Here, from a Google Street View photo take just a few years ago, is a portrait of the American dream: And here, after eight re-financings, a shiny SUV and a boat, followed by a bank failure then a Fannie Mae foreclosure, is the home for sale now: The topiary and rose bushes are dead. The… Read More
The folks at Redfin got into real estate to make the industry more efficient. But if anything, the market has just gotten less and less efficient. And most of it isn’t the Realtors’ fault but the banks. Banks selling a home don’t trust one another’s credit. They reject appraisals for a price that a buyer… Read More
For many home-buyers, REOs are an opportunity for a bargain. Short for “Real Estate Owned,” REOs are bank-owned properties (also known as foreclosures). Already this year, 39% of Redfin’s offers in Southern California have been on these homes, while the entire East Bay market’s REO sales are up 103% year-over-year. Real estate news site Inman… Read More
We just published a table showing the percentage of listings being sold by a bank. But then we began to wonder: what percentage of properties in an entire city are actually for sale at the moment? This is not an easy question to answer, because you have to count up all the properties for which… Read More
I was signing checks today when I noticed that our bill for obtaining bank-owned listings that have not yet appeared in the MLS (that is, those that are marketed on bank’s websites but not yet by a real estate agent, usually because the bank just took possession) in November had increased 123% from what it… Read More
One Sunday morning last fall, my great friend Conan, a debonair former nose-tackle who often advises me to get in touch with my feminine side, called to ask about using our site. It took half an hour to convince someone who knows I would never lie to him in a million years to run a… Read More