Just before I joined Redfin, I’d wanted to start a company but my brother got sick and I fell in love and soon I was in Seattle. What I never forgot was the lawyer who was going to help us incorporate that business, Ilan Lovinsky, a partner at Gunderson Dettmer, and brother of the great Noam Lovinsky.
Ilan may be the savviest mofo I’ve ever met, and yet he’s got soul too, which is just another way of saying he’s not a lawyer so much as the consigliere every CEO hopes her lawyer will be. He’s also a Redfin hound-dog, casing the site daily for listings.
And now today at noon Ilan’s giving a talk at Redfin in San Francisco, as part of a series we’re hosting for Redfin employees on how to run your own startup. Our goal is to attract the kind of people who will one day found a business, to keep them as long as we can, then to launch them into careers of rap-star wealth and profligacy.
You’re invited, to come in person or to dial in.
So far, the series has been one hit after another.
We’ve had Roy Gilbert — former nuclear submarine officer and head of Gmail, Google India and Grockit – come by to talk about management best practices; he explained how a Twinkie once out-rowed an NCAA Division-I oarsman.
And James Slavet from Greylock gave a five-step tutorial for dazzling a venture partners’ meeting. I went over everything you’d ever need to know about financial statements, in 45 minutes flat. And TellApart’s Mark Ayzenshtat took us deep into the science of customer profiling and re-targeting.
Now Ilan is going to hit the legal ins and outs. This may sound dry to you. But I’ve heard this talk before. In a Sand Hill-road parking lot Ilan once gave me his 15-minute guide on “how not to get f—-ed” and it was like the Businessman’s Book of Revelations.
You can come by in person, to 88 Kearny, 13th floor, in downtown San Francisco. Or you can just dial-in to a web conference:
If you’re coming by in person, please sign up here by 10:30 a.m. today so we can order lunch for you. I’ll be there with a Music-Man baton and a top-hat to introduce Ilan and slurp from his boob of wisdom. If you have a great idea for Redfin, we can chat before or after.
Redfin: The Movie (Casting occurs with every new hire…)
The plot for Redfin: The Movie. Must include international intrigue, car chases, explosions, and most definitely a martial arts master, a dog side-kick or both.
The Men of Redfin I.T. Calendar
Several of us joked about making a Men of Redfin I.T. Calendar over lunch a few years ago. We created multiple scenarios such as, “A voluptuous Ken in a provocative pose in the server room!” We laughed our asses off and went back to work.
But the joke always resurfaced. So this year I simply walked over to their man cave/office and asked them if they’d be willing to pose for a calendar. Here are their responses when individually asked:
Ken: Sure
Daniel: Uh, I guess so. Sure.
Andy: I guess so. Okay.
Mac: Why would anyone want to look at THAT?!??
Eric: Hell yes. I am so in.
A disturbingly enthusiastic Glenn Kelman even offered to pose for November. (“Um, yeah. Thanks Glenn, but I really want to give the I.T. guys their moment in the sun, you know what I mean? But I’ll definitely keep your offer in mind.”)
Baby New Year/I.T. Manager Eric
We printed up and handed out 300 Men of Redfin I.T. Calendars for our annual company meeting in Vegas last week. Anyone who wanted one (???) donated any amount they saw fit to MIND Research Institute. We chose MIND because they do amazing work, the money sent to them goes to the right places, we like math and computers, and the guys of I.T. really liked them. We just hope they’ll accept our final check given the unconventional fundraising method.
Winter Wonderland “Twins” of Systems Analyst Mac
Shot over the course of a month around the office using thrift store props and crappy IKEA floor lamps, these images would not have been worth diddly–squat if it weren’t for a little help from my Redfin friends. Hippie Goddess Lily Supardan brought her expert photographer’s eye and Graphic Designer Angela Salvo magically transported our studs to idyllic shires, romantically secluded beaches, and winter wonderlands through the miracle of Photoshop.
Colossal and eternal THANK YOUS to our heroes of the I.T. Department: Ken Brush, Eric Hollenbeck, Mac Jonson, Daniel Kasen, and Andy Wickell for their willingness to make love to the camera for the next twelve months. They brought Smizing to new levels, thereby making the halls of Redfin full of even more laughter. And, we finally got that picture of a voluptuous Ken in a provocative pose in the server room.
One more little gift under the tree for you! Just in time for the holidays, we released Redfin for iPad!
Like a magnificent medieval triptych, the app has a three-in-one interface — a map, a kaleidoscope of listing photos, a single house in all its glory — all in one screen. The app shot to the front page of Apple’s App Store from the day of its debut.
One other sugar-plum feature for Redfin fans: we now offer a monthly home report that shows you pictures and prices for all the homes that sold in the four or five blocks around your place. To sign up, just search Redfin for your home address, view the property’s details, then click the big sign-up link.
Hope and Darkness
The holiday spirit seems to have affected more than Redfin’s elf-engineers. Prices fell again, and yet analysts and investors are daft with the holiday spirit, convinced that real estate may finally be ready to recover. Why on the darkest day of the year, are we always so hopeful?
One can only conclude that hopefulness is in our nature, and thank goodness it is! Let’s consider all the reasons this coming year will be better than the last.
Prices Down 1.2%
But first, that lump of coal! The latest numbers show prices fell 1.2%:
Market
MoM Change
YoY Change
Date of Max
Change from Max
Prices Last at This Level
# of Months of Decrease
Phoenix
0.3%
-5.1%
Jun-06
-55.8%
Feb-00
0
LA
-1.5%
-4.9%
Sep-06
-39.6%
Sep-03
3
San Diego
-0.6%
-4.5%
Nov-05
-38.9%
Oct-02
3
Bay Area
-0.7%
-4.7%
May-06
-39.4%
Jan-01
3
Denver
-0.2%
-0.9%
Aug-06
-10.6%
Jun-02
2
DC Area
-0.3%
1.3%
May-06
-25.4%
May-04
1
Atlanta
-5.0%
-11.7%
Jul-07
-33.2%
Aug-98
3
Chicago
-1.8%
-4.8%
Sep-06
-31.0%
Aug-01
2
Boston
-1.1%
-1.1%
Sep-05
-16.3%
May-03
3
Las Vegas
-1.5%
-8.5%
Aug-06
-60.7%
Jul-97
4
New York
-1.2%
-2.0%
Jun-06
-22.1%
Mar-04
2
Portland
-0.5%
-4.7%
Jul-07
-27.4%
Dec-04
1
Dallas
-0.9%
-0.6%
Jun-07
-8.7%
May-04
2
Seattle
-1.0%
-6.2%
Jul-07
-30.2%
Aug-04
3
20 City Index
-1.2%
-3.4%
Jul-06
-32.1%
May-03
2
Case-Shiller Home Price Index for October 2011, Not Seasonally Adjusted
Big money is starting to wager on housing. Hedge funds run by Caxton Associates LP, SAC Capital Advisors LP, Avenue Capital and Blackstone Group LP have been buying housing-related investments, betting on a rebound. And formerly bearish research firm Zelman & Associates now predicts a housing pickup, as does Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
We aren’t surprised: all year, Wall Street has bombarded our site with web robots trying to download data in bulk. But the Street has been wrong before. As one analyst cautioned: “The smartest money in the world has been carried out on stretchers betting on a true recovery for housing.”
You Want Good News? We’ve Got Plenty
What has convinced some investors that the housing market will be nice instead of naughty? All sorts of good news:
But don’t get cocky kid! Our own opinion is that home prices won’t fall or rise much in 2012. Prices can’t rise far before banks and regular home-owners put more properties on the market. And they can’t fall far because of increasing rents and — for now — declining foreclosures.
We worry about this, but less than others: the banks themselves don’t want to go back to 2008, when they ruined their own balance sheets by flooding the market with foreclosures at fire-sale prices. And many home-owners fretting about expiring teaser rates are discovering that the new rate is lower than the old one.
Rates Are Low, and May Stay That Way
So what I worry about is interest rates. How long can the whole economy hold together given the apocalyptic politics around U.S. budget deficits? Rates keep falling, now to 3.95%, and government lenders now expects rates to remain low at least through mid-2012.
Which brings us to our final prediction for 2012. If prices are low and relatively stable, and rates remain very low, sales will pick up. Just a guess. Or maybe a hope. Happy new year, and thanks for all your Redfin support!
Well, now I feel silly. Earlier this evening, I wrote a blog post about the boycott against the pro-SOPA crowd; SOPA is the bill to stop piracy on the Internet. I said that the boycott was a form of censorship when in fact a boycott is an exercise in free speech. I was 100% wrong, moreso because I’ve argued in favor of mass movements before.
The commenters on my post, namely Mary Hinge, Chris Dixon and Sasha Aickin, are 100% right.
Why did I say something wrong? Well the whole boycott just reminded me of my days in college, when I saw very strident people make it very difficult for someone to express an opposing view. Even though I was sort of a wanna-be hippie myself, I always empathized with the guy being shouted down by the other hippies.
The issue back then was political correctness. Yes, I am one of those people who believe that the words we use to describe people of different races and sexual orientation matter, but still I’ve never been comfy with the idea of political correctness. The pressure back then somehow felt to me like a violation of free speech, when really the pressure itself was a part of free speech.
And now it sometimes feels to me that we are using far more powerful levers, on Facebook and Twitter, to shout down the pro-SOPA people. It is totally legit, especially since they have pretty big levers too. I still think we’ll regret that we didn’t engage in a more civil way. Something should be done about piracy. No one who built the Internet seems to have serious intentions of doing it. Any action the government takes will be despised.
But businesses and financiers have the right to organize together to crush a bill, just as today’s Internet companies and venture firms are now doing, alongside the studios and producers on the other side.
I apologize for being stupid, but I wasn’t trying to be provocative. I was sincere in my stupidity, if that makes any sense. I have posted many, many times about Internet piracy because it bothers me more than most people, and posted even more often arguing for moderation generally, because I’ve lately been feeling like the whole world has gone mad.
But I was still wrong about whether the boycott was a violation or a shining example of free speech. It’s a shining example. If you have ever gotten into an argument in which you hoped your unassailable logic would slay the will to live of the other side, please print this blog post out. My will to live has been slain for the moment, and I can’t delete it so I just have to eat it.
UPDATE: I was wrong in this post in saying that a boycott stifles free speech. A boycott is a form of free speech. I retracted that argument in a subsequent post a few hours later. *sigh*
The opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), the bill before Congress to punish websites that publish pirated songs, movies and essays, has united behind the theme of free speech.
But now in a turn worthy of the pigs in Animal Farm, Paul Graham, Chris Dixon, Fred Wilson and others are organizing a campaign to intimidate and silence those who support the bill, retaliating against law firms, journalists and investors alike.
To which I can only say: please add me to the black-list. Not because I support the bill. As I’ve written before, it is flawed in exactly the way most democratic legislation is: it’s a dog’s breakfast of competing interests, force-fed to the innocent and guilty alike.
I just don’t like bullies. Especially hypocritical bullies. If you actually believe in free speech, and not simply the free distribution of other people’s intellectual property, you should let journalists, law firms and investors exercise their rights to it alongside your own. And yes, working on a bill in an open, democratic process is a valid expression of speech.
Instead, we are threatening anyone who disagrees with us. Like all ideologues, we have convinced ourselves that the other side is a wealthy special interest as if we are not very wealthy, very special and very interested. We imagine that we are trying to protect the Internet only for noble purposes, but it’s also true that we stand to make billions of dollars from the Internet staying just the way it is.
And like all violent ideologues, we have convinced ourselves that the issue is so pressing it demands extreme action. The stakes in this case are usually described as “breaking the Internet,” when in fact it’s already broken: not for the folks profiting today from the Internet, but for all the folks who create the beautiful books, articles, movies and music that the Internet is so often used to steal.
What we need is a discussion about how to make the Internet work for artists, software companies and regular folks alike. No one in software seems interested in that conversation: more than a month ago, we asked everyone opposed to the bill to suggest a better way to prevent piracy, and still no one has.
Now, we have taken this a step further. Not only are we refusing to engage in a constructive way, we are threatening anyone who engages in a way that is disagreeable to us. When no conversation is possible and no action from us is forthcoming, we can hardly blame the Luddites, bureaucrats, idiots and meddlers for being ill-informed or hasty.
Over the holidays especially, we need to stand down from the crazed ideological stances and self-interested politics that are ruining this country, and work together with people we don’t always like to figure out how the Internet — and everything else — can be made better, not worse.
In what has become a marketing team rite of passage, the video was produced by our new PR whiz Rachel who estimates she consumed 50 packs of gum while messing with video cameras, file formats, and recording levels. One of these days we’ll need to blog about everything we’ve learned making demo apps for iPhone, iPad and Android.
Monday we released our long-awaited app, Redfin for iPad. Today you can sign up to get a monthly email that tells you what’s going on near your home with Redfin’s Home Report or in your neighborhood, zip or city with Redfin’s Insider Report. While serious home buyers are probably already signed up for our daily emails to stay on top of new and updated homes for sale, we figured the tire-kickers, the homeowners and those casually thinking of selling would prefer an email tailored to them, sent once a month.
The email is packed full of great info straight from the MLS, the database that all real estate agents use, as well as from our agents:
Local market statistics: See at a glance what has happened with prices, sales, sale-to-list and new listings
Recent sales: Photos and prices of what your neighbor’s home sold for
Recent listing activity: The last three homes that hit the market
Featured Redfin listing: Good news for Redfin sellers; we feature one seller a month!
Redfin Agent Insights: Honest opinions from a Redfin Agent who toured a home near you
Real estate porn: Photos of the most expensive, the cheapest and most popular homes nearby
This email is just the tip of the iceberg for us. Over the coming months expect to see more and more features for home owners and sellers as we build a suite of tools to rival those that we’ve built for serious home buyers.
Here’s what my Redfin Home Report email looks like:
How to Sign Up
To sign up, just search for your home on our site. Claim your house in the My Redfin box and we’ll sign you up for a Home Report:
Or if you want to get the report for a different house, look for the ad below on any off-market property:
To sign up to receive an email about a neighborhood, search for the neighborhood, click the Stats & Trends button on the left side of the map, then look for this box on the upper right hand side:
After you’ve signed up, you can manage the homes you’re monitoring with your Favorites page in My Redfin in the upper right hand corner.
And that’s it for new site features and apps this year! Although we’re always curious about what you would like to see us add for home sellers and home owners in the future. Any suggestions?
The wait is finally over! And just in time for the holidays :). If you can’t wait until the end of this blog post to get your hands on our free app, then head directly to the App Store to download Redfin for iPad right now. Otherwise, read on for all the glorious details.
Why did we take the extra time to customize an app for the iPad when we could have simply tinkered with our top-rated iPhone app to make it work on the iPad? Taking the easy road has just never been our thing. Plus, we couldn’t contain our excitement for all of the awesome stuff that we could pull off with the iPad.
We built our iPad app from scratch to take advantage of iPad’s delightful user experience and to bring every detail we can about each home that interests you right to your fingertips. In addition, we added several exciting, new features to this release such as the option to view homes in a photo gallery or on a map, and a smart, new sort option called the “Redfin Special Blend.” The new sort option prioritizes the homes we think will be most interesting to you (i.e. Redfin has more information about them such as comments left by Redfin agents who have seen the home in person). But the thing we love most about Redfin for iPad is how fun it is to scroll through the full-screen photos and zoom in for a closer look at each home. Be careful, it’s addictive!
Here’s a quick tour through Redfin for iPad’s most exciting features:
Find homes nearby. Our app uses your iPad’s GPS so you can quickly and easily locate nearby homes for sale and open houses.
You’ll know it when you see it. We love maps but we also think you’ll agree that a photo gallery is a convenient way to quickly discover homes that catch your eye. The photo gallery feature is particularly useful once you’ve narrowed your search down to a specific neighborhood.
All the home photos and details you crave on one big screen. With just one swipe you’ll find photos and all the details about a home including property history and Redfin Agent Insights, comments left by Redfin agents who have seen the home in person. Plus, it’s all on one screen.
Have fun! Swipe through full-screen photos and then zoom in for a closer look.
Share it with a friend or friends. With one tap you can share a home you like with a friend in email or post it for your followers on Twitter, and all without leaving the app.
Stay in sync. Don’t worry, all of your old standbys are still here. When you sign in to your account, you can save searches, mark your favorites or x-out out the ones you don’t like, and even store notes and photos. Everything you do on the iPad app stays in sync so you can pick up from where you left off when you return to your computer or use a different mobile device.
Love the app? Help us out and write a review!
Found some room for improvement? Leave a comment here or drop us a line at support@redfin.com.
Sometimes we start a market analysis project looking for one thing and end up discovering something else entirely. Recently we decided to dig into the data to see if it supported our feeling that winter is the best time to buy, and the worst time to sell. However, when we got the results we discovered that our assumptions were dead wrong.
As we roll through the holidays and into winter, many would-be sellers will be holding off on listing their home, waiting for the spring “selling season” to put their home on the market. But if you’re ready to sell your home now, is waiting until spring the best strategy? Not according to the data, it isn’t.
We pulled a year’s worth of data on three quarters of a million homes listed across the country and analyzed sales statistics by season. Here’s what we found:
Homes listed in winter sell faster: 46 days in winter vs. 55 days in summer
Homes listed in winter are more likely to sell: 59.2% sell in winter vs. 53.1% sell in summer
Homes listed in winter sell closest to their original price: a 2.7% drop from the final price in winter vs. a 5.2% drop from the final price in summer, worth more than $7,000 on a $300,000 home
Homes listed in winter sell best.
Yup, you read that right: Overall, homes listed in winter sell best. 5.8% more homes listed in winter eventually sell (compared to the overall percentage of homes listed throughout the year), and they sell 1.4 percentage points closer to their original list price than the median—that’s $4,900 on a $350,000 home.
Spring wins in one category: Speed. Homes listed in spring sell the fastest, sitting on the market for 15% less time than the median. Winter comes in second in this category though, at six percent below the median, while homes listed in summer and fall both sell slower than the median (12% and 16%, respectively).
Apparently not many sellers are on to this pattern, because winter has twenty percent fewer listings added than the spring.
Keep in mind that we’re measuring correlation here, not causation. Listing in the winter won’t guarantee that your home sells faster, for more money, or that it will sell at all. That said, the data does seem to indicate that winter gets a bad rap for no good reason.
Why do you think most sellers are afraid to list their homes in winter? Should they be? Let’s hear your opinion!
How did we come up with these numbers?
We analyzed 753,093 listings that came on the market between November 15, 2009 and November 14, 2010 in Washington DC, Arlington County, Fairfax City & County, Baltimore City, Suffolk County (Boston), Queens NY, Fulton County (Atlanta), Cook County (Chicago), Travis County (Austin), Maricopa County (Phoenix), Clark County (Las Vegas), San Diego County, Los Angeles County, Orange County (Irvine), San Francisco County, San Mateo County, Sacramento County, Multnomah County (Portland), and King County (Seattle). We broke down the data on eventual sale statistics, including the percentage that sold within a year of being listed, the days on market for sold listings, and the sale to original list price ratio. For the purposes of this analysis, spring = March-May, summer = June-August, fall = September-November, and winter = December-February.
For days on market, for every listing that sold we counted the number of days between when it was originally listed and when it went under contract, taking the median of that number both overall and by season. The chart shows the difference between the overall median days on market and each season’s median.
For percentage sold, we took the total number of listings that sold within a year of being listed and divided by the number of listings that came on the market during each season. The chart shows the difference between the overall percentage of listings that sold and each season’s percentage.
For sale to original list price ratio, we divided the final sale price by the original list price for all listings that sold, taking the median of that number both overall and by season. The chart shows the difference between the overall median sale to original list ratio and each season’s median.
For the stats geeks out there: The p-value was calculated for each set, with all probabilities coming in below 0.0013, i.e. the observed differences in the given measures between seasons is indeed statistically significant.
Time for Redfin’s monthly tell-you-everything analysis of the real estate market! We just hit $5 billion in home sales, where Redfin’s agents represented either the buyer or the seller, all in our don’t-crowd-me-baby style. For every customer, deal or no deal, Redfin surveyed the customer and published the answer.
And on every home, we’ve paid our agents a bonus based on the survey result, not just a commission. Ninety-seven percent of our customers would recommend us to a friend. We’re so proud! Break out the Dom and the Dixie cups!
The Market Spends Another Day In Its Bathrobe, But Feeling Better
But enough bragging. How’s the market? It’s been sick so long no one has noticed it’s getting better. But it is! Sure September prices slipped, driven by the animal spirits of economic malaise. But consider:
We don’t expect a miraculous recovery: prices will be low for years, and will probably weaken slightly in the remaining months of 2011. But being a little sick isn’t so bad. You watch TV. You fry an egg for lunch. You haven’t yet forgotten how terrible it was before, when you spent all night in the bathroom.
Welcome to residential real estate in late 2011. Let’s dig into the numbers shall we?
Prices Dip
September prices dipped .6%. On the bursting-bubble’s five-year birthday, Las Vegas homes prices now sit 60% off their peak.
What difference does the overall economy make? Well consider Dallas, where prices have fallen only 8%: $4-gas has been good to Texas.
The renters sure are laughing now! But perhaps they’re also finally getting ready to move. Rental vacancy rates just fell to their lowest level since 2006, and rents seem likely to keep rising, by 3% in 2012. The ratio of home prices to rents is at a five-year low, though still roughly 15% higher than historical averages.
One sign renters are buying: the proportion of Redfin customers who are first-time home-buyers has increased 18% in three months.
But we expect pending home sales in November to keep rising. The number of Redfin customers signing offers increased for three consecutive weeks in November before Thanksgiving. The November 30 Federal Reserve Beige Book reports that U.S. real estate activity increased, though not everywhere and not by much.
Not a clean bill of health by any means, but some improvement.
Inventory is Low
The reason Redfin’s been saying all year that prices don’t have far to drop was that there aren’t many homes for sale. A lot of homeowners owe too much on their mortgage to sell, and a lot more just don’t want to sell right now. Would you, if you didn’t have to?
What about the scary stuff, all the foreclosures that banks haven’t even tried to sell yet, and all the past-due mortgages that should have been foreclosed months ago? We worry about that too.
We just hired an asset manager from a big bank, who just told the whole company how many repossessed homes the banks are waiting to list. It was like the vast evil egg farm Sigourney Weaver discovered in Aliens.
This tells us that for years there will be a steady stream – not a tidal wave — of distressed properties hitting the market, accounting for about 1 in 5 listings nationwide. Price can’t go up by much until this stuff runs out.
But it really helps that banks have become eager to approve short sales – where the bank lets the owner sell the property for less than the mortgage — in lieu of a foreclosure.
Rates Dip Below 4%
And the fact that many 2006 loans have an expiring 5-year teaser rate probably will make a difference: the new rate is actually lower than the teaser, and many folks’ mortgage payments just fell.
So now we arrive at the real reason the market has been improving: mortgage rates have been at historic lows, once again dipping below 4%.
I once said these rates can’t last, and everyone said I sounded like a used-car salesman, and that I was wrong. That was a year ago. I was wrong! But hey, so was half the government! These rates can’t last forever — but they’ll probably last a while yet. The Fed is committed to keeping them low for years.
Redfin's corporate blog is the place to read what Redfin employees have to say about Redfin, the real estate industry and other topics such as life at a startup or usability and web design.
