Last February, when the rain wouldn’t stop and we were bored out of our minds, Redfin released a year of sales records indicating that our buyers on average got a better deal than customers of other brokerages, on top of the commission savings. Mose Andre, Redfin’s compulsive stats man, has only recently recovered. Hundreds of… 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
A random follow-up thought to the 60 Minutes controversy: one thing we’ve always wondered about is how traditional real estate brokers can insist on calling Redfin a discounter while strenuously maintaining there is no standard commission? The six percent commission is supposedly an emotionally void concept, but anyone who offers to charge less is reviled… Read More
Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote that we have in love to learn only this: letting go. Everything else comes naturally. In starting Sweet Digs, a blog that provided independent, eyewitness reviews of houses for sale, we had forgotten this advice. (Bahn Lee, Sweet Digs mastermind) After almost a year of negotiations came to a head… 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
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
Publishing MLS data that shows that Redfin got a better deal for buyers than agents at other brokerages sparked a riot yesterday: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here. We also showed up in Freakonomics (holy cow!). There has been a healthy discussion about how to interpret the data: whether… Read More
Earlier this week, the Sellsius real estate blog published a picture of me as James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, suggesting that Redfin’s criticism of the real estate industry is merely a marketing ploy. The most recent case in point was my remark in the LA Times comparing the real estate industry to Big… 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