When Redfin charged into the Seattle residential real-estate industry in 2004, the online discount brokerage was about as welcome as a terrorist at a tea party.

The brash, tech-savvy newcomer garnered lots of attention, attacking the agent's hallowed 6 percent commission.

"I was such a jerk about it," admits chief executive Glenn Kelman, a software entrepreneur who joined Redfin in 2006. "Saying (real estate) was the most screwed-up industry in America does not make you friends."

But does he still believe that?

Long pause. He fidgets. "Yes," he finally concedes. "But now I would submit that humbly and respectfully."

In recent years, the brokerage has revamped its business model and its agents have expanded their roles, becoming more like them, competitors insist.

The shift came after Redfin's surveys discovered that clients wanted a deeper, more trusting relationship with an agent. So while agents still work for a salary plus a bonus based on results of a customer-satisfaction survey, they now perform many of the same functions as their full-service counterparts.

But Redfin is still the geek in a gray-suit business. Information crams its website, online forums and blogs. Its free applications for smartphones are loaded with features and homebuyers roam its website, filling their virtual shopping carts with houses. The company's current project is a tool to help sellers — Redfin's weak link — better price their homes.

History of Redfin

In an industry where agents chauffeur clients around in nice cars, Redfin agents meet their clients at the property. Redfin agents and employees generally take the bus or ride their bikes to work. That includes Kelman, who has limited the search for new offices to downtown Seattle so he can coast to work from his Capitol Hill home.

Redfin's cocky attitude and original game plan — including practices that made more work for non-Redfin agents — angered so many in the industry that some refused to deal with it. The industry's rules, which effectively barred Redfin's access to the Multiple Listing Service, further shackled the company.

Once those barriers were removed, however, it began to focus on getting along with others in the industry.

"Part of being an effective customer advocate is being able to work with all the other real-estate agents in town," says Kelman.

Softening its antagonistic jabs, the company started to make a point of being a good industry member, such as automatically sending feedback to agents who have listed houses and showing homes to potential buyers instead of instructing them to call the listing agent for a tour. And today, everyone works with Redfin — even though some still hate it.

"Every once in awhile a real-estate agent will tell our customer that he hates our whole business model," says Kelman. But in general, "it's really been years since anyone has given us any trouble."

On one recent purchase, says Elisabeth Roberts, her Redfin agent helped her track a loan, offered a list of contractors to perform work and even sent another Redfin agent to open the house, meet the contractor and stay there until the work was completed.

"My experience with Redfin ... was probably the most efficient real-estate transaction I've had in 30 years," says Roberts, who was buying and selling two other properties at the same time.

Of the three transactions, she says, the Redfin sale was the smoothest — and she was thrilled to get a $2,000 rebate when the deal was done.

Inside headquarters

At Redfin headquarters in a modern Belltown office building, the employees — most of whom look like they just stepped out of an ad for running shoes — buzz around open offices in casual attire. After lunch one day recently, long tables covered with pans of leftover Chinese food bore witness to the latest staff lunch, a biweekly phenomenon.

The company strives to maintain a strong sense of camaraderie among its employees. Together they bike, hike, crew, ski and play basketball and soccer on company teams — often with Kelman leading the pack.

"It is an active group," says Kelman, a Redmond native who even bikes to business meetings, taking care to park his bike around the corner — and trying, he says, "not to sweat."

No doubt another factor that brings the group together is its near-universal ownership of Redfin stock or stock options, which can be exercised if the company goes public like Seattle-based Zillow.com did during the summer. But Kelman says an initial public offering is "unlikely" this year. Beyond that, who knows.

"Redfin's a very talented wild child," he observes, "and we have our ups and downs that are best enjoyed in private."

For the time being, Redfin has about $10 million in the bank, the nearly untouched proceeds from venture capital raised in late 2009 from existing investors — Madrona Venture Group, Vulcan Capital, DFJ and The Hillman Co. — and a new investor, Greylock Partners.

The company's unusual business model and the unsteady nature of the real-estate business drove investors away during previous attempts, which Kelman characterizes as "a total freaking disaster."

Like the rest of the real-estate industry, Redfin has suffered during the economic slowdown. In 2008, the company laid off 20 percent of its staff. Since then, sales have been doubling, Kelman says. Current annual revenues are between $30 million and $50 million, he says. By the end of 2010, it had returned rebates to clients totaling $64 million.

The fact that sales have grown at all bucks the usual trend, says one industry expert.

"Historically, most discount brokerage firms have prospered during good times and have not done as well when the market slows," says Glenn Crellin, director of the Washington Center for Real Estate Research at Washington State University.

The discounters' lower fees, he says, make it harder to absorb the additional cost of dealing with distressed and foreclosed properties, which involve more work and take longer to close.

Currently, Redfin has 300 employees nationwide, one-third of whom are in Seattle, and is located in nearly 20 markets, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston and Washington, D.C. It has about 250 affiliated agents, called Redfin Partners, who handle lower-priced listings that would not give Redfin its minimum, $6,000 commission. They also handle the company's business in smaller markets where Redfin does not have a presence.

Earlier this year Redfin announced on its blog that it had fired 50 of its partners, Kelman says, the result of accumulated problems.

Though Redfin now claims between 3 and 4 percent of the Seattle homebuyer market, it has made less headway with sellers, claiming under 1 percent of the market. Sellers, who by virtue of owning a house usually have dealt before with an agent, represent a particular challenge to a new business like Redfin.

"These are deep relationships, people sending bottles of wine to customers every year," says Kelman. "It's difficult to get them to change."

Competitive industry

Click onto Redfin's site and at first, it looks a lot like other agency websites. Search parameters by neighborhood, number of bedrooms, price range. A map with icons denoting listings, links to neighborhood particulars and basic property data.

Some industry leaders see these similarities as evidence that their sites are as tech-savvy as Redfin's.

"I think we're pretty much like Redfin in many ways as far as (being) service companies with technology as a tool," says Joe Spencer, John L. Scott Real Estate's president and chief operating officer. His company recently made global positioning system-enabled searches and its interactive map available on a free Android software application. But while Redfin displays extensive data it has on its site, traditional agencies tend to steer the prospective client to an agent who has even more data.

There's a reason for that, says Mike Fanning, senior vice-president of Windermere Services: "You need to have a professional in a full-service company to walk you through that data."

On the other hand, Redfin's website is a true nerd's nirvana — updated every 15 to 30 minutes and crammed with photos and sales information and just about every bit of public information about the property except, perhaps, the ambient indoor temperature and humidity levels.

Once a website browser becomes a client, there's access to the Redfin agent's personal notes on properties viewed and other, more detailed information.

Then there are forums and blogs specific to each market, where industry trends are examined, pondered, analyzed, dissected, graphed and charted. The Seattle blog generally is updated every two or three days, with Kelman himself often posting.

Even competitors check it out. Fanning says the Redfin site was among those he checked recently when he bought and sold his own houses — through a Windermere agent, of course.

Finally, Redfin has its "Deal Room," where clients can stay updated on the progress of their offers and check off closing tasks online. Electronic document signing is a standard feature.

Expanding base

Formerly, this high-tech instead of hand-holding approach appealed mostly to a small demographic: technology-savvy males under the age of 40. As technological skills become more common, a clientele that is grayer than Redfin's historical demographic is coming on board.

"We've been dealing with computers for years," says Lloyd Fleck, 65, who with his wife recently bought a house through Redfin after reading about the company in The Wall Street Journal.

Navigating Redfin's site is "not terribly complicated," says Fleck. "It's just a click-and-go-at-it sort of thing."

For the remainder of this year, Redfin plans to lie low, developing the markets it already has. But next year and in 2013, Kelman says, "I think we're going to expand again."

Where that expansion might take the company is unknown. But Kelman says Redfin's numerous Canadian employees are constantly lobbying for a beachhead on their home turf. So at some point, he expects the company will expand across the border.

Would it be Vancouver? Toronto?

"That's purely speculative," says Kelman, who still remembers what it was like to be feared as a menace to the status quo.

"It's not as if we have a diabolical plan to attack Canada," he says. For the moment, at least, "They're safe."