The University of Washington had a big computer science job fair today. Microsoft was there. Google was there. Eight Zillovians were there, all wearing Zillow t-shirts. And Redfin was there too, wearing a T-shirt that said, “NO, we don’t compete with Zillow.” Standing in front of our bare table, I found myself wishing I had… Read More
Contrarian super-brain James Surowiecki, author of the Wisdom of Crowds and a weekly New Yorker column on the economy, wrote last Thursday about how why the conventional wisdom that real estate prices never actually go down is wrong. His argument is that the median housing prices on which newspapers report don’t take into account: –>… Read More
As part of our brown bag lunch program, Farecast CEO Hugh Crean visited Redfin Friday for a talk on the Art of the Deal. Hugh was a corporate development bigshot at Priceline, and an equity analyst at the fierce DLJ investment bank before that. He talked about something I’ve never been good at, which is… Read More
Guy Kawasaki today published a stupendous blog entry about defending a new company from competitors, arguing that all you really have in a startup is a jump on understanding the problem and building the solution. It’s a very good argument. Fresh from having read The Art of War or Only the Paranoid Survive, entrepreneurs worry… Read More
The Redfin engineers have been hard at work this past month and I’m sure we all took advantage of this weekend’s rain to spend a few days indoors catching up on some much-needed sleep. Now what were we so busy working on? Helping you find bargains With the real estate market slowing down and the… Read More
The FTC’s Competition Director held a press conference today to announce legal actions against two Detroit multiple listing services for refusing to publish listings at a reduced commission. Five other listing services in Colorado, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Virginia, and Wisconsin rolled over, and agreed to publish the listings rather than fight the FTC. What… Read More
Free home tours are finally here! Customers screamed for it, the marketing department lobbied for it, yet we didn’t do it because we thought it was too reminiscent of irrational dot com behavior like Kozmo-we all know how well that worked out. Customer feedback from a recent focus group prompted us develop the new Redfin… Read More