Every month, Redfin publishes two newsletters on real estate prices. One, usually published on the last Tuesday of every month, is a Redfin Roundup, which synthesizes data collected by economists, government agencies and others to provide a complete portrait of what happened in the market over the past month. The other is Redfin Insider, usually… Read More
The more complicated a business gets, the more of a math problem it becomes. Running a lemonade stand, you don’t need to analyze gross margins or survey customers because you squeeze the lemonade yourself, and hand it to every customer. But once you have employees and customers you’ve barely met, numbers become more important. For… Read More
We’ve talked before about forceful personalities and humility, artistic endeavors and healthy organizations, so we’re posting this letter from my mild-mannered twin brother in Massachusetts, on the Weinstein Brothers’ gruesome creative process… *~*~*~* In the laundry room, I picked up Peter Biskind’s book on Miramax and the Weinstein brothers. The dust jacket has a blurb from… Read More
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Michael Jordan. Michael Jordan was once asked to campaign against Jesse Helms, the senator from Jordan’s home state. This should have been an easy decision. Helms had once argued that blacks were less intelligent than whites, and that the civil rights bill was the most dangerous legislation in… Read More
Last week, we published research showing that more than half of all listings activated in 2009 failed to sell by August 2010. We argued then that would-be home-sellers should hire the agent with the best track record, not the one promising the best price, because the most likely outcome was that the listing agent wouldn’t… Read More
Have you noticed how many churches are for sale these days? In almost every major American city, from Chicago to Seattle to Atlanta to Los Angeles to Brookline, Massachusetts you can buy a church. In fact, everywhere I looked, I found a church for sale. What’s the story here? Are churches under financial distress? Maybe churchgoers… Read More
Our software engineers have been hard at work on an upgraded version of our iPhone App, which is now available for download from the App Store! Here’s what you can expect: Enhancements: Drag-and-Search: You asked and we listened! Dragging the map to a new location re-queries Redfin for the homes in that area. High-Res Retina… Read More
A long time ago, before the Second Coming of Steve Jobs, I found myself on a drive over the San Francisco Bay Bridge with Michael Young, now Redfin’s Chief Technology Officer. I asked him: “Isn’t some small part of you rooting for Apple?” Having spent years porting server software for Windows, UNIX and Linux, Mike… Read More
A couple of weeks ago, Redfin engineers got together for a hackathon to prototype features we’d like to see on the site. One team, featuring Jane Nemenman, Jamie DeMichele, Dane Brandon and Llewellyn Botelho, built a Redfin.com widget for each listing that showed the listing agent’s track record: how many listings he had on the… Read More
Last night and this morning, Redfin published its analyses of Seattle and San Francisco activity in July, drawing on proprietary data and agent war stories to give consumers an up-to-the-minute portrait of the real estate market. With plenty of buyers but no real urgency, both markets are weakening, the Bay Area for the first time… Read More