bespoke requirements.

Solution: Working with Sendbird to build in-app chat and launch Redfin’s custom AI virtual assistant

Redfin selected Sendbird to rapidly deploy the in-app chat system that would host Redfin’s AI virtual assistant, meeting all necessary technical and feature requirements. Sendbird offerings included:

• A scalable global cloud chat infrastructure trusted by online leaders such as Doordash, Yahoo, and Hinge, hosting over 330M monthly active users.

• Developer tools to streamline cross-platform chat integrations, including

  • iOS, Android, React, and React Native UI Kits for quick prototyping

  • A robust chat API and chat SDKs for a fully customized production solution

  • A highly abstracted platform API for system integrations.

• Advanced chat features supporting diverse message formats and auto-moderation tools.

• Cross-platform push notifications to re-engage users in the app.

• Enterprise-level support for robust support and Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to ensure continuous operation and quick resolution of any issues.

The Redfin AI virtual assistant implementation

The development of Ask Redfin commenced with basic chat functionalities set up during a hackathon week. This was quickly followed by a customization phase that lasted only the equivalent of 3 person-months to create the final chat implementation. Sendbird provided highly responsive and flexible support, from improving UI Kits to custom feature implementation.

Outcomes of Redfin’s AI virtual assistant implementation

Redfin has found that Ask Redfin users are some of its most engaged customers: 93% return to the Redfin app within a week and use it near-daily during that period. As a result, engagement increased across the entire platform.

AI & in-app communication for Redfin

Redfin’s use of a custom AI virtual assistant in real estate is truly transformative. Conversational AI creates engaging, intelligent interactions, helping consumers get quick answers to their questions about for-sale homes. Within a few days, Ask Redfin drove an increase in introductions to real estate agents. Also, by engaging consumers on its iPhone app, Redfin provides a branded and convenient experience that matches modern customer service expectations.

To ensure effective online customer communication and a direct link to their app, their most performing digital business channel, digital leaders can also use Sendbird’s omnichannel business messaging solution that spans SMS, WhatsApp, push notifications, and in-app notifications. Contact us or schedule a demo to learn how to boost engagement, conversion, and loyalty through effective customer communication.

Amazon Bedrock and Amazon OpenSearch, provided by AWS, are the core components of Sendbird's Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) model, which alone delivers 96% accuracy. Since day one, Sendbird has partnered with AWS to establish itself as a leading conversations platform that enables a secure, global, and scalable in-app conversation experience. Sendbird is an AWS advanced tier technology partner operating 45+ AWS native services in 9 regions. Thanks to Amazon’s AWS Auto Scaling and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud services, Sendbird manages massive digital traffic sending billions of messages monthly. Using Elastic Load Balancing and Amazon Route53 geolocation functions, Sendbird ensures reliable global traffic distribution. Sendbird also leverages AWS CloudFormation to automate its servers’ management in each region efficiently. Lastly, AWS Elasticache and Amazon Aurora allow Sendbird to achieve millisecond latency and data storage for over 300 million monthly active users. Sendbird’s world-class conversation platform architecture and technical foundations are certified by AWS.