Hey Beautiful, Upload Your Photo!

Big news! Redfin upgraded its website last night to improve the performance of map-based search, which is quite zippy now. The site has been creaking under the load of more than a million new visitors this spring, so you’ll see more performance improvements over the next few months.

The site also looks a little different because we now ask everybody to upload a photo when you register for listing alerts, save favorites or create an account for any other reason. If you’ve already got a Redfin account, click on your user name at the top right of any Redfin.com page, and choose My Account from the drop-down menu to add a photo.

The photo gives us a nice way to welcome you back to the site. It also helps us to attach a name to a face when you sign up for a tour, ask us about a website feature, or invite a Redfin agent to visit your house for a listing consultation.

And it lends more credibility to the reviews you leave when working with one of our agents. Since our first deal in February 2006, we’ve surveyed every customer for a review, deal or no deal. We published that review, and every review since, good, bad or ugly.

Even now, every time we get a survey response, executives at Redfin get an email, and everyone’s heart skips a beat. After all these years, the agent’s bonus for a transaction still depends completely on that review: if the customer isn’t happy, the agent and his team gets no bonus whatsoever.

It’s an imperfect system, as a customer doesn’t always recognize when she has gotten good or bad service. But we couldn’t imagine running a brokerage at scale without it. It helps our agents get better, and we think it helps our customers make better decisions about whom to work with, too.

Our first cut at publishing these reviews in an agent’s online profile was very Rain-Man, dominated by numbers and text:

Now the reviews include a picture of the house you bought or sold and, with your permission, your picture too. The agent’s profile now looks much better. As Dave McClure colorfully observes, building social software is all about the faces:

So we hope that you’ll take a few minutes and upload a photo to your Redfin.com account or, even better, log-in via your Facebook account, so we can just use whatever profile photo you use there.

This is only the beginning. Your Redfin profile will get richer over the next few months as we get smarter about recommending the homes you want to see and the next steps that you want to take; with this website upgrade we’ve also completed our home-buying guide, which we’ll slice and dice into sashimi-sized chunks, educating Redfin.com users in a personalized way at each step of their search.

Unveiling Our Secret Weapon
Of course, there’s more to this website upgrade than most Redfin.com users can see. Over the years, about half the engineers at Redfin have shifted their focus to build software for our brokerage customers and our real estate agents, fundamentally making the process of buying and selling a home more transparent, delightful and efficient; folks just using Redfin.com for home search never see how good Redfin really is. The most recent example of this work was Deal Room, which guides home-buyers through the escrow process.

Now we’ve developed a similar platform for representing home-sellers, as part of a huge strategic effort to build the listing business. We’ll work out the kinks using it with our own agents, then we’ll begin to expose it to our customers, so they can always see what’s going on with their listing.

The other big win for Redfin’s brokerage customers in this release is a new tool we call the agent scouting report. It grew out of a hackathon project conceived of by Llewellyn Botelho, Dane Brandon, Jamie DeMichele and Jane Nemenman, who in turn had developed the idea after talking with our San Francisco agents how we approach a negotiation.

The rest of the engineering team took this idea and ran with it, building a new tool just for Redfin agents that helps our customers get a better deal. When negotiating with an agent at any brokerage, a Redfin agent can now quickly see when and where that agent has sold homes. More important, the Redfin agent can see whether the other agent has a history of over-pricing listings to create some room for negotiation, or under-pricing to create a bidding war.

Finally, the Redfin agent can see who else at Redfin has worked with the agent, and review any notes the Redfin agent left about how best to approach her. This is powerful stuff, similar to what a baseball pitcher gets when facing a great batter. Unlike media sites, we have full access to the database of agent activity for every market we serve, and we have our own direct experience of working with those agents. Here is a typical report available to a Redfin agent, providing the entire performance history for another agent with whom we’re negotiating a deal; for this blog we redacted the agent’s contact details:

And that’s it! Up next is a big new mobile upgrade. For now, let us know if you have any ideas on what you’d like to see next!

Why Renren and Yandex Sold Their Stock in the U.S.

Add one more commodity that China and Russia export for U.S. consumption: Internet stocks.

The emergence of Internet titans like Baidu, Renren and now Yandex is being hailed as a coming-out party for Chinese and Russian entrepreneurialism, but what’s striking about that party is its venue, U.S. stock exchanges.

Why would Renren, the so-called Facebook of China, sell its stock here and not where all of its users are? The answer: investors pay more for growth in the U.S. than elsewhere.

In China, valuations rarely stray far above ten times annual earnings. In the U.S., investors have valued Renren at nearly $5 billion, even though the company lost $64 million last year.

This tells the true story of why America is still the center of the Internet economy, and how tenuous our hold on that position is: even as our technical supremacy is challenged by engineers worldwide, our appetite for risk is much greater.

Culturally, America is still a destination for dreamers, con artists and get-rich-quick schemes. And that’s a big advantage. If we don’t reform education and immigration policy, or provide more funding for higher education, it may be our last one.

If U.S. real estate inventory is so “overwhelming,” where is it all hiding?

While some housing pundits are talking about demand being “overwhelmed by supply” and others are throwing out estimates of an “excess supply” of over 3 million homes, buyers that we are serving across the country keep telling us the same thing over and over this spring: “Selection stinks!”

Worse yet, when they do finally find a home that they want, they often submit an offer only to find that theirs is one of multiple offers that the seller has received—increasingly our agents are reporting bidding wars and multiple offers in numerous markets.

So what’s going on? How can inventory be high but buyers are hitting slim pickings and multiple offers? Well, for starters, although listings may be up from January—which is true every year due to the annual winter hibernation of the housing market—on-market inventory and new listings aren’t actually all that high for this time of year. In fact, in every Redfin market except Las Vegas, new listings are down from last year:

Not only that, but new listings of non-distressed homes, which are more frequently well-kept and owner-occupied (i.e. the kind of home that most non-investor buyers are interested in), are falling over twice as fast as bank-owned (REO) listings:

This result isn’t suprising at all if you’ve spent any time talking with home owners lately. Anyone who doesn’t absolutely need to sell seems to have decided to wait out the market, either hoping for a better opportunity to list their home next year or just renting it out to take advantage of a supposedly increasingly hot rental market.

Of course, if we’re trying to figure out what’s going on in the market today, and where we’re headed, we can’t just pretend that the distressed listings don’t exist.

When it comes to pricing, REOs are selling for 20% to 50% less than similarly-sized non-distressed listings, but the price trends of the two have been moving in the same general direction over the last year (click any of these charts to enlarge):

The overall price trend (both for REOs and non-distressed homes) has been down in most markets over the last year (Boston and Washington DC’s flat prices are two notable exceptions). Meanwhile, sales are slowly clawing their way out of the post-tax-credit gutter, but a decent recovery in sales is currently being held back by a serious lack of quality inventory.

Allow me to illustrate today’s market dynamics by way of a Venn diagram (because who doesn’t love Venn diagrams?):

If we don’t start to see more listings from owners who have the equity to put their homes on the market, prices of increasingly rare non-distressed listings seem likely to stop falling soon, just due to basic supply and demand. Of course, that claim leads to the big question: how soon?

Ultimately, supply and demand are the primary drivers of the real estate market, but prices seem to react to these inputs about as fast as a three-toed sloth. While the bubble was inflating, it took over a year of declining sales and increasing inventory before prices peaked and began to fall. Although on-market inventory has been declining since mid-2008, the slow recovery of sales along with a shift in psychology away from home ownership has delayed the turnaround of prices (oh yeah, there was also that delightful government meddling in the form of a giant handout that paused a true price correction for over a year as well).

As Calculated Risk recently pointed out, home prices are not far above their historic lows, although it’s a pretty safe bet that we’ll have a bit of an overshoot on the downside, followed by at least a few years of flat prices (which is down when inflation is factored in).

Foreclosures are still quite high and will likely take three to five years to work through, but growth in both the beginning and the end of the foreclosure pipeline seem to be backing off their 2010 peaks. The worst seems to be behind us on that front.

Every region has different dynamics, but with generally lousy selection, slowly recovering sales, and years worth of foreclosures to work through, where does that put us today, and through the end of this year? Barring some unforseen economic black swan, most of us here at Redfin think prices in most regions will probably stop falling by this time next year, while the more optimistic among us expect prices to end the year higher than where they are today. Sales will continue their sloth-like increases, foreclosures will be slowly but surely absorbed (many by all-cash investors), and hopefully, non-distressed sellers will begin to return to the market.

Is this a bottom call? Not really. Nobody is able to perfectly time the market, including us. No matter where we think the bottom is, we’re probably wrong (just like certain other recent high-profile predictions). Is buying a home today less risky than it was five years ago? Absolutely. Will buying a home ever be a risk-free proposition? Sorry, nope.

A Changing of the Guard

Quick! Name the top 10 publicly traded consumer internet businesses in the US. When you woke up Thursday morning, the list was:

1. Google: $171 billion market capitalization (26% annual revenue growth)
2. Amazon: $90 billion (38% growth)
3. eBay: $43 billion (14% growth)
4. Priceline: $26 billion (38% growth)
5. Yahoo!: $21 billion (-24% growth)
6. Netflix: $13 billion (45% growth)
7. Expedia: $7 billion (14% growth)
8. WebMD: $3 billion (21% growth)
9. Open Table: $2 billion (57% growth)
10. AOL: $2 billion (-17% growth)

The next one down would have been Ancestry.com, and there wouldn’t have been many more with a valuation over $1 billion. Sixteen years after Netscape’s IPO, the most amazing fact about the Internet is how few large-scale public companies it has created, and how irrelevant some of them already seem to our daily lives.

That’s all about to change, because most of the companies on that list are about to change. One telling sign: it’s a lot easier to come up with a top-10 list of private Internet companies. If you’re a consumer under 40, you’re far more likely to have used their services today than those of WebMD, Priceline, AOL or even eBay:

1. Facebook
2. Groupon
3. Zynga
4. LinkedIn
5. Twitter
6. Gilt
7. Living Social
8. Pandora
9. Yelp
10. Foursquare

The first of those companies to graduate from the ranks of private to public ownership is LinkedIn. Worth $9 billion, or 36 times 2010 revenues and 520 times 2010 earnings, it debuted today at #7 in public-company market capitalization. With the possible exception of Foursquare, it seems very likely that each of the other private companies will be publicly traded in two years. Most will be worth as much or more than LinkedIn.

The technology community brought this about almost despite itself. Only a few years ago, the two most prominent thinkers in venture capital said that even their portfolio’s most ambitious companies shouldn’t necessarily go public.

One said that no one wants to run a public company; the other reported that his hand shook every time he had to sign off on a public company’s financial statements. Yet today the two are investors in nearly half of the remaining private companies on the list.

Back then, the investors cited regulations as the main problem. But what has changed since is revenues, not regulations. More importantly, the ambitions of entrepreneurs and investors have changed, in just the way we once hoped they would. As we wrote in 2008:

This quarter was the first since 1978 that a venture-financed company didn’t go public. But the real headline isn’t the dearth itself, but the fact that some of the smartest people in venture capital are fine with it. It’s like the PGA moved the Masters to a pitch-and-putt, and Tiger Woods applauded the decision.

…We have to keep building businesses to be businesses, not just to get bought. There are plenty of entrepreneurs who, if they could grow a business to $100 million and beyond, would prefer to keep building it rather than get acquired. The hard part for us isn’t the regulations, it’s getting past $100 million, which takes patience, big thinking, and a huge appetite for risk.

Fortunately, everyone heard the VCs’ warnings but almost no one listened. All except one of the companies on that list were around when investors declared that the public markets were no longer such a desirable goal, and all of them could easily have sold for life-changing amounts of money. None did.

And after years of caution, fortune now favors the bold. Wall Street bid LinkedIn up 109% on its first day of trading for all sorts of irrational reasons, but also because investors are starved for high-growth businesses. Growth is what new Internet businesses do best. If we as Internet entrepreneurs aren’t going for broke, no one else will.

And without a new wave of businesses, the whole Internet sector would become the domain of value investors, eager for Google to pay its first dividend. Already, eight of the top-10 public companies grew revenues by less than 40% last year, and analysts are much less optimistic about their growth over the next two years.

Everyone is debating whether LinkedIn’s stock ended today overpriced, but this isn’t the important debate.  What matters more than the day-of-IPO frenzy is that LinkedIn and all the other soon-to-be public Internet companies are going to grow much more over the next decade than the current top-10 will. And that means the Internet segment of the economy will grow much larger, too.

A Part of History, Apart from History

Hours after news broke that Osama bin Laden was dead, Jeff Jarvis wrote that “Twitter is our Times Square on this victory day.” The New York Times published a photo of the actual Times Square, where firefighters cheered the announcement.

I sat in a cab, watching the tale of the tribe scroll by on Twitter. The friends I reached out to just chided me for not finding out sooner. But Twitter, which I often feel diffident about, came through.

I didn’t have to run around asking five different people about it or to switch TV channels, because Twitter was running around and switching for me, from anger to jokes to opinions and questions, amplified, added to, challenged. I’ve never been so transfixed.

I tried to remember when the U.S. had last won a clear-cut battle. But now I’ve been thinking about how events of this magnitude bring us together, and why this event felt so different this time.

The first national tragedy I ever felt part of was the 1986 Challenger explosion, 73 seconds after takeoff. I was a freshman in high school, on a hall pass in an empty corridor. A shaggy guy who never came to class rounded a corner. He was a “stoner,” which means he probably smoked a joint once, so I had been terrified of him.

He had seen the explosion in the AV lab. He walked up to me and said, “The space shuttle just blew up.” It was one of the first times TV showed someone actually dying.

We talked about it. I liked how being kind to him made me feel, and I was glad he was kind to me. Even a year later, we’d nod at each other passing in the hall.

For any event like that, you remember exactly where you were when you found out, just because the moment before seems like this eternity of innocence.

For example: a decade ago, I was at Phil Soffer’s wedding in Manhattan when the U.S. declared war on Afghanistan. Phil got word via a hand-written note, and no one else heard the news; could you imagine that happening now?

At the reception, Phil’s mom told us to smile for the camera. The way other people, before each shot, say “Say cheese,” she liked to sing out, “Say premature ejaculation!”

Earlier of course, news traveled even more slowly. You can hear wails and gasps on the recording when Robert F. Kennedy tells a mostly black audience in Indianapolis that Martin Luther King had been shot, though it had happened hours — hours! — earlier.

What did the crowd think when Kennedy, unaided by a speechwriter, found himself citing Aeschylus?

In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.

Indianapolis had none of the riots that other cities did, perhaps because people there felt something different, together. I hope, in moments of victory and despair, we can be that together again. I don’t think the Internet has delivered that kind of experience yet, but one day hopefully it will.

In Praise of The Middle Finger

The United States is becoming a startup factory. It’s a very good trend for the U.S. and for entrepreneurs. But this post is how it must feel different than it once did, when startups were hand-crafted in a basement or a garage, and stayed there much longer than they now do.

First, a few numbers. Michael Arrington reported today that Y Combinator is accepting 60+ startups for its summer 2011 class. With two – four founders per startup, this is the equivalent to the entering class at some liberal arts colleges, with a more selective application process and a similar regimen of lectures, discussions, and graduation. The kinds of people who progress in life by applying to one increasingly elite institution after another are naturally attracted to this approach; it’s just like getting into Harvard!

And Y Combinator is just the tip of the iceberg. Despite the popular sentiment in Seattle that our main problem is “we don’t do nearly enough to connect with one another,” the local startups calendar lists 29 public events from Monday to Friday. Here among some of Redfin’s up-and-comers, we have our own little startup forum that meets twice a month, too.

The success of these programs and the energy they create is staggering. I contribute to some and benefit from many others. I feel a touch of envy when sizing up the participants, because they seem so talented, and they have so many resources. But I also want to impart a different message to the participants, to take my advice if they want but mostly to take their own.

A startup needs mentors, structure,  guidance but the main thing we had at the company I co-founded was a lot of smart people and what Jay-Z would call a middle-finger-to-the-Man mentality. We were all heads-down and screw-you. What I first loved about a startup, especially in the early days, was that I could finally stop listening to people tell me what to do.

Incubators, I thought, were for babies not men. No one needed training more than I did, and no one was less interested it. Only the product mattered, and networking was baloney. In my own life, and at a shameful 11th hour, I chose starting a company over medical school only in part because I would have been a bad doctor. The emotional reason was I couldn’t bear the thought of attending Columbia’s orientation pizza party.

The first time my partners and I were alone in our own little office, it felt like finally getting the keys to the family car. We were shocked that neither the police nor anyone else ever stopped us to ask for a license. Our first thought was We should have been doing this years ago. You want to run over a garbage can for the heck of it.

The best entrepreneurs have a touch of that impetuousness. One of my co-founders at Plumtree, Kirill Sheynkman, wrote a parting message to his previous employer on the whiteboard of his vacated office: FAYMF, in huge block letters. The acronym is untranslatable, except that the A stands for All, the Y for Y’All, the M for Mother and the F’s for you-know-what. It was completely obnoxious and anti-social, but the main thing Kirill taught me was to please no one if not yourself.

We’ve come a long way from that brashness. A year ago in a post for TechCrunch, I worried that entrepreneurship was becoming a profession, when it had always felt to me like a lightning strike or a jail-break:

There were 2,500 self-help books on entrepreneurialism published last year… Business schools and conferences have institutionalized entrepreneurialism as an avocation like law or medicine when it is more often a streak of temperament, luck and inspiration. Far from a program taught by somebody else, entrepreneurialism has always been for me my only shot at being myself.

Some days entrepreneurship seems like a lifestyle. Some days it feels like the result of a carefully crafted process. But what you also need to change the world no one can teach you: brains, ambition, computer science and the occasional middle finger.

Buying from a Bank? Get Ready to Play Hardball.

If you’ve been shopping for a home lately, you’ve probably encountered more than a few listings that are either bank-owned (REO) or short sales. In some of Redfin’s markets (Las Vegas, Phoenix, and San Diego) distressed sales make up more than half of what’s selling these days:

With prices that are often considerably lower than non-distressed homes, this plentiful distressed inventory can certainly seem attractive to homebuyers looking for a deal in today’s market.

Of course, we’re never satisfied just to bring you flashy top-ten lists (or top-sixteen lists, as the case may be), so we wanted to dig a little deeper into the data. What kinds of things could we learn about distressed sales that would really help a buyer who is thinking of making an offer on one? As it turns out, the data was happy to talk to us on that subject, providing us with some juicy insights to share with you.

To generate the chart below, we dug into our database to analyze nearly half a million sales that closed between the beginning of 2010 and the end of Q1 2011. The two bars for each market represent the average sale to list price ratio for distressed sales to the average ratio for non-distressed sales. A 100% ratio means that on average, that type of home is selling at exactly its list price. Below 100% means buyers are negotiating discounts, and above 100% means that the sellers are typically getting more than their asking price.

In every single market we looked at, REOs and short sales consistently sell for closer to their list price than the non-distressed homes. This held true across every price band, although the volume of distressed sales is certainly weighted toward the low end. Note that we are using the final list price in this analysis, not the original list price. It is also worth mentioning that we were originally only going to discuss REOs in this post, but the sale-to-list ratios for short sales were so similar that we decided to include them in our analysis as well.

Marcus Fleming, a Redfin Agent in Phoenix has seen this phenomenon first-hand. “Banks are very careful about getting a number of BPOs before listing a home,” explained Marcus. “When it goes on the market they are so confident the price is right that for the first 2 weeks they will accept nothing but offers at 100% of list price.” According to Marcus, even when the home has been on the market for months, banks won’t consider any offers for less than about 95% of list price.

As we were looking at the chart above, we wondered why some markets have a much larger difference between the distressed and non-distressed ratios. For example, in Austin they’re fairly close at 96.7% and 96.5%, while in Las Vegas they’re quite different, coming in at 99.6% and 96.3%. Why might that be?

In order to dig even deeper into the data, we created the scatter-plot below using the difference between the two ratios (i.e. the height of the red bar minus the height of the blue bar) as the Y-axis and the percentage of sales that are distressed (the numbers from the first chart) as the X-axis. The results tell an interesting story:

In general, the more distressed a market is, the bigger the difference between the two sale to list ratios. In other words, in a highly distressed market like San Diego, buyers are a lot less likely to get a bank to negotiate on price than they are in a less-distressed market like Denver. Admittedly, the correlation isn’t incredibly strong, but there is definitely a clear trend in that direction.

In some markets, banks are being especially aggressive with their listings, putting homes up for sale at well below the market value, leading to multiple bids and average sale prices that are higher than the list price. Across the entire data set we analyzed, distressed listings were more than twice as likely to sell for over list price than non-distressed listings (see a chart with the market-by-market breakdown here).

Anna Nevares, a Redfin agent in San Diego has definitely seen this at play in her market (where 41% of distressed sales are closing above list price). “Banks are pricing in line with the market, and sometimes even below in order to drive activity. Buyers are looking for a bargain and the banks know it. Their strategy is working,” said Anna. “Banks price their listings so well that buyers shouldn’t expect much of a discount, if any at all.” On the other hand, Anna points out that non-distressed sellers “typically list their homes with some degree of negotiability built in to the price. Many buyers won’t even look at an over-priced listing, so it doesn’t serve the seller well to price too high.”

So what does this mean for you if you’re thinking about trying to buy a distressed home? Here are our two takeaways:

• “Distressed” doesn’t mean “pushover.” Don’t expect to negotiate much of a discount from the bank. Even in Queens, where buyers of distressed homes are getting the biggest discounts, they’re only averaging 5% off the list price.
• The more distressed your market is, the better the banks are at pricing homes compared to their owner-occupied competition. If you’re seeing a lot of bank-owned homes for sale in your market, your chances of talking down the bank is going to be pretty slim.

The tide of foreclosures and short sales doesn’t look likely to recede soon, so if you’re thinking of jumping into the market, plan your offers accordingly!

Microsoft & Skype Can Lose the Web But Win the Internet

What I’ve never understood about critics of Microsoft’s Internet strategy is what you expect Microsoft to do instead: just give up, and pretend the Internet doesn’t exist?

A more realistic strategy may be to give ground on the Web, but not the Internet. This after all, is what Apple has done, with iPhone and iTunes, with proprietary applications instead of HTML5. It has worked out just fine for Apple.

And this is what I like about Microsoft’s acquisition of Skype. Microsoft has demonstrated that it is fundamentally better at building software applications than websites. And Skype is an application, not a website.

Why not re-invent Office, Windows and X-Box to use the Internet for multi-media communications, with Skype as the backbone? The true threat to Microsoft’s business isn’t Google’s search engine, it’s Google Docs, which includes chat and video-calling functions that Skype can counter. Microsoft needs to give the world a reason not to buy the new Chrome notebooks that will start showing up in Best Buy next month.

Of course, the deal may well blow up. Any time you pay $8.5 billion for a company losing $7 million per year, it’s hard to call that financially savvy. And in general, it’s easy these days to be skeptical about any Microsoft acquisition, or any Microsoft Internet strategy, especially when acquiring a European a company that has been consumed and disgorged once already.

But I respect Microsoft for putting its chips in play. For years, the company’s corporate development strategy has been so quiescent that it seemed to be ceding the Internet to its competitors. No longer. It’s easy to criticize Steve Ballmer for doing nothing, or for doing anything; harder to say what you would do in his place. I’d try to win.

Fifty Agents Say So Long to Redfin

It isn’t easy building a network of high-quality real estate agents, even if you’re a real estate agent yourself.

Redfin just removed 50 partner agents from our tiny, exclusive partner program, most in the past few weeks. Forty two left because the customers we surveyed about their service so far had mixed reviews. Those are easy to take care of quickly, because we already have the customer’s email address for every referral, and we begin following up on each one within 24 hours of making the referral.

But we also survey an agent’s other customers, too. We start by pulling up the agent’s list of customers over the past 18 months from an agent-only database known as the Multiple Listing Service; we then ask the agent to provide an email address for every customer. Each customer gets a survey; if not enough customers respond, and respond with good reviews, the agent never joins our program.

But why can’t the applicant just fake the reviews, using fake email addresses? Well, the applicant can. But it turns out that potential fakes are pretty easy for us to detect, using software and customer follow-up too. When we spot a fake, we fire him, no questions asked, no second chances. Another eight agents just left our program for this reason.

We’re always surprised that anyone tries to get away with it. We interview every agent in our partner program, nearly all in person, accepting only 35% of all applicants. Even still, we later end up asking one in six partner agents to leave the program later.

Otherwise, we try very hard to be good partners. Since we’re agents ourselves, we know which customers are really ready to meet an agent, so a Redfin referral tends to be worthwhile. And since we don’t charge agents to appear on our site, instead splitting the proceeds from a successful transaction, most agents are eager to give Redfin a try. These agents often make a lot of money, building a reputation on Redfin that helps them get more and more business.

And we make money too. The partners only account for 5% of our business, but they help us cover far-flung areas, spikes in demand and obscure deal types that would be very expensive to support using our own employees, who keep pretty busy handling the other 95% of our revenues.

We hope that more agents who are ready to stand by their customer-service performance apply to our program, and that the rest just pony up for a pure no-questions-asked lead-generation site.