I mean, I’m an amateur when it comes to real estate. I’m like that kid in the back of the classroom who ate paste. And I don’t mean the kid in second grade. I mean the kid in college who sat in the back eating paste.

I’m also, officially, a Redfinnian.

I’m not entirely sure how I got the job as a writer here. I spent the past nine years writing for videogames – none of which were real estate-related, by the way. I’ve been following the market for the past couple of years, but I came to it the same way most people do, I suppose; my wife and I were considering buying a house. We started reading up to educate ourselves. We started checking out Redfin.

Prices started to drop, then plummet, and we decided to wait until the dust settled a bit. But in the meantime, I continued going to the site, checking on my favorites like they were my prized petunias. I kept reading the blogs and the news. I was like some sort of armchair home-buyer. It’s entirely possible that I was a little obsessed with the process.

One day, my wife spotted the job listing on Redfin for a writer. One short whirlwind later, here I am.

Since I got the job, it’s been interesting to read what people say about Redfin, on blogs and discussion boards, or wherever. Because I’ve always loved the site. The data is great. The map is great. I can spend hours just browsing for houses.

But a lot of people love the site. The interesting part is reading the Internet chatter about the people of Redfin. That they’re crazy, or trying to ruin the industry, or that they haven’t thought their business model through, or that they don’t care about their customers. Or that they’re making some Big Mistake that will doom them to failure.

As I was struggling to commit to my blog entry, Glenn Kelman gave me some advice. He told me, above all, to keep it real. So here it is: You’re never going to meet a smarter, more passionate, more customer-focused group of people than you’ll find stepping off our elevator. Believe the hype. This place is the real deal, and it’s intimidating as hell, frankly.

As for the Big Mistake… oftentimes, the chatter was right. The people here have made some Big Mistakes, some of which might really have killed the business. But it’s a funny thing about mistakes – they only kill you when you refuse to acknowledge them. And if there’s one quality the people here seem to hold above all others, it’s this: You admit when you’re wrong, and you learn from it.

So, for what it’s worth, I promise to work my butt off as the new guy here on the site. I promise that I’ll make my mistakes as quickly and entertainingly as possible. And I promise I’ll do my level best to learn from them.

(Photo Credit: b7_banana on Flickr)

The post The New Guy appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

I wrote the post in an hour or two and then spent the weekend trying to decide whether to let it see the light of day. John Cook was supposed to publish a picture of Khan from “Star Trek: Wrath of Khan” as my picture but instead just inserted Ricardo Montalban below the standard headshot, with no explanation. While searching for the photo, I learned that Montalban’s ridiculous rubber pectorals were in fact real.

And to express how I felt about the need to disagree, to have it out, to get somehow to that lost little shivering creature of truth, there was a link in there to the opening monologue in “Michael Clayton” that spoke to me like nothing else in film in the past five years. Here’s the full clip:

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And while we’re on the subject of stuff that didn’t make the cut… For the closing sentence, about how we are all “more delicate than we pretend to be,” there was a Flickr photo we never got permission to use, so you’ll just have to look at it on Flickr itself. If humanity had to send one picture into outer space to convince hostile aliens that our planet was worth saving, this one would be it.

The post OK, Yes, Elements of Madness — The Speed of Madness… appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

While there continue to be many blogs, including a lot of very good ones, it seems to me that one would be hard pressed to make the case that there’s still a “blogosphere.” That vast, free-wheeling, and surprisingly intimate forum where individual writers shared their observations, thoughts, and arguments outside the bounds of the traditional media is gone. Almost all of the popular blogs today are commercial ventures with teams of writers, aggressive ad-sales operations, bloated sites, and strategies of self-linking. Some are good, some are boring, but to argue that they’re part of a “blogosphere” that is distinguishable from the “mainstream media” seems more and more like an act of nostalgia, if not self-delusion.

Noting that 94% of blogs have been abandoned, Mr. Carr compares the initial proliferation of amateur bloggers to radio’s earliest days when, as one contemporary account observed, thousands of amateur broadcasters turned the entire country into “a vast whispering gallery.”

It’s an amazing essay, exactly the kind that argues for professional writers to blog. And of course he’s right: when Tina Brown edits Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and then a blog, you can’t really deny that blogs have become a major commercial enterprise.

It’s about time. The commercialization of online journalism isn’t a tragedy; it’s the de-commercialization of journalism that has been the tragedy. For years now, the suppliers of information — the writers who actually gather news — have done all the work and the Internet aggregators such as Google and Yahoo have mostly profited from it.

Karl Marx would have called this a contradiction of capitalism, with technology taking the place of capital as the way to create surplus value.  It’s good to see online journalists take charge of the machinery and turn their blogs into businesses. As for the rest of us, Mr. Carr shouldn’t worry: trust me, there will always be a place on the Internet for amateurs.

The post Citizen Kane Starts a Blog appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

So it was a nice surprise to get Guy Kawasaki’s Reality Check in yesterday’s mail.  And nicer still to see that Redfin essays on financial models, talking to the press, and startup life (also featured in the New York Times) became their own chapters in the book, now ranked#209 on Amazon.

Thanks Guy, for including us.  It was a wonder you ever took notice of Redfin when we were only a few goofballs working in David Eraker’s apartment. And it’s exciting to appear in a book that gets manufactured by a big machine, and moved around on forklifts and in cargo ships,  and read by people in subways and hammocks and breakfast counters. Almost the fulfillment of a life-long ambition.

Some day, I’m going to see a guy falling asleep on a plane with this book in his lap, and I’ll tell him Hey! pay attention! There’s some good stuff in there…

The post Reality Check for Redfin appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

Which made me wonder how private we really are. You can hide from the Wall Street Journal but not from the hundreds of tech and real estate blogs that covered Redfin last week. One big difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 is that this time, the meltdown will be blogged.

That kind of attention can lead startups to dither like publicly traded companies before making hard decisions. And it has prompted some startups to turn against blogs just for covering the news.

Connections with Other Little Companies, Everywhere
But Redfin has no complaints. Blogs brought us our first customers and our best ideas. Most important for the lonely types who tend to go off on their own to make software, blogs connected us to other little companies everywhere.

Sure, eWeek or CNET covered startups before, but it was blogs like TechCrunch and GigaOM – with their fits of idealism and jadedness, of accessibility and remoteness, of cleverness and heart, their sense of “we” and “they” — that first made us feel cool.

When Redfin announced our layoffs, we expected all that to turn against us. But there was only empathy for the company and, most important, for the people who had to leave the company.

To all the folks who blogged or commented on our setback, thanks for your even-handedness. Redfinners past and present have never needed your support more, or expected it less.

The End of Cool
The only thing that we lost in having blogs write about our troubles is our cool: the cool of startups that never struggle, that show up on all the “hot” lists, that always seem to be having a ball, that don’t have a care in the world.

That’s ok. Startups haven’t always tried to be cool. Today, the blogosphere has created its own celebrities, mixing Michael Arrington with Ashton Kutcher, MySpace with Paris Hilton.

But my first startup job was about as far from cool as you could get, a reunion of all the people at the desolate end of the high-school cafeteria. We rented U-Hauls to drive our own pop-up booth to a trade-show. At big client meetings, we wore debate-tournament-era suits.

Even starting a company that went public was never really cool in the way it’s usually portrayed: it meant walking through rivers of my friends’ blood, and working on silly little things all night, and caring too much, and becoming a jerk and becoming humble again, and it meant joy that arrives without your noticing it, and love and above all things — not a flash of brilliance or a dramatic strategic decision — endurance.

And that is the one trait that characterizes Redfin, endurance. This was a business run out of an apartment, by people working for free. We created a real service when it was fashionable to be all virtual. We have changed the game rather than play the game. And now we offer a service so valuable to so many people – and so much better than what they have come to expect — that I believe we will always endure.

The Only True Currency
It seems like the blogs — which are typically written by compulsive people late at night in their bedrooms, for reasons they can barely explain — are best equipped to understand what we are going through: setbacks and endurance, passion and hardship, being cool and not being cool, working for love and scrapping for money.

As Lester Bangs explains in “Almost Famous,” the “only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you’re uncool.” This impulse is what drives blogs and startups alike. That bloggers have reached out to us now, when we have never felt less cool, is the truest currency there could be between us.

(Photocredit: Philipp Klinger on Flickr)

The post Almost Famous appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.