It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, these last nine months. Since July, the stock market has increased 29%. Over almost the same period, housing prices have declined more than 5%. At the end of last week, just before sales of new homes fell again, to more than 80% from their… Read More
Redfin published its latest analyses of Bay Area and Seattle real estate markets last night, based on proprietary data from our websites and war stories from our agents. To no one’s surprise, prices were down in Seattle, and mixed to down in the Bay Area. In both markets, three trends jumped out at us from… Read More
Last night and this morning, Redfin published its analyses of Seattle and San Francisco activity in July, drawing on proprietary data and agent war stories to give consumers an up-to-the-minute portrait of the real estate market. With plenty of buyers but no real urgency, both markets are weakening, the Bay Area for the first time… Read More
Here at Redfin, we don’t have much patience with bubble bloggers. We do not have a fixed position that all markets are over-inflated all the time. For example: since last year, we have stated repeatedly that foreclosures are likely to peak this summer, a position now corroborated by statistical data and our own experience: in… Read More
Every month, Redfin publishes a newsletter about real estate prices out to a few hundred thousand people. A few hundred write back. The tone of the responses depends on the tone of the original newsletter. If we argue that the market will improve over the next year, as we did in Southern California at the… Read More
My favorite anecdote in Michael Lewis’s The Big Short is about one of the first people to make big bets against mortgage bonds, a Deutsche Bank trader who liked to brag that he employed China’s second-smartest mathematician. According to Lewis, the trader talked about the mathematician as if he were “a pet tied to his… Read More
Redfin has hardly been an advocate for real estate tax credits. When the original first-time home-buyer credit was set to expire last November, we urged Congress to let it expire. But now that the federal credit has finally expired, the $24,000 question is how the market will respond. It will take months to sort this… Read More
On the last Tuesday of every month, I get up at 5:45 a.m., pour myself a bowl of cereal, and begin hitting the refresh button on my browser, waiting for the Case-Shiller data to come out on the housing market. Once the data go live, we crunch the numbers, make some charts and publish a… Read More
We got our monthly newsletter out just in time for the holiday. We sent it to 135,021 folks, up 7% from last month. You can always read our newsletter here, but if you’d like to receive it via email, just sign up. Enjoy! Lisa Happy Thanksgiving Redfinnians! Lots of big Redfin news this month, and… Read More
Here I am, back in Washington DC, past midnight, in a hotel room with my favorite rubber giraffe and a snoring baby. I just got into bed but can’t sleep because Congress looks like it might extend the first-time home-buyer tax credit. The new Chris Dodd-sponsored deal has bipartisan support and a deal is at… Read More