I minded my own business, thinking of a friend at Berkeley who once saw members of a cult walking down the street toward his house. Though heterosexual, he took off all his clothes, clasped the hand of his roommate and, when the missionaries knocked, invited them in for a religious debate. I imagined the argument I would have with my seat-mate in a situation like that, sipping tea naked on a couch, atomizing her world view.

While I was busy with that, the woman opened her laptop to view some paintings of flowers. Almost involuntarily, I mumbled something about how pretty they were. She mentioned that these powerful, emotional works had been painted by people with autism and dementia. She had dedicated her life, she said, to helping them paint.

Tears didn’t actually come to my eyes until a few minutes later, when I saw the pictures of the artists next to their paintings, smiling for what seemed like the first time in a long time, oblivious of the bleak institutional setting in the background. What prompted my seat-mate to help folks whom almost everyone else had given up on?

It was another reminder that people whom I disagree with are good people, and that they are as likely to be right as I am. This has been the essential humbling experience of life in my 30s, especially of my life running a startup. You see how many surprising shapes and sizes good people come in, and occasionally get zinged with how fallible you are.

Whereas my imaginary argument with my seat-mate had made me feel smug but still bad, my actual experience of her made me feel good. It’s an experience I’m lucky to have had, not just on the plane, but over and over again at work.

The reason most people have fixed opinions is that they get tired of never seeing them enacted, but I get to see my ideas in action every month at Redfin. We try out beloved website features & make hiring decisions, and discover they sometimes don’t work out. The rubber meets the road. The crazy woman speaks.

In this way, a startup turns you into both the lab rat struggling desperately to survive and the lab scientist standing back and measuring his performance. It gives you less patience with the ideologues telling you what the rat should have done.

If more people could see that the measurable, indisputable outcome of getting your way was sometimes disconcertingly bad — if reality could surprise you more with how often people you wrote off turn out to be your savior — we might stop listening to the smug partisans on talk radio, the outlandish political candidates in both parties, the outraged voices in our own heads.

And, stuck in the middle, we might get more out of our crowded, lonely flight across America.

The post The Crazy Woman Speaks appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

But in talking about how politicians use the web to influence citizens, the article neglected to mention how citizens are using the web to influence politics. It has been on my mind lately because of two emails I got in the past 24 hours: one from Matt Lerner, promoting a Digg-style site for voting on the priorities of an Obama CTO. And the other from Ben Elowitz, about a Wetpaint-powered site for mobilizing protest against California’s Proposition 8.

Beyond chattering about gadgets and kitty photos, it seems like Web 2.0 has found a larger purpose. Part of this seems to be a byproduct of the web’s becoming easy enough for anyone to use, and part of it is a function of web-savvy people becoming more politicized.

That’s a big change. As long as I’ve been in technology, “Live free or die” was a UNIX rallying cry, not a political slogan, and the dominant political strain was libertarian. Now Silicon Valley has become a force of elites, like Hollywood, with an active interest in government and outsized ambitions to influence the rest of the world.

Naturally, members of the technology elite view this as a very good thing, the Revenge of the Nerds on a political scale. And I do too. But I also wonder what it means for poor folks and older folks who are less web-savvy — and now maybe less influential.

I also wonder what the next revolution will be like — not the kind talked about in Redfin’s press releases — but one involving protests,  barricades, tear gas and fallen governments, which seems to happen somewhere every few years. It will probably start on Facebook and Twitter.

The post Web-Powered Supercitizens appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

There’s still plenty of stagecraft in this year’s election, but what has been remarkable for me about the past two years is how much more real — not fake — it has all felt. I’ve barely watched CNN, but I’ve been glued to live-blogs, Twitters and IM conversations — written in real-time, by people on the scene, in voices that have been so personable and persistent that they’ve become part of my life:

• John Dickerson’s Twitter feed about a fire in the press tent, a grandmother’s death, sleep-walking to last night’s hotel room, eating six Butterfingers for dinner, a biblical deluge of rain just as the first McCain-Obama debate ended, a bigshot suddenly deciding to show a mother and her daughter around a rally.
• Katharine Q. Seelye’s breathless live-blogs of  the caucuses (“a soft orange dusk is just settling over Des Moines now… all indications are that turnout is huge tonight”)  and conventions (“Bristol and Levi are holding hands, as they have been doing for hours, it seems. Levi is chewing gum. More than 20 million people are probably watching on TV at home”.)
• An IM conversation with friends about what was happening on the ground in Iowa the day Clinton lost, and Romney suffered his first setback. (“Bill Clinton is attending one of the caucuses. He’s in like a school gym.”)
• A campaign volunteer on IM and SMS, live from the belly of the beast, about a disgraced politician giving a speech that nearly made him cry.

These voices have made politics feel immediate, unpredictable, intimate, exciting. They have made our democracy feel smaller and more connected. It’s another way — much more important than the oft-discussed YouTube videos of a gaffe — the Internet has made government better.

Come Tuesday, I’ll miss the action. Hopefully, whatever forces compelled people to travel everywhere, and talk, and campaign, and write and write and write — and listen too — will get behind whoever wins tomorrow night. Our real work is ahead of us.

The post The Dog Wags Back appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

But talk is cheap. This morning, Jonathan Lansner at the solidly suburban Orange County Register did the actual research, overlaying real estate trends on polling trends. Here’s what he found:

• In the 17 states that are “solid” or “leaning” McCain, according to RealClearPolitics, my spreadsheet tells me that the weighted average home price fell 1.6 percent in a year. That’s relatively strong when you note that First American LoanPerformance’s overall national index, weighted in the same manner, was down 6.5 percent in the past year.
• In the 24 states plus D.C. “solid” or “leaning” toward Obama, my spreadsheet tells me that the weighted average home price fell 9.1 percent. That’s significantly worse than McCain strongholds, as 13 of the 17 worst state home markets are seen by RealClearPolitics in Obama’s camp.
• And those seven toss-up states? Curiously, housing performance fell right between the two candidates real estate portfolios, so to speak: weighted average losses for the too-close-to-call states ran 6.4 percent.

I read a lot of political blogs, and a lot of real estate blogs too. This is the best of both, with original thinking, real spade-work, and balanced analysis. Bravo Jon, bravo!

The post Foreclosure Dads & The 2008 Election appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

But then Redfin’s Rob McGarty sent me a video of all our old friends, the congressmen from the Housing and Finance Subcommittee. These are the people who lined up to challenge Redfin’s testimony that self-regulation mostly fails to prevent blackballing, and that old MLS rules limit  access to the information consumers need to negotiate a better home price.

The new video shows that there were Democrats too who insisted that nothing was wrong with Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, using the exact same rhetoric they used to insist that nothing was wrong with the real estate industry.

As before, Artur Davis and Maxine Waters led the charge, with Davis notable for an intelligence bordering on cruelty, and Waters for incandescent outrage and an occasional twinkle of self-mocking hooded behind her tinted glasses. Both are Democrats, heavily funded by real estate interests.

The video is the worst kind of partisan hack job, but what it reminded me of was a non-partisan truth: that both Democrats and Republicans are equal parts corruption and genuine conviction. When I came back from Congress, all the people who saw Democrats as good and Republicans as bad, or vice-versa, just seemed to be living in their own ideological world.

It’s impossible for a congressman to live in that world. A few months after our testimony, when the committee chairman was headed to prison on fraud charges, he left a late-night voice-mail thanking us for our testimony. By November, the whole committee staff was unemployed, their phones answered by strangers, because the Democrats had taken over Congress. It was hard at that moment to blame Davis and Waters for putting self-preservation first (though I do).

I thought about the two of them when reading Sunday about the retirement of Republican Congressman Tom Davis, a centrist who became convinced that both parties would rather embarrass one another than get anything done; judging by the number of party-line votes, Congress is more partisan now than it has been in a century.

And so are we. Any newspaper’s most e-mailed articles aren’t, like the Tom Davis swan song, about partisanship, they are partisanship, arguing that John McCain is half-senile or Barack Obama is un-American. Ellie Fields noted yesterday that opinion-and-rumor blogs have sprouted up just like the scandal-sheets popular 100 years ago, and Facebook makes matters worse by ensuring we never read anything that hasn’t been recommended by people like us.

But do we really believe that 49% or 51% of Americans have got it completely wrong? What has been best about America is that we aren’t subject to age-old grudges based on differences in religion, class or politics, or mythologized histories of victimization. We are still a new, open place. After years of partisan rancor, the two candidates for president are both promising to work with the other side. It is why Obama beat Clinton, and McCain beat Romney. And it’s why I’m hopeful about this election — even if my guy doesn’t win.

The post In the News Again: Redfin's Old Friends in Congress appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.