Redfin is scheduled to be on Seattle’s local NPR stations (KUOW @ 94.9 and KPLU 88.5) tomorrow morning at 6:50 a.m. and again at 8:50 a.m. The interviewer talked about bicycling to work in the rain, eccentric parents and other pleasant topics until the recording light dinged, then reduced me to rubble with her first… Read More
Google, as everyone notes today, is launching a search engine for real estate, but without MLS access. Damon Darlin of the New York Times immediately recognizes that the problem is therefore that there just aren’t enough pins in Google’s map. Our question: why don’t real estate sites publish each night an HTML page for every… Read More
Every home-owner or would-be home-owner has a war story about the crazy stuff he or she did to buy or sell a house. And everyone else wants to learn how to take his or her house-buying or house-selling game to the next level. If you’ve got a great war story, ping me at glenn (dot)… Read More
Dostoevsky recognized the lurid appeal of the high and the low better than anyone. He’d probably be able to explain why so many people, on seeing the most expensive and the most popular homes in our database, immediately asked for the lowest-priced property added to Redfin this week (3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, 1,440 square feet,… Read More
Redfin is introducing a new feature to its blog: house porn! Here is the most expensive house added to Redfin over the past seven days: It’s on the east side of the Hunt’s Point peninsula that juts north of the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge. 6.95 million. 6 bedrooms, 4.75 bathrooms. A wine cellar. A guest… Read More
A thoughtful New York Times article by Damon Darlin highlights new research from a pair of Pomona College economists on how to evaluate whether homes are fairly priced, by comparing home prices to rents. While price-to-rent ratios have been calculated before, the Pomona research is more sophisticated in at least two ways: 1. Pair-wise comparables… Read More
From the March 23, 2006 New York Review of Books: “The greatest of Earth’s architects and builders are the termites. These distant relatives of the cockroach build cities whose spires tower far higher above their inahbitants’ heads, relative to their size, than do our tallest skyscrapers. Some species in northern Australia build razor-backed structures that… Read More