In our series of reports on The Real Estate Scientist we bring you data driven, no-nonsense answers to help you untangle the snarl of real estate advice you commonly encounter when trying to buy or sell a home. We’ve sifted through piles of real estate data to answer the following question: What is the true… Read More
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
Our Washington DC market manager, Karen Krupsaw, was in my office last Monday getting ready for her first board meeting. We weren’t worried about her presentation, just because her point of view has the violence and certainty of a hawk descending on a field mouse. Instead we worried about the Q&A; most board presentations are… Read More
What a coup for Redfin! The founder and former CEO of CarMax, Austin Ligon, joined Redfin’s board of directors this week, and also made a small investment in the company. The note we sent out Monday night to everyone here at Redfin captures some of our excitement at Austin’s arrival: The big news this week is… Read More
TechCrunch’s Sarah Lacy just published an essay on how Silicon Valley has still been eating steaks throughout the recession. She makes the case using the upside-down logic that is unavoidable in the Valley, based on venture and merger activity. This is true. A recession is the best time to be an early-stage company. But for… Read More
Today’s most-emailed article in the New York Times is about the near-manic entrepreneur, who dreams big and sleeps in his office. I read it feelingly, as it describes a way I have always wanted to be. But in at least one respect, how I wanted to be changed once I became a father. Not for… Read More
There’s a fascinating essay on Facebook just now from the owner of the lovely Posie’s Cafe in Portland, OR about how Groupon nearly bankrupted her business. The coffee shop proprietor, Jessie Burke, was shocked at how much money the daily deals site charged to run the promotion. Groupon sold consumers a $13 Posie’s credit for $6,… Read More
It’s a simple argument: Bill Gates is, by far, our industry’s greatest hero. It’s hard to believe we once saw Bill as the pie-splattered villain, and others as the idealists. And it’s hard to understand why, even now, the entrepreneur whom our youth admire far more than Bill Gates is someone who has had great… Read More
Redfin published its latest analyses of Bay Area and Seattle real estate markets last night, based on proprietary data from our websites and war stories from our agents. To no one’s surprise, prices were down in Seattle, and mixed to down in the Bay Area. In both markets, three trends jumped out at us from… Read More
Here at Redfin, we’ve been thinking a lot lately about Twitter as a development platform. The problem with that platform today is that nearly all Twitter applications are applications for using Twitter, not applications that use Twitter for doing something else. Redfin, for example, doesn’t want to build another Twitter client. We want to build… Read More