The Occupy Wall Street protests once seemed so futile to me. You just can’t stop smart people from making money, and I’m not really sure why you’d want to. But it turns out you can persuade those people to make money by doing something useful beyond lining up on either side of a financial bet. They… Read More
October is the quietest month at Redfin. The interns leave in September, and the new recruits don’t visit the office until November. In the mountains, it begins to rain but hasn’t yet snowed. Before our thoughts turn to the holidays, we wanted to take a moment to thank last summer’s interns. Redfin’s engineering, products and… Read More
Big news Redfinnians! Redfin just raised $15 million, mostly on the strength of nice revenue growth and very, very happy customers. Since launching our service with one Seattle agent in 2006, we’ve closed about $6 billion in home sales, with a customer satisfaction rate of 97%. Consumers have saved $85 million in commissions. The value… Read More
Redfin just raised $14.8 million, in a round led by Globespan Capital. The press release rattles off the stunning accomplishments that brought us to this pass: $6 billion in Redfin transactions, $85 million in savings to consumers, 97% customer satisfaction. Michael Arrington broke the news, in a blog post with a photo of Redfin as… Read More
Today’s Redfin upgrade brings with it a couple new features you’ve told us would make your search faster and easier. Check them out: Auto-complete for search locations: Ever had trouble remembering the peculiar spelling of a city or neighborhood? Now, as soon as you type the third character of the city or neighborhood name on… Read More
With home sales in the gutter, anyone thinking of selling a home today can use all the help they can get, starting with what day of the week to debut. Serious sellers know that it is important to make repairs, stage well, and showcase their home online with professional photos, but there isn’t a consensus… Read More
Many folks asked this past week how I’ve felt about Steve Jobs’s death, and wondered why I haven’t written about it. When I first heard the news, I thought of a graph Jonathan Franzen drew in “How to Be Alone,” about how Franzen’s ailing father made no concessions to Parkinson’s and then, when that effort… Read More
Redfin just took down Scouting Report 1.0 for good. Our latest problem was that the data we used for Scouting Report had problems at the source that weren’t easy for us to fix, mostly because agents work informally in teams, or sometimes don’t formally record when an out-of-town agent represented a buyer in a deal. So… Read More
When Redfin first launched our home-buying service, David Eraker sent an email to the whole company that I’ll never forget: “Strap in Team Redfin. We’re in for a wild ride.” No truer statement has ever been made about Redfin’s journey, which took another turn last week when we launched Redfin Scouting Report. We made big… Read More
Over the weekend, the U.S. stopped guaranteeing big loans in expensive cities, and ever since the folks in real estate have been holding our breaths to see the market’s reaction. Now Redfin has released new data showing which areas are most vulnerable to the policy change. First, some background. The reason the government began backing… Read More