Redfin redefines real estate with Atlassian cloud

Redfin, America's top brokerage site, is on a mission to “redefine real estate in the customer's favor.” From making every transaction smoother to saving families thousands in fees, their team has built a customer-first company from the ground up.

In fact, while many real estate tech firms are solely focused on cutting agents out of the process, Redfin’s core business is using technology to support them and, as CTO Bridget Frey puts it, “free our agents to focus on service.” As a result of their unique approach and products, the company has become the top real estate website in the U.S., gone public, and experienced hockey-stick growth.

In a hyper-competitive market that’s in the midst of disruption, those who innovate and take a customer-first approach will get ahead, and those who don’t will get left behind. That’s why Redfin’s engineering team looks for any opportunity to streamline and automate: so they have more time, budget, and brainpower to focus on innovating for their customers. This was the catalyst for exploring a move to a more agile culture and collaborative, cloud-based solutions. 

Redfin had used a variety of tools for development, communication, and collaboration in the past, which worked fine when they were a small company. But as the staff, stakes, and number of offices grew, so did the challenges that come along with remote work and disparate systems. To transform the real estate experience for their customers, they needed to transform their own practices and platforms. 

Since Evan and other team members had used Atlassian for similar purposes in the past, and engineering has relied on Bitbucket as a code repository for years, Atlassian was a natural fit. Once leaders and engineers saw how they could use Jira Software to create custom workflows and share them across teams, along with Confluence for documentation and collaboration, they were confident Atlassian would meet their needs. 

When it came time to choose a deployment, Atlassian cloud was Redfin’s first choice. “We are managing too much of our own infrastructure. I would much rather be building new things that help us improve than maintaining old things,” Evan says. “Frankly, having our engineers or IT professionals manage our systems on-premise is a waste of time and money. If there’s a company that already has amazing products, why not have them do it? That way, we can spend our time working on the things that we're good at and reduce maintenance and toil.” With clear advantages for employees and the business, the team agreed Atlassian cloud was the way to go. 

Once their new workflows were established, Evan says they turned to Confluence to “solve a documentation mess.” Engineering started with their own department and transferred all of their documentation into Confluence. When IT saw how Confluence made life easier for engineering, they asked to use it too. Now, IT uses the platform for everything from onboarding to documenting to collaborating. 

“Confluence is our linchpin for everything,” Evan says. “On their first day of work, new hires who are onboarding go to Confluence and start reading. ‘How do I set up my dev box?’ ‘How do I get my work going?’ Whatever they want to know, it’s all there.”

With a more agile, cloud-based development ecosystem and a centralized documentation system, Redfin quickly saw their teams working faster and collaborating more effectively than ever before. 

The migration was fast and painless. “The amount of support and the level of urgency from the Atlassian team was awesome. Nothing was ever too much, and they far exceeded our expectations,” said Systems Administrator Greg Lee. Alasdair Thomson, Senior Manager of IT Development and Operations, added, ”It was nice being so close to fast-moving development of the migration tools. A dedicated team is a really nice thing to have. I wouldn’t change a thing.”