Archive for the ‘Events’ Category
March 18, 2008
“If there’s one thing I know how to do,” a friend once told me, after one of those long, grappa-fueled nights of ping-pong that make the rest of life seem like such an enigma, “It’s how to have a good time.” 
Over the years, this friend has explained to me many things: what different drugs are like (”if you must choose just one, mushrooms”), how to bake a chicken (salt, pepper, nothing else), the only way to actually finish writing a book (feverishly, in a remote cabin), and how good family life could be (his toddler-age children fetch beers from the fridge).
But never how to have a good time. Whenever I’ve been supposed to have a good time, like at an amusement park or a party, I’ve failed, and then felt worse because of my failure. “Corporate fun” has been especially miserable. But then I came to Redfin. And if there’s one thing Redfin knows how to do, it’s how to have a good time.
In that spirit, we threw
a Red Carpet party last week for our Seattle customers, so they would tell us how to improve our service or our site. And we had a really, really good time. Naturally, I was opposed from the start. “Nobody will come,” I said. “And we won’t have anything to say.”
But I wasn’t in charge. Our ringleader, Chelsea Mitchell, got $200 worth of beer on a high-heeled sprint through Costco. Mykie Gunderson cleared out his “Rock Band” junk just outside my office. Matt Goyer set up a computer to show drunk people the next release of Redfin.com.
And the customers came in droves. A Russian couple, on hearing that I was Lithuanian, told me that the “hard-working Lithuanian is a myth.” Bahn Lee took one of our prettiest guests and her boyfriend on an extensive Redfin tour. Angela Cough’s husband explained to an awe-struck crowd of scrawnies how to do 100 pushups (”just be naturally strong, I guess”).
And a dozen different customers came up to me just to gush about how great their experience was. The cumulative effect was overwhelming. Running an online business is a constant effort to think in inhuman dimensions, about changes to your site that can bring millions of new visitors. But at the end of the Red Carpet party, each happy customer seemed like a triumph.
If you’d like to meet the Redfin people in your area, let us know, and we’ll set up a Red Carpet party there, too. Thanks to Chelsea, Pam, Janelle and everyone else for setting up the party, and thanks to all the customers who made the event such a blast.
March 6, 2008
Last fall we opened our doors for a live real estate mashup dubbed The Red Carpet; a sort of customer meets agent and engineer free-for-all. And I was reminded again why we don’t need ice breakers or alcohol (we’ll still bring it anyway) at our events. Real estate is the ice breaker. It’s like talking about the town’s favorite ballclub except you don’t need to be a sports fan.
If you’ve ever wanted to interview one of our agents in person, or grill an engineer about why you can’t search by
$ per square feet, now’s your chance. The next Red Carpet happens Wednesday, March 12th in Seattle and you’re all invited, whether you’ve bought or sold with us or decided to kick the tires while the market cools off. True story: one of our guests at the last Red Carpet came looking for a job and now she works here.
Product man and Redbull-drinker, Matt Goyer, will be demo-ing all the cool new features on Redfin. Don’t worry about the oxymoronic blog heading. Coronas, Chipotle and Redfin… it will all make sense when you get here.
The Details
Date and Time: Wednesday, March 12th, from 6:00PM to 8:00PM.
Location: Dexter Horton Building at 710 2nd Ave, Suite 600 in Downtown Seattle (between Cherry and Columbia).
Parking: There are many garages nearby. Street parking is also available, free after 6PM.
This event happens to be at our Seattle office again but we plan on holding Red Carpet events soon in our other markets. If you’d like to sign up for a future event email our event coordinator: Chelsea at chelsea (dot) mitchell (at) redfin (dot) com.
RSVP for next week’s shindig on our invitation page: Click here!
November 14, 2007
Draper Fisher Jurvetson hosted a CEO Conference Monday in Half Moon Bay. Just about all the CEOs in the DFJ portfolio were there, mostly to talk among ourselves about how best to stave off the usual fate, which is to lose a lot of money and then get fired.
And yet we all went into it with the unfounded optimism peculiar to California: as if we might find a new best friend, or start a religion, or get swept up in an apocalypse (fires, earthquakes, Internet bubbles) that no one could previously have been convinced to take seriously.
I went curious to see what CEOs as a group would be like, as if to see what I might become: I imagined a convocation of X-Men, each with her own freakish flaws and special powers, or of business-casual, bloodlessly suave Agent Smiths.
And there were plenty of both, more than can be described here in any organized way. An Israeli entrepreneur working on a top-secret project with Eastern European X-Box hackers complained that investors in his first business wouldn’t let him use the service he built to run porn. “But this time,” he promised, “lots of porn.”
In his keynote speech, Tim Draper made a plausible case for colonizing Mars, showed a photo that may have been of himself standing astride a slaughtered elephant, and asked the crowd to sing along to a song that he composed and performed. (When I later asked a DFJ partner about the song, he said, “Oh, I’m the drummer in Tim’s band.”) It made me wonder if every titan of venture capital is really just a camp counselor on steroids, nudging his little charges along on their projects.
I felt bad for the follow-up acts. A Chinese entrepreneur took the stage to boast that his countrymen were “the Jews of Asia.” A banker dusted off “Internet growth” charts from 1999. But then a CEO in a pastel tie and matching pocket square explained how he evaluated job seekers in terms of the way they made people feel, a leap of empathy and insight that it had never occurred to me to consider.
The folks running ad-driven sites clucked that big advertisers still don’t get it. And we all agreed that the real problem was that nobody can beat Google in direct response ads, while for the zillion-dollar branding campaigns, TV and radio still pack a bigger emotional wallop.
We competed to say how little money we spent and how few people we employed, which climaxed when a San Francisco entrepreneur said he rented industrial space in Potrero Hill for $2 a square foot — ten times less than Redfin pays for its truly vile south-of-Market office. On the phone later that night, Redfin’s HR swami talked me out of cutting everyone’s pay.
Things went downhill from there. Over drinks, a games entrepreneur boasted of receiving letters from men who lost their wives because they couldn’t stop playing his game, MechWarrior. “You have to believe they might be happier alone,” he said. I misheard a young lady complain about the person who “did her nails” and told her “I’d love to have that nose.”
A guy from Los Angeles in a Thriller-style leather coat told me his creative partner was Ashton Kutcher. An Internet media mogul said he moved to LA so he could feel like part of the entertainment industry but discovered that “down there, the bassist in a third-rate bar-band has more street cred than we do.”
Everyone nodded. We knew all about being nobodies. But then we all went to bed that night in a real hotel — not on some friend’s twingey mattress – kings of ridiculously small, ragtag empires that seemed for the moment as unprecarious and boundless as the sea.
(Thanks to DFJ for hosting the conference).
November 8, 2007
We are voices without faces. We are emoticons. We are Redfin Direct Agents.
On Tuesday, November 13th, all of that changes. Redfin is opening our Seattle headquarters to current clients, past clients, and those on the fence. You will be treated to the finest pizza and beer that $300 can buy and demo unreleased website features on a floor to ceiling screen. You can even chat with Redfin’s engineers about your likes and dislikes. We call this event The Red Carpet.
While no metaphor suffices, an image of Gene Wilder comes to mind. If Glenn is Gene, I guess that makes me an Oompa-Loompa and makes you Charlie.
Come one, come all. The standard issue Redfin uniform is jeans and a cotton sweater. I think I’ll wear a collared shirt on Tuesday. You can wear whatever you like.
The Details
Date and Time: Tuesday, November 13th, from 5:30pm to 7:30pm.
Location: Dexter Horton Building at 710 2nd Ave Suite 600 in Downtown Seattle.
Parking: There are many nearby garages. Street parking is also available.
Our humble headquarters does have limited space. Please RSVP to donald -dot- desantis -at- redfin -dot- com. We will confirm you on our list and make sure that there is enough food for everyone.
August 5, 2007
A few Redfin folks went to last week’s Inman Conference in San Francisco; Inman is a big real estate and technology conference. Like all conferences, it felt like an alternate universe: smaller, friendlier, more competitive, shorter-lived.
But this one also felt set in a year of magical thinking, 1999, when San Francisco was at the height of the dot.com boom: Trulia dressed up some of their employees in big green foam-suits, like their logo. Terabitz drove people around in Mini Coopers and hired models and acrobatic sign-twirlers to work the sidewalk. A Redfin knock-off bought a booth and sent five people to the show. Behind closed doors, everyone talked about the meltdown in real estate and mortgage.
On the same night we were running a focus group, a real estate website threw a big party and somehow printed the address of our San Francisco office on its invitations. Before we could decide whether to invite everybody in, everybody left.
On a walk through the sunshine of Yerba Buena’s fountains, the great Adam Koval kept asking why each of us cared so much about a site that was such hard work. Later that day, Zillow’s Rich Barton waved from an escalator as he drifted away.
I sat down in a meeting with executives and consultants from a social networking service for real estate consumers and went unexpectedly berserk on hearing that agents would be able to challenge and sometimes remove reviews. (I later apologized, and the entrepreneur graciously forgave me.)
One of the conference’s real estate super-bloggers approached a big brokerage’s CEO to introduce herself in the flesh, stomping off when he seemed to have no idea who she was. “He knew,” she later said. “Oh, he knew!”
Before my blogging keynote, Joel Burslem assured me I had time to go the bathroom. I came back a few minutes later to discover the entire crowd twiddling their thumbs. I began my speech convinced Joel had just told everybody where I had been.
After the keynote, developers in Redfin’s San Francisco office announced “Hell has officially froze over,” because someone on Bloodhound Blog had made a kind comment about Redfin. I visited the blog and read that “I was full of sh__.”
(courtesy of whiteafrican on Flickr)
Everyone talked about switching from Google Maps to Microsoft Virtual Earth or back again.
Many people came up to us to say “That this whole conference hates you except me.” This was usually followed by their saying they had only one (friendly!) question, which was usually “WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?”
And everyone kept asking us why we came to the conference since we obviously didn’t belong there. For the first time, actually, we had thought we did…
(Thanks to Marc Andreessen, Netscape co-founder, for calling out our post on entrepreneurship. Everyone has probably already seen our bonus link, a video of people dancing on treadmills, but we had to be sure…)
July 26, 2007
The Naked Truth video is up, on Mixpo instead of YouTube, so we could stream the entire 56:53. This is your chance to hear five great journalists and bloggers talking about how entrepreneurs talk to them. Greg Gottesman from Madrona moderated.
In case you don’t have an hour to watch the whole thing, we’ve summarized the juicy bits.
FV is Fred Vogelstein from Wired, JC is John Cook from the Seattle PI, MA is Michael Arrington from TechCrunch, RB is Rebecca Buckman from the WSJ, TD is Tricia Duryee from the Seattle Times.
*~*~*~*~*
5:15, MA: If you have a really cool product it doesn’t matter how much of a buffoon you are, it’s going to get written about.
5:45, MA: Get rid of all the marketing crap that you’ve learned… Start with MySpace and say it’s different in this way or that way.
6:30, RB: What we do and what Michael does is now very, very different. The considerations are very different for a blog, a newspaper, a monthly magazine.
8:05, FV: Essentially what all of us do is we traffic in smart people.
9:36, JC: I would encourage everyone to give me the scoop first… I don’t get bent out of shape if it gets pitched to both [PI and Seattle Times] organizations.
11:06, TD: If you’re trying to pitch something for the largest newspaper, things trickle down hill.11:55, RB: What we like to do is bigger-picture trend stories… if it has been mentioned in other publications or other blogs, that’s ok, we can use that as a news-peg… but the Journal is very picky, as far as if the trend story has been written somewhere else, we’re not going to do it.
13:30, TD: Even if you send us a press release and you don’t hear back from us, it’s not like we just hit delete and are not even reading it… If I get five e-mails on a similar topic, I can see that the trend is happening…
14:30, MA [on PR firms]: Some PR firms are ok and some flat out lie manipulate and steal to get what they want. They think that we care a lot about exclusives… I don’t really care about exclusives, because I feel like if I write a better story, because I’m a blogger I have a natural advantage because others blogs links to each other… I don’t care that much about exclusives… what I don’t want to be is second… I don’t mind being the same time as everybody else.
16:25, RB: I would think for me a scoop is more what we call a concept scoop… it’s more like, hey, you’re the first publication that connected these dots and put the concept scoop together.
17:30, FV: A handful [of pr firms] can pick up the phone and call me and say they’re having a dinner with such and such company I’ve never heard of and because I know they’ve taken the time to be serious about choosing their clients, I’ll probably go. If you wind up getting a PR for the sake of lightening your work load I think that’s probably a mistake, you guys are the best sales men for your ideas and your companies.
19:00, FV: Every once and a while just to be evil if I know the CEO, I’ll call the CEO up and say you know you should fire your PR firm.
20:00, JC: I’m always looking for a news hook. For me a lot of the times that news hook is a financing event… just because a financing event is a transformative event in a company’s history.
20:45, MA: A lot of times, I’m not super-interested in hearing a PR rep’s idea of a trend and how their video site fits into it. I feel like it’s my job to come up with that.
22:30, FV [on how to approach a journalist]: Become a source of mine, tell me what is going on in the industry that you’re starting your company in. Tell me about the VC’s that are smart and the VC’s that are dumb.
23:00, MA: [Michael calls out Fred on giving more coverage to his sources, since Michael has been criticized for making the same comment before.]
24:15, RB: Not only can it suck your wallet dry, I feel like PR firms can suck the life out of you… If you’re an entrepreneur, you’re doing it for a reason, and if that kind of interest and passion is relayed to us, that makes us more interested in what you’re doing.
25:00,TD: Don’t worry about being completely polished.
25:20, TD [responding to a question about how to spin a journalist]: Why do you want to spin us? Are you doing something illegal?
27:15, JC [on ducking a question]: If there’s information that you don’t want to share, just tell me I can’t comment on that and leave it at that… just be straight up.
28:45, MA [on how to prepare for an interview]: Get the CEO on phone, you [as a PR rep] are not going to be able to know the product to the detail I want to hear about. If you’re the CEO, it doesn’t really matter, you know the product, I’m going to dig it out of you… I like to disrupt the story immediately by asking random questions… and try not to waste time… Some times a five minute conversation leads to a much better story than an hour conversation would.
30:50, RB: The worst thing is when you’re talking, they say something really interesting and then AFTER they say it, they say you can’t print that, that’s off the record.
32:05, FV [on if you screw up on the record]: You beg.
33:15, JC [on takign something off the record]: If it’s really important to the story, I will fight to get that in there. If it’s a guy that just misspeaks, and says something silly, I’m going to cut him some slack.
34:30, MA: I have two sets of negotations when I talk to an entrepeneur, one is tell me everything, and two is now ok tell me what you’re ok with me printing.
36:45, TD: if the facts are wong, you should let us know immediately… [But if it’s just an opinion from another source you don’t like,] that’s the breaks when you’re talking to a reporter.
37:33 JC: I really like follow-up after an interview… you have it in e-mail which is easy to access.
40:00 FV [on the company that is the best at PR]: I’d say Microsoft [laughter].
40:15 JC: I APPRECIATE SCOOPS.
43:40, RB: We have some very, very high ethical standards at the Journal and that’s something that everybody who works there is very proud of.
46:00, MA: A lot of the young entrepreneurs are a little bit nuts in Silicon Valley, I actually forget the name of the disease they have, they’re so smart they cannot communicate with other human beings… literally people have this. They’re always a lot of trouble.
46:40, FV [on the most surreal interview]: I got to interview Jeff Bezos jumping on a trampoline… yes we were naked.
48:00, FV on getting into TechCrunch or Wired: It’s just personal, we hate you [laughter].
48:25, MA: It’s not their fault, it’s your fault. You can’t force this stuff… spending more money on PR is not going get into these publications… I mean it’ll get you into mine, I’ll write about you [laughter].
49:30, FV [on focusing first on the trade press]: Success breeds success… that’s exposure we’re all going to see. Whenever I try to get up to speed… I’ll pull tons of stories.
52:40, MA [on the importance of entrepreneur’s blogs]: I think it’s really important. When you have a blog you become 100 times more important to me as a reader than you were before. Because you have your own voice and you can link back… I think every entrepreneur should have a blog.
53:30, FV: It takes a huge amount of work. It absolutely builds credibility and it probably builds more credibility than any PR firm you could hire but it has to be reasonably transparent.
54:50, RB [on what entrepreneurs’ blogs are good]: [Redfin’s] blog is excellent [screams of joy].
55:25, JC: I do like the Redfin blog… I think Zillow does a really good job, they’ve made it a really important part of their PR strategy and it shows.
55:30, MA: Yeah, but don’t break your own news on your own blog, give it to us [laughter among the panelists].
That’s it! To read more, check out what John Cook, Dipika Kohli and Tricia Duryee have to say…
Our bonus link today comes via the Second Friend of Redfin from the Washington Post: Attorneys for two United Arab Emirates leaders urged a federal judge Monday to dismiss a lawsuit filed on behalf of thousands of children forced to ride racing camels…
July 25, 2007
The Naked Truth party wasn’t the three-ring circus I had hoped it would be. No one arrived by camel. The police didn’t shut the party down. There were big bouncers working security, but no velvet rope.
And yet everybody — hundreds of people — seemed to have a blast. Our goal in hosting the event was to foster direct conversations between journalists, bloggers and Seattle’s entrepreneurs and that was how it seemed to work out. It felt like things could happen between people that don’t normally happen, probably because I drank more than I should.
There was a panel then a party. I was so nervous handling the introductions that Dave Hanley asked from the back of the crowd if I was doing alright.
Just before the panel started, TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington told Wired’s Fred Vogelstein to get to the freaking point, then rolling his eyes, explained to everyone that he was quoting the Fred Vogelstein dossier that a PR agency accidentally mailed to Fred Vogelstein. Later he pulled in everyone’s else’s microphones so that they all sat in front of him and then leaned back, smiling.
Fred said that you should hire an agency, but only if they’re unlikely to work with you (the elite, selective firms). The WSJ’s Becky Buckman admitted to having a soft spot for goofy, impassioned pitches from entrepreneurs (by e-mail, so you don’t freak her out too much). The PI’s John Cook, looking healthy and quick in a Ho Chi Minh outfit, explained that he doesn’t mind talking to crazy people — our eyes met — but that follow-up clarifications (BY E-MAIL) are always appreciated.
One brave entrepreneur stood up to say how he and his agency had tried to get into Wired and TechCrunch; Michael Arrington told him you never will (”We just hate you,” Fred chimed in, jokingly. “It’s not them, it’s you,” Michael said). MC Greg Gottesman asked the Seattle Times’s Tricia Duryee how best to spin a story, and Tricia asked, “why not just tell the truth?” Then she teased John Cook about whose circulation was bigger.
On the subject of scoops, Becky Buckman explained that she likes to have a “concept exclusive,” in which she can tell a meaningful story behind events that others may have already covered. Michael Arrington said he didn’t need an exclusive scoop on a story, so long as a news embargo was taken seriously by everybody else (I think I saw him check his iPhone in the middle of the panel). John Cook was asked what his favorite kind of story was and immediately replied “AN EXCLUSIVE.”
Becky was unexpectedly moving in a comment about ethics in journalism. Michael begged people to eliminate “revolutionary” and anything else that sounds like marketing babble from their vocabularies, suggesting instead that companies pitch themselves like movies (”‘Tootsie” meets ‘The Longest Yard’” –>”MySpace for senior citizens”). He also said he couldn’t fathom the reason an entrepreneur wouldn’t blog, explaining that the network of links between blogs is the currency for exchanging information and traffic between his site and theirs — then added, but “don’t break your own news on your blog.”
As the panel wound down, a gigantic barbecue trailer backed into the parking lot. Its ghastly perfume wafted over the audience, but their attention never wavered. The panel was great — really lively — and it was good too.
And wasn’t Greg Gottesman a magnificent host? He never looked at any notes, he never sounded like the teacher in Charlie Brown, he spread the action around to all the panelists.
Then the party got underway. One partygoer asked another how his social networking site was different than others (answer: “you’re an asshole.”) iLike’s Hadi Partovi, modeling his own company t-shirt underneath a blazer, looked every inch the hip Web 2.0 entrepreneur. Amit Mital, Redfin’s first fanatical investor, demanded extra drink tickets for his years of support. An intern, Alex Loddengaard, asked my wife out to dinner (she said yes).
A kindly young woman challenged Fred Vogelstein, who flew up for the event in the middle of a deadline, to explain why Wired put a half-naked woman on its cover (answer: “I didn’t think they’d go for it either.”) Michael Arrington trampled me on the way to the bar.
Tricia Duryee wore big sunglasses. Peter Cochran looked like a model for a surfing magazine. Paul Goodrich talked up his Croatian triathlon training regimen. Our progenitor, David Eraker, suddenly stood before me, a large, happy presence.
Michael Dougherty battled back a horde of Redfin engineers from recruiting a colleague at his new startup. With his deep, knee-buckling voice, Matt Goyer asked a woman about interviewing at Redfin (”my boss is right over there,” she squeaked).
After months of harassing us about Safari support, Mike Davidson suddenly appeared in the flesh to take my chest-heaving, tearful confession. (I tried to blame Microsoft. He introduced me to his friend from Microsoft).
A man told me his name had been erased from the invitation wiki by a saboteur. John Cook overhead him, and smelling a juicy story, suggested we go back through the edit history to find the culprits.
Someone complained to me about a beer shortage. I told him Zillow drank it.
Angela Cough promised there would be a vegetarian option (the corn bread was terrible). Cynthia Pang pointed someone out and said “That girl is NOT nice!” Angela nodded violently, arms folded across her chest, menacing even when pregnant.
I wobbled out of the party while the sun was just setting behind the mountains, on one of the longest days of a very short and wonderful summer.
Many, many thanks to the journalists who took the time to come to the event, to the team at Havana Social Club for hosting a great party, to Angela Cough and Elise Hebb for putting it together, to Cynthia Pang for coming up with the name and helping out, to Madrona for helping us pay for so much of it, to iLike, Wetpaint, Jobster, Farecast and WildTangent for their support, to everyone who came. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
We all had a really good time. Please tag your Flickr photos with nakedtruth. We’ll post the video in a jiffy. Any details we forgot about, or that John Cook didn’t address in his excellent post, just add a comment.
July 16, 2007
Between Friday afternoon and Monday morning 320 people signed up for The Naked Truth, an event we’re putting together with Madrona to connect entrepreneurs with journalists. We were going to limit the pre-party panel session to 200 people so we could keep it indoors but now we paid for a tent and a little stage so more of you have to have come: 50 more to be precise, all from the waiting list. This kind of feels like planning a wedding. The party itself still has plenty of space left, and all the same people will be there. To RSVP for the party, click here.
July 13, 2007
A year ago, the Diddy spirit pervaded Seattle, resulting in a NerdPartySupernova led by an Ephod-clad Michael Arrington as the Grand Poobah. Beer-hauling trucks conked out, young men fell fatally in love, entrepreneurs with Hare-Krishna looks in their eyes rampaged through the ranks of venture capitalists.
This year, we’re doing something bigger. First of all, we’re bringing in the barbecue pit. More importantly, we’re on a mission to introduce journalists to entrepreneurs, so that little companies with big ideas can put themselves on the map, and figure out how they want to talk to the press. With a tip of the hat to Robert Scoble, we’re calling the event The Naked Truth.
Rebecca Buckman from the Wall Street Journal, Fred Vogelstein from Wired, Michael Arrington from TechCrunch, John Cook from the Seattle PI and Tricia Duryee from the Seattle Times will be on a pre-party panel to answer questions. And startup bigshots like Hugh Crean, Hadi Partovi, Jason Goldberg and Ben Elowitz will be in the crowd to ask.
Here are the details:
When: Tuesday, July 24, 2007. The panel starts at 5:30, the party starts at 6:30.
Where: The Havana Social Club, 1010 East Pike Street, Seattle
Who: every entrepreneur, dreamer, procastinator, narcissist, coder, starter, joiner, flim-flam man, gonzo PR guy, bigshot, littleshot and networking twizzler in town… please come!
Madrona Venture Group and Redfin are paying for the kegs and the ‘cue, and iLike, WetPaint, Farecast, Jobster and WildTangent are helping us put it together. If you want to come, you have to sign up in advance, or overpower our HGH-juiced Cambodian bouncer at the door. Panel attendance is limited to 200 people. We’ve tented a nearby parking lot so the party can handle 500.
Madrona’s Greg Gottesman, master of ceremonies for the panel, has already laid down the law for his approach: “I have come here to chew bubble gum and kick ass—and I’m all out of bubble gum.”
Edit the wiki to put your name on the list…
February 2, 2007
After seeing readership grow by leaps and bounds in Seattle, Redfin launched Bay Area Sweet Digs today, a blogsite that provides eyewitness views of listings in neighborhoods all over the Bay. Check out what’s shaking in Fremont, Palo Alto & Mountain View, Berkeley, San Mateo & Redwood City, in San Francisco itself, or up north in Santa Rosa & Sonoma.
We hope you like it.
Already the site is getting plenty of attention, with reviews and notices at SocketSite, Inman, 3 Oceans, Transparent Real Estate (which says our reviews in Seattle have gone soft).
My favorite house reviewed so far has of course been the one in Berkeley. I also liked hearing about the Roman Catholic priest who fell in love with an artist.
If there’s neighborhoods you’d like to see or ideas for how we could make things better, let us know. Otherwise, sign up for a subscription!
Bonus material, from a friend of Redfin: a court ruling against an unscrupulous mover. There’s a misanthropic pleasure in reading about what this sadistic mover did to people and their possessions.
