Added after the fact to blog posts that generate a significant number of comments.
Redfin today announced its expansion to the Washington, D.C. area and a $12-million series-C financing led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, the folks behind Skype, Overture and Hotmail. The whole process of raising money from DFJ seemed to encapsulate the essential Redfin traits (persistence, serendipity, adventure, speed): Redfin wooed DFJ somewhat unsuccessfully over the course of… Read More
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,… Read More
About a week after Redfin showed up on 60 Minutes, Century 21 started running an ad challenging the idea that you could buy a home online. [video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANQdmWpehBU[/video] “Some people think they can do it all on the computer,” the actor says. Find a home, sell a home. Except the computer can’t do what I do… Read More
Redfin and the traditional real estate industry duked it out on 60 Minutes last night. The segment aired second, after Mitt Romney took a stand against polygamy, but was the most popular video until losing out to a wayward penguin who swam 3,000 miles to Peru (Sasha Aickin just sent an e-mail around saying “we… Read More
Redfin launched the real estate consumer’s bill of rights today, which Inman News is blasting out to its hundreds of thousands of real estate subscribers some time this morning. The premise of the bill is that consumers should have all the information the agent does about a house they’re trying to buy or sell, and… Read More
The old way: explain your real estate needs and desires to an agent, he searches for listings, wait, wait, wait until he shares the details with you. The Redfin way: search for real estate on your own terms, whether in your PJs or work duds, get immediate information. The old way: once you fell in… Read More
Thanks to McKinsey-trained Kevin Boer, one of several brokers who reviewed Redfin’s NWMLS data, Redfin has discovered that we screwed up the accounting for one transaction in our analysis of Redfin’s negotiating advantage. Except for this transaction, Kevin seems to have corroborated our analysis. We originally reported that our King County buyers got a final… Read More
Redfin announced big news today, publishing MLS data that indicates our agents negotiate significantly better than their counterparts at traditional brokerages. Last month at Brad Inman’s big real estate conference in New York, Realtor.com President Allan Dalton accused Redfin and other critics of a “massive level of disingenuous communication,” because we ignore the likelihood that… Read More
A friend descending into Southern California once looked down on the vast grid of tinkling lights and said it was as terrifying to see as the mind of God. I used to dislike the way LA made me feel insignificant, but now it’s almost a relief. If Gertrude Stein once complained that the problem with… Read More
At real estate’s big Inman technology conference in Manhattan, Redfin squared off with Allan Dalton, Move.com’s President of Real Estate, in a keynote session entitled high-touch vs. high-tech, about the differences between online brokers and traditional real estate agents. Move.com runs Realtor.com for the National Association of Realtors, publishing listings nationwide. It has also threatened… Read More