Author: Rob McGarty
Recent posts
October 31, 2008
Earlier this month, Janelle sent out an email to the entire Seattle office soliciting people to build on last year’s hit costume of Donald DeSantis dressed as Rob McGarty by getting as many people as possible to dress as Scott Nagel, VP of Real Estate and affectionately known as “The Silver Fox.” She hatched the plan with a short email “We found a great deal on Silver Fox wigs. We are ordering as many as it takes, but you need to give mykie the full amount of $11.25 by end of day Wednesday to make it happen.” Followed by this picture.
We counted 23 Silver Fox impersonators at our annual Halloween costume contest today, but the real surprise was that the real Silver fox out foxed the fake foxes by dressing as Janelle.
We had a great turn out with almost the entire Seattle office in costume.
Scott and Mary “Bearded Lady” Black tied for first place and the best Nagel impersonation went to Corey “Well whaddaya gonna do” St John.
November 28, 2006
We are experiencing some unseasonably cold weather in Seattle this week. Good for winter sports, bad for driving. During my rally-cross drive home, I caught tonight’s episode of Marketplace on NPR. They had a really entertaining segment about burying a statue of Saint Joseph to speed the sale of your house. Long story short, wherever you bury a statue of Saint Joseph the property is bound to sell. I am willing to bet this will be a question on Bluff the Listener on Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me this weekend.
The Marketplace story followed Mike Hickson, a skeptic turned believer after reading a testimonial about a “man who, while trying to sell his home, was given a St. Joseph statue, but scoffing at the notion, threw it in the trash. It went to the dump. Wasn’t he surprised a couple of weeks later when he saw in the paper that — lo and behold — the dump had been sold.”
Mike promptly ordered a statue and “dropped St. Joe into his basement sales office next to the For Sale sign on a Saturday morning anyway. Lo and behold, people viewed the house on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. On Wednesday, we got an offer.”
We would like to conduct a more scientific study of the effect burying a statue of Saint Joseph has on selling a home. If you are selling your home and would like to be part of our study post a comment or send me an e-mail. Or if you’ve buried St. Joe to aid in the sale of your home, let us know the outcome.
November 10, 2006
Yesterday’s The Wall Street Journal article – “Do Real-Estate Agents Have a Secret Agenda?” – reported on the well-known, but often undisclosed, practice of sellers offering buyers’ agents additional incentives to close a deal.
Sometimes when properties, typically new developments, are not selling as fast as the builder had anticipated they offer additional incentives. Similar to a car manufacturer’s “0% financing” or “Friends and Family” programs, sellers will offer buyers incentives such as a granite counter upgrade package, free closing costs or a year of free homeowners” dues.
Other times the incentives are hidden. Just like when you pay the invoice price on a car, the dealer still gets paid. The same thing happens in real estate. As the WSJ article points out, there are some pretty serious incentives being offered to the buyer’s agent such as 10% commission as opposed to the usual 3%.
Redfin is just as transparent about incentives as we are about commissions. If the incentives are monetary, we share them with our clients the same way we share our commission –a two-thirds refund to our client. If the incentive is something else like a vacation or free homeowners’ dues, we directly pass them along to our client.
Jing Feng, a Seattle-area, first-time homebuyer used Redfin to purchase a condo this summer. She used the $6,000 commission refund to pay down her closing costs. A week later, we received a $2,000 bonus check from the builder and cut Jing a check for two-thirds–an extra $1,334. Jing was shocked and excited to hear she was getting even more money back from Redfin that she decided to go to New York City with friends this weekend. She just called form Fifth Avenue and told me, “I just bought a coat that I wouldn’t have been able to afford otherwise.”
Starting today there is a new category in our local blogs (San Francisco and Seattle) called “New Construction” that will highlight any promotions we are aware of. If you are a seller that has an incentive and want to get the word out, please let us know by e-mailing support@redfin.com.
November 8, 2006
A few months ago we launched a feature called Ask an Agent and Ask About a Listing. Answers from our experienced real estate team are just a click away. Since launching the program we have answered hundreds of questions ranging in complexity from “When is the open house” to questions as vague as “Can you tell me anything else about this property?”
The most entertaining of all came late Saturday, Oct. 21 from an intoxicated fellow who was fed up with the real estate market. He asked us several rhetorical questions about the price of homes using mostly four letter words. Here is what he had to say about this $799,950 Capitol Hill home
Are you @#$%ing serious?????? Your asking price is so far outstide the bounds of reality that it make me laugh. A lot. Good luck, dumb ^#@$s.
Coincidentally, the home is actually priced within reason at $392 per square foot compared to the average price per square foot of $448 for homes listing within a five block radius.
There are many ways to access the feature from the Redfin site, with the most common being from the listing detail tab. This image shows the link to “Ask a question” on the right side (circled in green below).
Last week’s most interesting question came from a San Francisco Bay Area Redfin user about a $67,000 listing in Richmond, CA. The user asked, “This property is not listed on the MLS. Looks like a duplex. You call it a bungalow. But on Zillow it is a condo. Its a teaser, right?” Even I was surprised to find something in the Bay Area for that price–I would have guessed there was a zero missing at the end. Our local expert, Rosemary Vo, quickly researched the property and replied “This listing is actually a co-op. It is a true listing, however, the reason it is priced low is because it is difficult to get a loan for this type of property. ”
If you ever have a real estate question you can’t find the answer to or just want expert advice, take advantage of our Ask an Agent functionality. We will get back to you in two hours or less during our agent’s normal business hours (9AM-6PM Monday-Friday, noon-6PM Saturday and Sunday), otherwise we will get back to you before we open the following day.
October 11, 2006
Free home tours are finally here! Customers screamed for it, the marketing department lobbied for it, yet we didn’t do it because we thought it was too reminiscent of irrational dot com behavior like Kozmo-we all know how well that worked out.
Customer feedback from a recent focus group prompted us develop the new Redfin Red Carpet Services: free home tours, free pre-inspections, and the ability to ask an agent a question online.
We prepared ourselves to be inundated with requests and give away home tours by the car load, but so far only a few people have taken us up on the offer. So next time a listing agent gives you drama or you want to see a string of houses let us know.
We have been experimenting with the free pre-inspection program for several months. It is a great way to make your offer more competitive by allowing you to safely waive the inspection contingency on your offer. Plus you will save a couple hundred bucks because Redfin will pick up the tab if you close on the property.
We are answering about 60 ask an agent questions a week. We get everything from questions as vague as “Can you tell me anything else about this property?” to people comparing homes to their marriage like this customer that said “It [the house] is a perfect opportunity as my hubby is the fixer upper type (I am the finder type…).” We haven’t been stumped yet so now is your opportunity to ask us something that even Ken Jennings can’t answer.
Don’t be shy, our agents are standing by.
September 15, 2006
We found a flick about us on YouTube in which a guy by the name of Joel manages to bring together water closets and real estate. At first we thought this was a secret test by our beloved Marketing department trying out our first TV spot. But then it dawned on us that Eric Heller and Glenn Kelman are on vacation. This is for real.
We liked how Joel compared plumbers and real estate agents. We have often made a similar reference to booksellers. When Amazon.com (where several Redfinnians worked in a prior life) launched its website in 1995 and received immediate and widespread attention, the bookstore owners cried foul. The press talked about the demise of the old-fashioned bookstore. Some bookstores that could barely support themselves were crushed by Amazon.com and similar online plays.
However, the viable bookstores are thriving. Some of our all-time favorites include Elliot Bay Books in Seattle, Kepler’s in Menlo Park, or the famous City Lights bookstore in San Francisco. Not to mention Powell’s in Portland, which now has a booming online presence on Amazon.com. In addition to these tried-and-true booksellers, Amazon.com created a new breed (and a new generation) of penny-booksellers. Their business model is to give away books they get for free and charge only for handling and shipping. They make $1 per order on the handling.
Book shoppers now have a choice — buy the book new for a discount, or, used at a rock-bottom price. Get the personalized advice from the good ol’ book store keeper, or the power of customer feedback. Almost everyone wins. We believe the business of real estate will change in similar ways.
We’re just not quite ready to accept that waterless toilets with a composting bin underneath are the wave of the future. Joel has started to convince us though.
Sebastian and Rob
August 25, 2006
Sitting in the passenger seat of a minivan we just rented at SFO cruising north on 101 at 65 mph (Eric drives too slow) heading to set up our booth at the Trump Expo I realized that we have a limited number of extra tickets for the show.
In the hopes of meeting some of the many San Francisco Bay Area Redfin users, I pulled out my laptop and much-maligned Treo and logged into the Redfin blog to get the word out.
If you are interested in going to the show ($280 street value), drop me a line at “rob at redfin dot com” and I will try to hook you up with a ticket. George Foreman, Al Gore and Donald Trump are speaking!
