Just over a year after acquiring Redfin, Rocket Companies has named a former Meta executive as Redfin's CEO.

Alessio Sanfilippo, Meta's former vice president of insights for Reality Labs — a division focused on building virtual and augmented reality products — will fill the shoes of longtime Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman, effective immediately.

The Redfin 20-year veteran stepped down in January, around seven months after Rocket Companies, a Detroit-based homeownership platform, acquired the Seattle-based real estate giant in a $1.75 billion stock deal. At the time, Kelman posted on LinkedIn that he wanted to explore other roles as Redfin approached a second, longer phase of integration with Rocket.

In a news release Monday, Rocket said Sanfilippo helped build and grow the market for Meta’s artificial intelligence-enabled wearable glasses. Before that, he led data and user research for the popular Meta-owned communication platform WhatsApp.

For nearly two decades before joining Meta, Sanfilippo held a variety of leadership roles at major companies including Intuit, SAP, GoSeek, Hotwire and United Airlines.

Rocket Companies CEO Varun Krishna said in the news release that he worked with Sanfilippo at Intuit, where Sanfilippo exhibited deep analytical thinking with a real instinct for the consumer."

Krishna held executive roles at Intuit from 2015 to 2023 across several teams, while Sanfilippo served as vice president, and then senior vice president, of data and analytics from 2018 to 2022.

"(Sanfilippo) has spent his career using data and technology to make complex products work better for enormous audiences," Krishna said. "Now he gets to bring that experience to Redfin and help us connect home search, brokerage, mortgage, closing and servicing into one experience.”

Sanfilippo said in the news release he used Redfin to purchase his first home.

"Redfin has always helped make an intimidating process easier to understand," he said. "I’m excited to work with this team and combine what Redfin has built with Rocket’s capabilities to make finding, buying and owning a home simpler for millions of people.

Sanfilippo joins Redfin at the tail end of a battle with the federal government and the beginning of an agreement to bolster its rental listing business.

The Federal Trade Commission sued Zillow and Redfin months after they struck a $100 million deal last February requiring Redfin to exclusively repost apartment listings provided by Zillow, transition its customers to Zillow and stay out of the rental internet listing services market for up to nine years.

Last week, Zillow agreed to eliminate the part of its agreement with Redfin that requires the latter to shut down its rental listing business. An FTC news release last week said Redfin agreed to reenter the market with “far more apartment listings” and commit to investing millions of dollars in its rentals advertising business “to ensure Redfin will be a far stronger competitor” than it was before the 2025 agreement.

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