Redfin leaving Frisco office space after shuttering mortgage division

National real estate company Redfin is looking for a new tenant to take over the Frisco, Texas office space that housed its now-shuttered mortgage division.

Seattle-based Redfin put more than 22,199 square feet of office space at Hall Park in Frisco up for sublease. Dallas-based brokerage Cresa is marketing the space at 2611 Internet Blvd., which was the primary office of Redfin Mortgage. Redfin said in January that it would consolidate its lending operations into Bay Equity Home Loans, a San Francisco Bay Area-based firm it bought for $137.8 million in April.

Redfin eliminated 121 jobs as part of that deal, and the majority were in Frisco, the company said. That represented less than 2% of Redfin’s total staff, primarily in sales support, capital markets and operations. Other Redfin Mortgage employees moved over to the Bay Equity team, which maintains its headquarters in California.

“Redfin continues to have a robust presence in the Dallas-Fort Worth area,” the company said in a statement. “We need less office space now due to the closing of our internal mortgage division in the area and because many of our employees are choosing to work remotely.”

In addition to lending, Redfin also operates an online home-search platform, has real estate agents across the country and runs an instant-buying service, RedfinNow.

Redfin opened its office at Hall Park in 2019 as the mortgage division was expanding to new markets. At the time, the office was home to mortgage and title teams, agents and its first engineering team outside of Seattle and San Francisco.

The 162-acre Hall Park started in the 1990s and has grown to encompass more than 2 million square feet of offices in more than a dozen buildings. It’s Frisco’s largest office employment center with over 10,000 workers.

The developer, Hall Group, started construction late last year on a high-rise addition with a 16-story office tower, a 19-story apartment building, a 154-room boutique hotel and a 10,000-square-foot food hall.

In addition to the changes in its lending business, Redfin cut its workforce by about 470 employees in June, roughly 6% of its staff, which CEO Glenn Kelman said was due to revenue shortfalls and changes in the housing market.

“A layoff is always an awful shock, especially when I’ve said that we’d go through heck to avoid one, and that we raised hundreds of millions of dollars so we wouldn’t have to shed people after just a few months of uncertainty,” Kelman told employees in an email in June. “But mortgage rates increased faster than at any point in history. We could be facing years, not months, of fewer home sales, and Redfin still plans to thrive.”

Several other real estate companies with a presence in the Dallas-Fort Worth area cut employees in response to lower mortgage demand.

Ann Arbor, Mich.-based Home Point Financial Corp., also known as Homepoint, plans to lay off 526 employees tied to its Farmers Branch office in November, Coppell-based Mr. Cooper Group Inc. cut almost 700 jobs this year and Plano-based First Guaranty Mortgage Corp. cut more than 400 jobs this summer.