He actually said that: When asked about the company’s “Plan B” in case mortgage rates don’t go down, Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman replied, “Plan B is to drink our own urine or the blood of our competitors and stay in the trenches.”
This wasn’t an informal, off-the-record meeting. It was Redfin’s second-quarter earnings conference call, the kind of call where executives usually limit themselves to bland, optimistic platitudes — a call that gets transcribed on investor relations websites.
The real estate website’s earnings came in better than expected, but Wall Street analysts focused on the outlook for the overall housing market. At one point, Kelman compared the current market to “The Twilight Zone,” saying, “I can’t remember ever seeing (mortgage) rates drop so much and so quickly and the market react so mutedly. And we just have to believe they’re going to (go up).”
To be clear: He hopes that the market situation will improve, but does not expect it to.
After the aforementioned promise to drink various bodily fluids, Kelman added: “The last quarterly earnings call ended with me singing a line from The Who’s song Won’t Get Fooled Again. In it, I said that we are not betting on low interest rates when other people thought they might go down (…) We are prepared to take share when the market is growing, and we are prepared to take share when it is not, but we are not going to let up.”
Shortly before the end of the conversation, Kelman finally expressed some regret about his choice of words: “We prefer to drink our urine rather than the blood. Actually, I wish I had just not said that. I am a lover, not a fighter.”
