When Redfin first launched our home-buying service, David Eraker sent an email to the whole company that I’ll never forget: “Strap in Team Redfin. We’re in for a wild ride.” No truer statement has ever been made about Redfin’s journey, which took another turn last week when we launched Redfin Scouting Report. We made big… Read More
Spread the word! Redfin’s finally expanding to Portland, and offering search for most of Western Oregon, which will increase the number of listings on our site by another 8%. We also finally got ‘round to offering x-out, which keeps track of all the properties you don’t want to click on again… As John Cook recently… Read More
There’s plenty of talk on Twitter and the web about my saying in an interview with the Globe & Mail in Toronto that the real estate industry is still “screwed up.” I first said this a long time ago on 60 Minutes, in response to a question I’d been asked over and over again. I was asked… Read More
At Redfin, we’ve long been opposed to dual agency, where the same agent represents both seller and buyer. This hasn’t always been an easy call because in some ways dual agency is more efficient. But it’s hard to represent both sides in a negotiation simultaneously, and the big problem is that it encourages the listing… Read More
A strange thing happened in online real estate last Friday. After three years of fierce competition and $100+ million in venture capital, TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld finally asked real estate websites the $24,000 question: who has the most homes for sale? “The most important success factor for these sites,” Erick writes, “is how comprehensive they are.”… Read More
In September 2005, just as Redfin was raising its first round of funding, the Department of Justice sued the National Association of Realtors for developing a policy that allowed its members to share listing information with some brokers but not others. The policy was suspended while the lawsuit lumbered through federal court. And in the… Read More
For no real reason, a San Diego Sweet Digs blogger attacked real estate broker Kris Berg today. The contract blogger, a usually kind person who deeply regrets the post, no longer works for Redfin because she violated the first rule of our culture, which is that everyone is respected. The charter of Sweet Digs is… Read More
Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt renew their argument that real estate brokers aren’t worth 6%, citing a study (PDF) conducted by Stanford economist B. Douglas Bernheim and one of his graduate students, Jonathan Meer, which shows that using a broker has no effect on a home’s average selling price. We are an (online) broker ourselves,… Read More
What do you make of this: The New York Times reports today that a San Diego couple, the Ummels, is suing their real estate agent for allegedly failing to protect them from overpaying for a $1.2 million Carlsbad home in August 2005. The lead plaintiff is a 60-year-old university fundraiser who describes herself as “114… Read More
Thanks to everyone for their kind words about Redfin’s appearance on “Today,” which broadcast on Friday our data-driven guidance on how to sell a home more quickly, for a higher price. We showed up in the local papers and the blogs. Another food-fight broke out with the real estate bloggers. But mostly people have asked… Read More