- In today’s CEO Daily: Alena Botros talks to Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman on leading during the LA wildfires.
- The big story: The Fed vs Trump.
- The markets: Moving up.
- Analyst notes from Apollo, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and Convera.
- Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.
Good morning. It’s a hard time to be the chief executive of a real estate company. Home prices and rents soared throughout the pandemic, and mortgage rates followed once the Federal Reserve began its quantitative tightening. The pandemic is over and the central bank has begun to loosen its monetary policy, but home prices, rents, and mortgage rates are still high.
So the housing world is at a standstill. For the second straight year, existing home sales have fallen to their lowest level in almost three decades. That means not a lot of people are buying or selling homes. On top of it all, wildfires recently tore through Los Angeles decimating neighborhoods and thousands of structures. “Redfin has been through the wringer,” Glenn Kelman, its chief executive of almost 20 years told me.
One of his real estate agents lost her home to the fires, all the while clients are calling her because they are worried about their homes. Not to mention, the wildfires ignited a discussion on the role real estate services companies play in preventing price gouging. It’s illegal, but that hasn’t stopped some landlords from doing it. So Kelman has a lot going on, more than usual, it seems. But how he handles it when disaster strikes can be telling, and sometimes that means having the emotional conversations.
“People think you’re a saint just for picking up the telephone,” he said. “So I worry that I have to have some novel words of wisdom or comfort, and mostly what I do is, I just call and the other person starts talking, and I listen for a long time, and it does my heart good. It does the other person good.”
Those types of conversations sometimes end with the employee asking if the company will stand by them in times of slower home sales, when their incomes take a hit. It might sound like an emotional question, but it’s a financial one, Kelman explained. Redfin has decided to do that, but “it can’t be a blank check,” he said. — Alena Botros
Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady, diane.brady@fortune.com, Linkedin.
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