Many thanks to Michael Arrington and Erick Schonfeld for publishing an essay this morning on what I’ve learned as a CEO during the downturn. Did anyone notice that the picture of Arnold in “Predator” is strikingly similar to the picture of me? The premise of the post isn’t that Redfin has found our way out… Read More
After Tuesday’s announcement of a monster $800 billion stimulus package led to the largest mortgage-rate drop in seven years, on the same day that the latest Case Shiller data showed the largest-ever year-over-year drop in home prices, we wondered if more home-buyers might start poking at Redfin’s site. So I just checked Google Analytics, which… Read More
We waste a lot of time at Redfin trying to predict the future. Every business does I guess, but the speculation at a startup is especially poignant because the future is where you’ve pinned all your hopes. When we launched the big upgrade to our home-buying service, with unlimited home tours, agent choice and a… Read More
Well, I feel a little embarrassed now. After reading about Apple’s advertising budget on TechCrunch, I complained yesterday that, for its size, Apple spends more money on marketing than Microsoft. In the comments on that post, Sasha Aickin pointed out that Microsoft spends more ad dollars than Apple as a percentage of their respective overall… Read More
Last September, when Microsoft first launched its “I’m a PC” ads, we pointed out that Apple was a marketing behemoth, and Microsoft was the nerdy engineering company: We think of Apple as a products company, and Microsoft as a business behemoth, but Apple is the company that floods the airwaves with ads while Microsoft is… Read More
We think Lisa Hurt is the first Redfin seller to promote her home for sale in Bothell with Twitter! While Lisa is new to Twitter it’s exciting to see sellers using different online mechanisms to promote their listings. I definitely think that Twitter, especially if you have a decent number of followers, can be a… Read More
The New York Times published yesterday an article about how Barack Obama is using social networks not just to raise money but also to communicate directly with citizens. It is a measure of how much many folks on the web believe in Obama as their candidate that he is being now lobbied via the web…. Read More
Following Andreas Kluth’s essay in The Economist, Nicholas Carr, author of Does IT Matter? and the recent Atlantic essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” said on Friday that the blogosphere is dead: While there continue to be many blogs, including a lot of very good ones, it seems to me that one would be hard… Read More
It’s been a busy few months and an all hands on deck effort as we changed not just our service (Read Glenn’s blog post on the service changes) but updated the website to match. Every page was touched, all the content was re-written, and no pixel was left un-turned (except the blog layouts which will… Read More
Redfin started life as a cult for what my mom still likes to call “your little web friends.” But our goal has always been to become a religion, appealing to grandmas and truck-drivers and everyone in between too. Unlimited Tours, Agent Choice To hit the mass market, we’re upgrading today our home-buying service to offer… Read More