To that end, we launched a feature on our search menu today to let you filter out homes above a maximum monthly homeowner’s association dues amount – or even “No HOA.”  Might not seem like a big deal at first glance (and maybe it’s not if you have an extra $600/month handy), but anyone looking at condos or townhomes can tell you that HOA dues can be the difference between a great home you can afford and one that’s out of your price range.

You can find the Max HOA option under Home Facts on the search menu.  This can be used for any search, including your saved searches, and even used on the iPad or iPhone through a saved search.  And it’s another way you can refine the homes that are exactly what you’re looking for with our Listing Alert feature.

So thanks for the feedback, and keep it coming! We do turn your ideas into features!  And in the meantime, what do you think of the new filter?

The post Now Available on Redfin: Filter by HOA Dues! appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

The room went dark and a video came up on a big screen. Except the screen was black. We heard Starbucks’s old CEO apologizing at the 2008 annual meeting for the company’s failures, past, present, ongoing, anticipated. He sounded like he was trying not to cry. We saw people crying at a Starbucks layoff. We saw late-night comics lampooning Starbucks, while McDonald’s and Dunkin’ Donuts attacked the company. And then we saw employees pulling together, and people cleaning stores, and moms with babies drinking coffee. And then Howard Schultz — the CEO who built the business into an empire and took it over again when it faltered — took the stage to talk about how the company had turned itself around. In 2009, its stock price more than doubled.

Whenever Howard Schultz talked about coffee, my eyes glazed over. I don’t drink coffee, and couldn’t be less interested in it. But what he said about treating employees as partners, and fanatical customer service, and building a company with a social mission — these statements made me wonder how Redfin would be different and better if it were run by Howard Schultz. Here’s what I learned from that meeting:

• Better customer & quality tracking: to become a great company, Redfin will need better customer & quality tracking. We carefully monitor every electronic touch-point, but don’t always follow customers and agents into houses and out the other side. Starbucks knows how long people wait for coffee and how customers rate store cleanliness, not by sending out an email survey but through pain-staking, store-to-store gumshoe work. Without these metrics, the company couldn’t have pulled off the first step in its turn-around, perfect execution on each cup of coffee.
• Health insurance for everyone: the first story Howard Schultz told was about a chat with one of Starbucks’s largest and longest-standing shareholders, who called him the month he came back as CEO, to ask about canceling barista’s health insurance. “You’ve got the cover to do it now, during the recession,” the investor said. Schultz told the investor: “It sounds like Starbucks isn’t the stock for you.” In another industry where benefits are far from the norm, Redfin insures all our full-time agents & coordinators. We’ve wondered how long we can afford to do that. Howard Schultz would say “forever.”
• For every meeting, put the customer in the room: Howard Schultz said he likes to begin every meeting by asking people to pretend the customer is in the room. Corny? Sure. But I’ve sat through plenty of meetings that felt like a math problem where we didn’t know which variable we were solving for, because we’d lost focus on the customer. Two of the greatest consumer companies in the world, Amazon and Starbucks, are right here in Seattle, and the two sound so identical when talking about their customer focus that you can’t tell which is which.
• Innovation isn’t just technology: if you programmed a computer to spit out the meaning of life, the universe and everything, its answer these days would likely be “The Internet.” Guided by the same logic, I struggle to think of innovation except in terms of Internet technology. But for Starbucks, innovation is instant coffee, or finding a new way to train people, or using Burger King as a distribution channel. Howard Schultz would think about innovation at a real estate brokerage in the same way, not just in the brokerage’s web site, but in its training and its service.
• Retail experiences define the brand: Starbucks uses the physical environment of its stores to define its brand. What does that mean for Redfin? I think Howard Schultz would think about the quality of the stationery an offer is delivered on to the customer. He would think about the yard sign a lot. He would think about the offices where we run home-buying classes, and how the cars our field agents drive are branded & what the agents wear. He’d like our agent photos.
• “Everything mattered”: Howard said this more than once. He meant that everything has to be perfect – not just the coffee, but the store, the sleeve, the stuff created by every department at Starbucks — to create a great brand. These are the kind of exhaustively high standards we want to bring to employee training, our home-buying class, how we answer the phone (why do so many people say “I think I have the wrong number,” when I answer my phone?) So much of retail is just a willingness to work harder to get everything right, all the time. It seems like Howard Schultz has this willingness in spades.
• Simplicity, Wit: I was thinking about all the long treatises I’ve written for Redfin when I saw all the Starbucks ads being flashed on the big screen. Everything was so simple. And almost every sentence tried to make you smile. I think Howard Schultz would tell us to be more serious about not being so serious. You can get people to do anything once you get them to smile.
• Video = Emotion: it was hard not to see the Starbucks videos that day – there were many – without thinking that Starbucks used emotion to great effect in their branding. Video is the best vehicle for creating emotion. Redfin has a video of stick figures that I absolutely love for its wit, but like everything on Redfin, it has low emotional payload. If Howard Schultz made a Redfin video, he might show people crying when they won the offer and got the keys; he’d show new families driving up in an overloaded Beverly Hillbilly station wagon to an empty house on a nice little street; he’d show tense negotiations and smiling agents and customers too. He’d set it to music, which makes a big difference. Coffee is less emotional than buying a house, but Starbucks made it more emotional.

Anyway, this is what I thought about on my way back to the office from the Starbucks meeting. Thanks to Dan Levitan for inviting me, and to Howard Schultz for putting on such a great show. I learned a lot.

The post What I Learned at Starbucks' Annual Meeting appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

As an extra little twist, I decided to go incognito. Instead of hanging out with my coworkers, I donned my trench coat and fedora and sat in the middle of the audience. I wanted the chance to talk to my fellow schoolmates without them holding back for fear of offending my Redfinnian sensibilities. What did I find out?

We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Boat
If you’ve flown, you probably know about overbooking. Typically, an airline will sell more seats on a flight than they actually have available. This is because they know there will usually be last-minute cancellations, a few no-shows, and maybe a couple of people who get stuck in the bathroom.

We do the same thing with our home-buying class. If we get 100 RSVPs, we can count on a few people flaking out. A class that sounds great at 9am on a Monday morning might seem a little less enticing after a long day at the office. Which is the same reason, incidentally, that I can’t speak Italian.

Well, our attendees must have dodged the genetic marker for flakiness, because the place was packed to the metaphorical gills. We were dragging chairs out of offices. At least, my coworkers were. I couldn’t risk blowing my cover.

Maybe it was just a fluke. Maybe not. We won’t rent out Safeco Field just yet, but it was pretty great seeing so many people eager to take the class.

Secret Agent, Man
“How many of you know that Redfin has agents?”

That was one of the opening questions posed by Dave Billings, our Seattle market manager and host for the evening. I’d estimate that somewhere around 70% of the audience raised a hand. Even accounting for early evening hand-raising jitters, that’s a pretty good chunk of people who didn’t realize that Redfin has agents. Which is a real shame, because…

They’re the Best… Around
Man, I love our agents. Different portions of the class were presented by Dave, Allie Howard, and Kevin Broveleit, and they were simply awesome. Knowledgeable, entertaining, personable, and absolutely candid. Allie was particularly frank about the emotional rollercoaster involved with pursuing Real Estate Owned (REO) properties, and Kevin made a funny, from-the-heart argument about how Redfin’s practice of putting the customer first was a much-needed tonic for the entire industry. Did I mention that I love our agents?

Self-Starter, Shows Initiative
I didn’t get to talk to a ton of other people in the class, but when I did talk to my classmates, I was surprised. One couple was taking the class even though they had already worked with a Redfin agent, found a house, and made their offer. They had RSVP’d for the class well ahead of time, and said they figured it was worth attending, in case their offer wasn’t accepted. Another guy had already been out on tour with one of our field agents. Clearly, for at least some percentage of the attendees, the class wasn’t so much a starting point as a helpful mid-journey resource.

Give the People What They Want
Overall, I think the class does a great job. People were clearly engaged throughout the evening, asking good, specific questions, laughing, chatting with co-attendees. But there might be some room for improvement.

First, we spend about 30 minutes during the class showing people how to use the Redfin site. I’m not convinced that we need to do this. I don’t have the data to back this up, but my impression was that our attendees were already well-versed in how the site works. There weren’t many questions asked during this section, and the people around me with notepads generally stopped scribbling.

On the other hand, there was a flood of questions during the section that dealt with the home-buying process itself. Dave, Allie, and Kevin did a great job answering these questions, but we might be well-served by spending more time in this section, identifying key terms and explaining them in more detail. A phrase like earnest money might seem basic to some, but for others, it sounds like some scary and mysterious financial commitment.

Finally, it was interesting to watch our attendees react as Kevin explained, in detail, how Redfin agents are compensated in contrast to traditional real estate agents. There was a lot of polite nodding at first, but when he finally spelled it out – that our agents get bonuses based on customer satisfaction, and not a commission – you could literally see a wave of understanding pass from row to row. People were excited. There was a lot of hushed smiling and nodding and whispering. It might take a little extra effort to convince people that this isn’t just a bunch of corporate smoke-blowing, but once that message hits home, it seems to knock down the front door.

That’s about it for my key take-aways, though I’d like to point out that our audience was unbelievably conscientious about recycling their cans and bottles. (Thanks!)

We’re already seeing some tweets from last night’s class. Anyone else there? We’d love to hear your take.

And if you’re interested in taking a home-buying class in your area, check out our schedule of upcoming classes.

(Photo credits: NBC Universal, Sony Pictures Entertainment, and our own Matt Goyer)

The post Secret Squirrel and the Redfin Home-buying Class appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

Starting out as an entrepreneur, I once tried to hire an engineer who was so engrossed in the brain-teasers we had given him that he never noticed my nose had begun gushing blood in the middle of our interview (I had actually walked into a wall while gesturing wildly to my partner and mouthing “Let’s hire this freaking guy!!!”).

But since then, I’ve come to learn that there is something far, far worse than people who aren’t Math Olympians. There are people who don’t do the right thing, or care about others. No matter how hard somebody works, if his values are messed up, he’s useless to us. In fact, worse than useless: he screws up the whole company’s reputation.

So Redfin is taking a more balanced approach to the talent-at-any-cost mentality that drives most startups, by emphasizing values too. Starting today, Terrell Owens couldn’t get a job here. This isn’t an easy change for me; I still spend four days every fall rifling through the Stanford computer science resume book looking for the 25 highest GPAs so I can beg them to work for us (Rebecca Illowsky, you made the wrong choice!). But what I like about values-based hiring is this: anyone can have the right values. It’s just that many don’t.

The choice is yours.

Lots of people work for just a paycheck, doing only what is expected of them, with none of the gumption to understand what’s really going on and to make things better. They view any form of idealism with suspicion or embarrassment, and they try so hard to be official and corporate that they can’t have a good time. Many call themselves professionals, but never profess to put their clients’ — or anyone’s — interests ahead of their own.

We want to avoid hiring those people. Which will be tricky, as Redfin has begun to grow very quickly, hiring agents in every market we serve.

So a few weeks ago, Redfin pulled together folks from across the company — agents, field agents, engineers, executives, product managers, even customers — to talk about what we valued in one another. And then we talked about how we’d act if that’s what we really valued. Here’s what we came up with:

Julie Brown and Ann Rhoades, who built the customer-service organizations at Southwest and JetBlue, flew out from New Mexico to help us get through our spats and funks.

The fur really flew. We put in stuff like caring and balanced that would never have occurred to an Ahab like me, even though I could have cried hearing colleagues say how far from those values we had sometimes strayed. We stuck with idealistic terms like mission-driven despite some concerns that it was kind of a wussy value for a company that needs to turn a profit (giving people something to believe in is the only sustainable way to turn a profit).

We ditched scrappy at the last second because it reminded people of either a cartoon dog or a drunken runt who starts a fight.

And we tried to avoid the usual corporate baloney, though anything that just hangs on the wall sooner or later starts to smell that way. The only way to keep it fresh is to call out the values every day, guiding how we hire, pay and promote folks within Redfin, how we build our website and serve our customers.

Hopefully, you’ll keep us honest. If a website feature isn’t beautiful, if it isn’t does make you smile, if we aren’t completely transparent with data, call us on it. If we don’t put the customer first, and rally to get the job all the way done, scream it from the rooftops (or maybe just send us an email). The reason we published our values is so we can be accountable for upholding them. That, and to hear what you think of ‘em too… have at it!

Thanks to all the customers and employees who helped us work this out. And thanks to Janelle Saylor for suggesting this Liberace photo to personify our headline values of Wow and Fire (or was it Genuine)?

The post Do the Right Thing appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

The main argument is that real estate folks chase after new marketing channels like YouTube, Twitter or Facebook before developing credibility on the issue customers care most about: how they’ve served customers. It has only been up for an hour but is already attracting plenty of comment.

The post Bring Out Weight, Number and Measure in a Year of Dearth… appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

Not much time for Mark Reitman, Chicago market manager and customer-service manimal, to make headway. But now we’re looking to complete at least eight Chicago transactions in November, which for Redfin, in a new market, in a down economy, during the low season — is a lot. Check out what a client said about Mark today in Redfin’s Forums:

Before I first contacted Redfin I thought that, since the commissions were lower, I could expect to receive a lower level of service.

Boy was I wrong about that.  We closed on our house this month, and nothing could be further from the truth.  I actually got better service and everyone on your Chicago team worked very hard, and responded 7 days a week.  Plus, thanks to your awesome website, we were able to select and tour homes we were actually interested in, and saved a lot of time that used to be wasted driving around in the back of someone else’s car to see a lot of homes we didn’t want.  Then, after providing all of those benefits to us, you also gave us most of your hard earned commission.  Incredible!

I am amazed that you are able to provide such a high level of service at such a low commission.  Redfin appears to be single handedly transforming the badly outdated model that residential real estate has been following forever.  What is your secret?

Way to go Mark, way to go Redfin! And thanks to the customer who posted this message. These things whang off the walls at Redfin, and make everyone try a little harder.

(Bonus link: a remarkable essay on why bailout money should go to community banks…)

UPDATE: many thanks to Greg Whelan and Patrick Lusk for being the folks who as much as anyone really made this deal happen, and to Mark for being so generous in sharing the credit.

The post Our Kind of Town… appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.