February 27, 2008

The Broken Tower and the Ivory Tower

Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt renew their argument that real estate brokers aren’t worth 6%, citing a study (PDF) conducted by Stanford economist B. Douglas Bernheim and one of his graduate students, Jonathan Meer, which shows that using a broker has no effect on a home’s average selling price.

We are an (online) broker ourselves, but have argued that consumers should be able to choose the real estate services for which they pay, so I’m not sure we have a dog in this fight. In the past, we have welcomed studies showing that buyers and sellers can get along without a broker, and argued that a client working with an online broker negotiates a better price. But in this case I was surprised that the Freakonomics team didn’t evaluate the Stanford economists’ methodology.

The Stanford study only evaluated 800 homes sold on the Stanford campus, “the ownership of which is limited to Stanford faculty and a limited number of senior staff.” In such an environment, marketing is much easier because of the small number of potential buyers, trust is high because of the buyers’ affiliations with one another, and supply is extremely limited: many academics would kill, or even teach an extra freshman survey course, to live on the Stanford campus.

Moreover, there is no broker-operated MLS on the Stanford campus, and likely no other broker representing the buyer, so there is no rationale for buyers’ brokers to steer clients away from properties not paying a commission. It seems like a leap to draw conclusions from this data set for the typical consumer, who is probably selling a home in a larger market, with more competition, to strangers largely represented by brokers.

In real estate and in life, college is a smaller, more perfect vision of how the rest of the world could be. We thought it was interesting that the previous academic study on brokers’ effectiveness focused on Madison, Wisconsin, because this is also a small college community where alternative approaches to real estate have reached critical mass. Maybe these communities point the way to a post-brokerage world waiting for all us, where both sides abandon their brokers, where we can access information for ourselves online, where we can come to terms more easily and economically.

For now though, we should at least take such findings with a grain of salt, because the Stanford campus isn’t the Hobbesian jungle of, say, the Orange County real estate market. We revere the Freakonomics team, who inspired us to offer real estate e-commerce in the first place, but it seems a bit too credulous to present these findings without acknowledging that Stanford, far more even than Madison, is a different world.

Bonus link: a consumer reviews the best real estate search sites… photo credit: To Mr. “Leaning Right” on Flickr.

Also, the NYT obituary on William F. Buckley is unusually good:

“No other act can project simultaneous hints that he is in the act of playing Commodore of the Yacht Club, Joseph Goebbels, Robert Mitchum, Maverick, Savonarola, the nice prep school kid next door, and the snows of yesteryear,” Norman Mailer said in an interview with Harpers in 1967… For Murray Kempton, one of his many friends on the left, the Buckley press conference style called up “an Edwardian resident commissioner reading aloud the 39 articles of the Anglican establishment to a conscript of assembled Zulus.” A friend of mine was, as a teenager, once fundraising door-to-door in Buckley’s Stamford neighborhood, and William F. Buckley invited him in and held forth at length on obscure topics…

February 23, 2008

There May Be Blood…

After arguing that we should let foreclosures run their course, we saw just what this would look like in a bank-owned Oakland listing, first noticed by one of the Redfin Forums participants.

In the listing photos, a man sits in front of the house, seemingly with his head in his hands. In the floor of one room there is a large red slick of what appears to be blood, beside a pail of forlorn cleaning supplies. Is it a Halloween haunted house gone bad or something worse?

We cannot display the pictures in a blog post commenting on an active listing, per an agreement with our data providers. But feel free to join the discussion about what exactly is on the floor of this listing in the Forums or comment below…

February 21, 2008

Give Me Price Discovery, But Not Yet

Slate’s Daniel Gross complained last Friday that recent proposals to declare a temporary moratorium on foreclosures will only slow the process of price discovery, which is how the market figures out what an asset is worth.

Whether we like it or not, Gross argues, housing prices still need to come down. A foreclosure is the market’s only way to force the issue.

And as anyone who has seen “Trading Places” can tell you, in most markets, price discovery can take a few minutes. In real estate, it takes years. Sellers, Gross says, get stuck on a price. Builders hold the line so that other residents in their development don’t feel like suckers. Commissions and moving costs, he notes, decrease liquidity.

Gross has argued elsewhere that bubbles are good for the American economy; without such irrational exuberance we wouldn’t have the telegraph, the Internet, or railroads. But in the bubble’s aftermath, he says, it’s just as important to murder as to create.

And when nobody faces the music, you get a Japanese-style recession, with prices stagnant for years. This is why Gross says that a foreclosure moratorium would perhaps be good for social harmony but bad for our economy.

One symptom of incomplete price discovery is wide disagreement between home buyers and sellers on price. Sellers are remembering what they could have gotten six months before, and buyers are forecasting what they could still save six months later.

This surfaces in our business as low close rates, which have dropped 50% since late fall. To generate the same amount of revenue, we have to do a lot more work. We spend most of our day trying to explain to buyers and sellers what we see happening in the market.

Predictably, we think the solution to the price discovery problem is more information. Informed consumers are one of the basic prerequisites for an efficient market. In the bubble, consumers bought houses without realizing the properties had sold for half the price two years before, using adjustable-rate mortgages they didn’t understand. Now in the bust, they are even more anxious.

And I’m sure Adam Smith would say it’s their own fault. Consumers should read the fine print. But the real estate and mortgage industries haven’t always made it easy for consumers to do that.

Today, many of the MLS cooperatives for sharing listings regulate brokers’ ability to publish price history, valuation estimates and tax records. And at least one California MLS has pressured Redfin not to support the “bubble bloggers,” who — working anonymously, occasionally at their own peril — often challenge conventional wisdom on market conditions. Extremely intelligent people struggle to compare the cost of different mortgages. Most disclosures are made at the discretion of the real estate broker or the mortgage broker, which is one reason why there’s still nothing like Yahoo! Finance for real estate.

And home-buyers need information more than stock-pickers. Buying a home isn’t like playing the stock market, which is still the sport of America’s other half; buying a home is supposed to be what all Amercians strive to do, regardless of whether they have personal finance expertise.

So while we have come to embrace the idea that cooperation among brokers is necessary to ensure the information we share is high quality, we still think the industry needs to get over itself about sharing all of that information with consumers. The most forward-looking MLSs — including the one here in Seattle — have already begun this process, and many others will follow their lead. If we as brokers aren’t the source of information about price discovery, someone else will be.

*~*~*~*

Bonus link, from a Friend of Redfin, on Florida prison system’s drunken orgies. Also check a review of online real estate sites which puts Redfin at the top of the charts. And a free Redfin t-shirt to anyone who can guess where the title for today’s post came from…

February 20, 2008

For All You Data Junkies Out There

We’ve been getting local about our markets to see which towns should be hot spots for Redfin. We’re sharing the analysis for all you data junkies out there.

Here’s what we already know about Redfin buyers: they’re very likely to work in high-tech fields, they usually have a college degree, and they typically buy a house for about $500,000. Like these people:

We looked for similar demographic characteristics in targeted areas within each of our markets, and combined that with recent activity on Redfin’s site. The data we considered was:

• Visits to Redfin.com, from Google Analytics. Note that Google tracks where people are when they search, not where they’re searching on the Redfin map.
• Redfin closed deals. Useful because many Redfin buyers hear about us through word of mouth. We got this from our own database, which surprisingly is only about 50% complete.
• Demographics of the area. We considered median household income, homeownership rate, and percent of population with bachelors’ degrees or higher, as reported by the US Census. If we couldn’t find city-level data, we used county data.

We used visits to rank order the towns, and then added the other data. The top 20 towns searching on Redfin in the Boston area look like this:

What’s interesting about the Boston data? Well, a lot of the neighborhoods where people are searching for homes- Somerville, Allston, Cambridge- have very low homeownership rates. But if you know Boston, you know that’s because these are where a lot of college students live. They’re mostly in apartments but maybe they’re looking for a place to buy after graduation. Or maybe they’re just blowing off class and surfing the Net.

Let’s go down the coast to Washington DC. This is a big area that covers several counties in Virginia and Maryland, as well as the cities of Washington DC and Baltimore.

Washington DC and Arlington ranked near the top, which wasn’t surprising to us. What was surprising was Baltimore: not often regarded as a tech center, and with a much lower median household income than Washington DC, the citizens of Baltimore showed themselves to be quite tech-savvy by searching Redfin for homes to buy (full disclosure: I’m from Baltimore).

Flying across the country to our home market of Seattle, we found some odd patterns. Note that in this data set we didn’t include the three demographic variables from census data, but we did include more of the Google Analytics statistics about the behavior of visitors.

The best brain candy in the Seattle area data-set, in my opinion, is Medina. This city is right on the coast of Lake Washington and has some pricey real estate. It’s a small area, and so it’s not surprising that Redfin has closed few deals there. What is surprising is that Medina is the fourth largest searcher in Seattle. Could it be that Medina’s most famous resident, Bill Gates, is addicted to searching real estate on Redfin?

Also interesting is the data for Spokane, where Redfin has a lot of searchers but a high bounce rate. Bounce rate is when a searcher finds a site and immediately leaves it. The searchers of Spokane probably realized that Redfin doesn’t have service in Spokane, and left. This makes me think that Redfin should add coverage in Spokane.

Data on our California markets isn’t included here. In San Francisco, the exercise was less illuminating because San Francisco and San Jose by far dominated our search results and closed deals. We can get more granular data, down to the neighborhood level, but we didn’t for this exercise. Ditto for Southern California.

February 15, 2008

Rambo, Meet Silicon Valley…

In one night, Michael Arrington wrote a dazzling refutation of this week’s post on leaving Silicon Valley for Seattle. I have often wondered what midnight fuel propels him through essays that are as pure, perfect and straight as an arrow, which is now plunged to my great surprise into my tiny, heaving chest…

But Michael probably already knows that I would be the last person to “explain away” Silicon Valley’s massive advantages. Michael’s point of view is where I started from when I left Silicon Valley, and one which I still largely share. The appreciation for Seattle’s outdoors that he mocks as irrelevant to a startup was what I already described as “something I still barely understand.”

It was the Valley’s scalding concentration of talent, its profusion of ideas, its manic urgency to change the world that made me want to belong to something for the first time in my life. It is why I fell in love with startups, and it is why I am still in love with what I do.

Growing up in Seattle’s suburbs, my twin brother Wes and I used to talk about an eternal fight against lameness — suburbs, station wagons, screaming kids — that I felt for the first time I had begun to lose when I left the Valley. My first two years in Seattle, I rode home every night yelling at myself. I ticked off the days until I could go back.

While Realtors were accusing me of already preparing the ready-made excuse that Redfin would fail because of industry resistance, I was stomping around with an even lamer excuse, saying we couldn’t succeed because of Seattle. Redfin opened a San Francisco development office as soon as we had the money.

But now I am here to say that bashing Seattle is bullshit. Sure Seattle will never be as good for startups as Silicon Valley. No place will. But that doesn’t mean you can’t succeed in Seattle. There are people here too who burn with a hard gem-like flame to make something beautiful. They have become my friends and colleagues at Redfin. We are keenly aware what all the freaks are up to at 2 a.m. in Silicon Valley, because we are freaks too. No one will outwork us.

So even though all of us in Seattle would probably concede that Silicon Valley is generally better for startups than anywhere else, that doesn’t mean that we have to agree with Michael that Silicon Valley is always better, or better in every way. For starters, people in Seattle have helped me in an open-hearted, small-town way that I might not have found in the Valley.

And where Michael and I really disagree is on whether it is good some times to be away from all the me-too Valley companies trying to make money on Internet ads, even though he complains about them every day on TechCrunch.

I don’t have many examples beyond Redfin of Seattle-based startups taking a different approach, but it is definitely true that folks in Seattle have stood by Redfin when nearly everyone in the Valley ran screaming from the idea of a business that wasn’t purely digital.

Purely digital businesses like Google are more profitable and easier to grow than a hybrid like Amazon, but there are too many companies trying to be the next Google in Silicon Valley rather than trying to be the next Amazon in Seattle. And nobody ever got a Christmas present — or bought a house — from Google.

So we are going to take our shot at doing our own thing here. This is how I believe a startup in Seattle can succeed: not by crying about what Seattle doesn’t have, but by going straight at the Valley. As Rambo says while strapped by sadistic communists to an electrified steel mattress skeleton: SILICON VALLEY, WE’RE COMING FOR YOU!

We aren’t afraid to be wrong, and we can’t be so afraid of failure that we never try.

Post script: Robert Scoble chimes in, noting that he is in the Valley because “the range and diversity of tech companies is a lot greater here than in Seattle” but nonetheless recommending the Boeing factory tour for anyone who visits.

February 12, 2008

How Green Was My Valley

The New York Times reports Friday that alone among all the cities hoping to be the next Silicon Valley, Seattle “is actually doing it.”

But the Times didn’t talk to iLike President Hadi Partovi, or Zillow.com CEO Rich Barton, both entrepreneurs who, like many of the folks at Redfin, shuttle between Seattle and Silicon Valley. None of us thinks Seattle is ever going to be much like Silicon Valley. We believe instead that what other cities can learn from Seattle is how to be different than the Valley, not the same.

In reality, most places don’t even want to try to be like the Valley. Seattle has become unrecognizably wealthier in the past decade, yet is oddly unhappy about it. Many Seattleites wish we were still a modest boreal town rather than a Microsoft-Amazon megapolis. The question I am most often asked here is where I went to high school — twenty years ago — not what I’m doing next.

The Valley by contrast is a heartless amnesiac. In my 16 years there I can’t recall anyone’s ever expressing nostalgia for how it used to be. This is probably because almost no one in Silicon Valley has any idea how it used to be. Internet guru Michael Arrington often opens conferences by asking audience-members from Silicon Valley to raise their hands and then, if they were born in the Valley, to keep their hands raised. Hands go up and down like The Wave.

And this is what Michael loves about the Valley: that it calls out at dog-whistle frequencies to nerds across America, Russia, India and China. The single-mindedness of their migration belongs in National Geographic. My first roommate spent four years building a company in San Francisco without ever buying furniture. When his startup went bust, he packed for the trip home to Toronto the same day.

Seattle is different. People live in Seattle because they love Seattle. When I was still looking for a reason to be here myself, I often asked Redfin recruits what brought them to town. The answer I always hoped for was “CONQUEST.” But what everyone talked about was something I still barely understand: the lifestyle and schools, the mountains and lakes. “Do you have any idea,” I finally told one candidate, “how bizarre it is to swim in a lake at the center of a city?”

Failure to appreciate a lake is viewed by many Seattleites as a sign of mental illness. But the Valley’s monomania is really just a kind of pubescence. What else could account for the Valley’s self-righteousness, its congregations of frustrated dudes, its all-nighters, idealism, delusions of grandeur, mood-swings, longings, dramas, hero-worship and pranks? Anywhere else by contrast seems all grown-up.

No one in the Valley can afford to grow up. Just as stressful environments delay the onset of sexual maturity in marsupials, a high cost of living – a two-bedroom house in Palo Alto typically costs more than $1.5 million — prevents people from buying homes and having children. In Silicon Valley, Seattle’s 28 year-old family man is still working his tail off for a hit.

The Hogwarts of Silicon Valley
The other source of Silicon Valley’s youthfulness is, in fact, places like Seattle. Seattle has some of America’s best high schools, but sends many of its best computer science students to California.

The founders of Apple, Google, Intel, Sun and Yahoo! all graduated from Berkeley or Stanford; an enormous graduating class seeks to follow in their footsteps every year. The whole state of Washington produces about 150 computer science graduates a year.

Stanford in particular is not just the source of Silicon Valley’s manpower but its magic. Guy Kawasaki says it is “the single biggest reason for Silicon Valley’s existence.” And as Hadi notes, “very few colleges spit out 21-year-olds who think they can be the next Jerry Yang or Larry Page.” It’s painful for those of us never admitted to Stanford to marvel at its sunny rejection of failure, its Hadron-sized Internet connections, its courses on venture capital and Facebook, its magnificent sense of entitlement.

Yet we all know that without Stanford the Valley would grow old and die. Native Seattleites hardly notice Seattle’s Stanfordlessness; Valley expats never get over it.

Rotarians and Pirates
This is not to say that Seattle is all bad for entrepreneurs, only that the ways in which it is good only show how different it is compared to Silicon Valley. Start with Seattle’s Rotary Club, the largest in the world. High-tech entrepreneurs are expected to be pillars of the business community here, not, as Silicon Valley’s establishment likes to think of itself, pirates of the Caribbean.

At one of the first conferences I attended in Seattle, I was shocked to hear a speaker talk about how to improve K-12 math education, not how to hack a Tivo. It took a while to realize that “K” stood for kindergarten, not kilobytes. But this mindset connects us to a set of civic virtues bigger than any one company. It’s why I’m optimistic about Seattle over the long haul.

And it has nurtured a rookie CEO like me. A Seattle journalist e-mailed me while I was still loading the tiny U-Haul that brought me here. A VC who should have eaten my gizzard for breakfast invited me to his lake house for dinner. A startup CEO who offered money-raising advice over lunch diverted us from Quiznos to Carmines. Redfin is better because of their help.

Far from the Madding Crowd
Few people would have had the time to help in Silicon Valley. The chaos of newcomers and the desperation of those who want to stay make the Valley seem like a capital about to fall in a coup. Dingbat ideas are scattered like pennies on a sidewalk. Overlooking last night’s website launch is like showing up at a party with last year’s purse.

The cult of the new may seem like madness but here’s the method to it: what’s often most difficult about developing a new idea is figuring out if it’s already an old idea. A business just like the one you’ve been dreaming of may already be forming within Google, or preparing to launch on its own.

When you and everyone you know spend 18 hours a day downloading, hacking, breaking, sharing, gossiping, criticizing and arguing about the Web, it’s easier to tell when an idea is truly new. And if you don’t, it’s almost impossible to catch up.

This is why Hadi says so many Seattle entrepreneurs develop ideas late. We aren’t slow; just out of the loop. Even Seattle’s greatest two start-ups, Amazon and Microsoft, were first conceived somewhere else.

But being apart from Silicon Valley can give entrepreneurs the latitude to think about what works, not what’s fashionable. It was, at first, hard for me to break out of the Valley mindset. My initial question in setting Redfin’s course wasn’t “Is there a business here?” but “Is it cool?”

Because Redfin’s business — real estate — isn’t cool. And taking on the messy business of serving customers directly definitely isn’t cool. But some of the best – and most meaningful — new ventures may be the ones that combine old and new business models, experience and youthful recklessness, perseverance and opportunism. And it is these ventures that really seem to belong in Seattle.

Loyal to a Fault
Because if it turns out that Zillow, iLike or Redfin are on to something good, it may be easier to build a long-term business in Seattle. Ten years on at Microsoft, engineers deep in Redmond’s rain forests are still writing the next version of Office. Meanwhile the engineers at Google are, as Zillow’s Rich Barton points out, plotting their next startup on the company dime.

I’m not sure which engineers one would rather have, but it is true that there is a blue-collar dedication in Seattle that you don’t find in the ADD-addled Valley. “You work hard here because it’s gray,” Rich writes. “Then you go hiking or fishing or skiing.”

I really like that advice. Unfazed by any heavy weather ahead, Rich keeps chugging along and having fun. And Seattle does, too.

Thanks to Rich Barton, CEO of real estate portal Zillow.com, and to Hadi Partovi, president of music discovery startup iLike, for their help.

February 7, 2008

The Gods Must Be Crazy

The Illinois General Assembly is now considering HB4313, a bill that would make it illegal for any licensed real estate agents to “give or pay cash rebates, cash gifts or cash prizes to an unlicensed person who is a party to a contract to buy or sell real estate.” This would make it illegal for Redfin or any other broker to refund a commission to a buyer, even though the buyer is the ultimate source of the money from which commissions are paid.

Eleven other states support similar laws, which explains why Redfin hasn’t responded to our many requests to expand to Portland, Oregon. The Illinois bill is worrisome to us because of our plans to open a Chicago office this spring (already delayed slightly by a merger of two Illinois listing services).

In most political disputes, it is at least possible to imagine the rationale of either side. But we have never been able to concoct a plausible reason anti-rebate laws are conceivably in the public interest; perhaps our commenters can help? Recent legislative battles in New Jersey and Tennessee put the lie to my original assumption that the current laws must have been an artifact of an earlier, corrupt age. And every progressive Realtor opposes the laws. After grousing about 60 Minutes’s description of its lobbying efforts, even the National Association of Realtors has been at pains to distance itself from the ardent efforts of its state organizations to lobby for anti-rebate laws.

But if it’s hard to imagine how these laws serve the public, it isn’t hard to imagine how they serve their sponsors. Representative Robert Molaro introduced the Illinois bill on January 9, with support Tuesday from Representative Franco Coladipietro and today from Representative Angelo Saviano. In his 2006 campaign, Representative Molaro received four donations from the Illinois Realtors Association; for the same campaign, Representative Saviano received seven donations from the Illinois Realtors Association.

If you live in Illinois, let your representative know how you feel about these laws! Representative Saviano already offers his email address to the public: skip@skipsaviano.com.

(Photo credit to Jeff Holmes. We included it just because it looks cool.)

February 3, 2008

The 1st & 2nd Moments of Consumer Delight

Reacting to Thursday’s announcement about the new “Freakish Depth” release of Redfin.com, Austin asset manager Lani Anglin-Rosales wrote an analysis of Redfin’s brand for national real estate magazine Agent Genius:

Redfin is actually designed to appeal to GenY by using hip vernacular like “Redfin’s goal is to delight our audience of hard-core real estate fanatics by offering Freakish Depth on major real estate markets.”

On the same day that Lani talks about our appeal to people born between 1980 and 1995, San Diego real estate blogger Kris Berg writes “you dudes, like, speak my language,” and Greg Swann wonders about the “gnomes who find Redfin appealing.” But it was Lani’s analysis that generated so many comments she had to close the post, concluding with:

As an insider, I can tell you that GenY falls for wants jazzy words and being made to feel special, so all you really have to do to cater to GenY is tell them they’re special, that you’re stupid and they’re not, and give them shiny buttons on your website and offer them $100 at closing as a rebate.

Notwithstanding that our average refund is $10,000 at closing, Lani is correct that our brand appeals to younger people: 90% of our customers are under 45.

But this talk of “delight” was not a calculated attempt to appeal to GenY. The concept actually came to us years ago from P&G employee Dan Gerbus, when many Redfin employees worked for a startup that made software for companies like P&G. It was strange to hear a now-retired IT manager in Cincinnati talk so freely and passionately about the vaguely sensuous idea at the center of P&G’s strategy: “the first and second moments of consumer delight.”

And it had never occurred to us back then that the proper role of a new product is not simply to fill a need, but to delight its customers. Pre-Redfin, we had always focused on such dry selling points as return on investment and network security.

Dan explained that the first moment of delight is when the consumer first spies it on the grocery shelf. The second moment is when the consumer actually uses the product. We liked the idea that using the product is the real moment of truth precisely because, contrary to Lani’s point, this respects rather than dupes the consumer.

Coming to Redfin with no consumer products experience, we remembered what we learned from the best consumer-products company in the world about delight. Our first moment is our map-based real estate search, but the second is what really counts: when we deliver results as real estate brokers. If traditional agents teleported into a random Redfin meeting, I really think they would be surprised just how much we talk about this. And then they would be brainwashed, hogtied or sacrificed in a bizarre, sadistic ritual.*

But what about “Freakish Depth”?

Before Redfin, we had been used to pouring our guts out on software that half-interested people barely paid attention to. But a real estate application is one of the few web applications in the world where you can safely assume that people want all the information you can possibly give them. Few people browse Amazon, Orbitz or E-Trade until their eyeballs fall out, but that’s how they use real estate sites.

So in focus group after focus group, we tried to convince our customers that they didn’t actually want to see all the information about a property for sale, or that brief data quality burps didn’t matter. And we always failed.

Redfin’s happiest thought came at the end of one of these focus groups when someone said, “These people are as freaky as we are.” It’s a nerd’s dream: taking one of the most rich, public and structured data sets in the world, and getting free reign to shovel as much of that data as you can out onto the Web.

So after poking at inventory for a while, we’ve decided to go nuclear on data quantity and quality, because we found that consumers really freak out about differences that we had worried seemed arcane or even invisible. Freakish Depth is also probably the only strategy that Redfin, limited now to seven markets while others build national sites, can be good at: taking consumers the long hard way from previewing homes online, to touring, pricing and buying, owning.

So we use terms like “Freakish Depth” not to appeal to GenY but because that’s how we really think of our strategy, and saying what we really think is probably the only way we can be heard in this fake-weary, media-saturated world. But to our critics, sincerity just seems like the most cunning trick of all.

(Bonus to anyone who can identify the art work pictured above as an example of delight, and how it works. Credit to Business Week for Dan’s photo. Many thanks to Dan for all he taught the Plumtree-alum at Redfin and everywhere else.)

*The human-sacrifice comment was just a joke, about how traditional agents seem to think of us and what we do all day. We try to delight you, too. If we held an open house for traditional agents to meet Redfin agents and executives would you come?