Before I joined the Open Book team at Redfin, I was a Redfin Agent. I walked alongside hundreds of clients through the home inspection process, and I know first hand the drama that can unfold. No matter how intrepid you are, buying a home can be unnerving and full of surprises. Like planning a wedding,… Read More
Every year, the Wall Street Journal and Real Trends come out with their list of the 250 top-producing real estate agents in the country for the previous year. In the lean years of real estate when there’s less inventory on the market to buy and sell, agents are hungrier and the very best agents really… Read More
If you’re a serious home buyer, you’ve been following the news on the housing market about bidding wars, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it sales and the depressed and depressing inventory situation. When things are moving this fast, the home you want to buy probably hasn’t been sitting on the market for weeks or months. It’s the gem that just hit… Read More
Alone, Just the Two of Us
I’d just sat down last month for a chat with the CEO of a very successful startup when his co-founder, the company’s chairman, walked into our coffee-shop. The two had been apart for a few minutes, but the chairman made such a beeline for us that I worried he wanted my pastry. He was in… Read More
Who needs another home-price index? For years at Redfin, we focused on serving customers, not calling the market. As a local broker, we couldn’t really say what was happening nationwide. But now that Redfin covers about as many markets as the Standard & Poor’s Case-Shiller index, we are publishing our own monthly report on prices, sales… Read More
Recently we studied home sales data from 2010 and 2011 and found that thanks to the hard work of our amazing listing agents, Redfin listings sell faster and for more money than the competition. That’s a great starting point, but what if we could do more? What if we could get our clients’ listings in… Read More
Redfin Certified Service Providers Are Rated 30% Higher Than the Competition Earlier this year, Redfin launched Open Book, a local review site for lenders, inspectors, stagers and other service providers that work with Redfin’s home buyers and sellers. We ask every client how their service provider(s) performed, and we post every single review on the… Read More
Here at Redfin, we try hard to figure out when real estate’s going up or down. Because we’re the only broker that employs agents with salary and benefits, market shifts can leave us with idle employees on the payroll, or with customers we have to refer to other brokers. Guessing wrong has cost us millions…. Read More