Archive for the ‘Redfin in the News’ Category
December 13, 2007
We’re going to be on the Today Show Friday morning!
Are we joining Al Roker for the weather (and housing) forecast? We’ve been sworn to secrecy, but tune in Friday morning around 7:40 a.m. (same time in each time zone) to find out.
And it’s LIVE, so you know what that means … anything can happen. Unless, of course, they have a tape delay for those Janet Jackson moments.
Check back tomorrow morning to get the scoop and maybe even a first-hand recount of what goes on behind the scenes.
In case you don’t know where to watch the Today show in your city, find out here.
November 14, 2007
Michael Arrington just posted onTechCrunch a Redfin essay arguing that venture capitalists put too much stock in an entrepreneur’s experience. Brimming with emotion, we saw that within seconds of publication, someone had already left a comment! What a thrill! We breathlessly opened the page to see what our first reader had to say:
“Stop with the guest posts. We only come here to hear from Mike and Duncan.”
Somewhere in Seattle, a small office became very quiet. Moments later, Michael put the hammer down with his special green font: “do you guys practice at being assholes or does it come naturally?”
Later, Guy Kawasaki posted his own version of the essay, prompting my second-favorite comment: “after 20 years of unfocused attention to my various start ups, I am now relatively broke. I mean the house is paid for, the kids are in private school, but we now fly commercial and sit in the back unless there’s a cheap upgrade.” It was written at 3 a.m.
(The National: Fake Empire.)
October 15, 2007
For those of you who like to track our daring exploits around the web, Redfin has posted a generic version of its financial model along with a brief overview of what might be useful about it on Guy Kawasaki’s blog. Whereas the initial post provided a few actual data-points, this one offers only sample data, but hey! there is an entire model that you can use for formulas and formats.
We published the generic model because so many people asked for it, not to make a statement about whether our actual projections are accurate or not. We’re not so smart as to believe our projections are any better than anyone else’s.
Thanks again to Guy for hosting us.
We also owe folks an answer to the question we posed a few weeks ago as to which blog sent the most people to Redfin, on a week where we appeared not only on Guy’s blog but also on TechCrunch (a brief but kind mention), and Slashdot, which gave our new devblog its first big hit. In fact, the most traffic came from Lifehacker, which wrote about Redfin later in the week. We had never appeared on Lifehacker before, and we were featured there as “the ultimate window-shopping tool” and “a terrific map mash-up,” so that probably explains it. Guy came close behind, in part because that post was linked on sites like del.icio.us more than 800 times. The most traffic we have ever gotten from any one website was our debut on TechCrunch.
Our bonus link today is a video of the Chicago marathon’s closing moments:
At second 24, the commentator talks about how the then-leader will remember this moment for the rest of her life, just as you glimpse a maniac sprinting around the corner.
October 1, 2007
After popping up on TechCrunch and BusinessWeek Friday and in Slashdot over the weekend, Redfin appeared on Guy Kawasaki’s blog today, in a post comparing our planned costs to our actual costs. For those putting together a financial model, here are a few bonus links:
1. On the amount of office space recommended by brokers.
2. On the need to get a quarterly third-party valuation of common stock, to protect employees from cheap stock charges.
3. And proof that California’s tiny payroll tax is tiny.
Thanks to Guy, who has put Redfin in the limelight before on why a startup was harder than we thought, and how you can do your own PR. It’s a huge honor to appear on such a great blog, even if Guy took out (again!) our Diddy link.
Anyone want to guess which site (Guy Kawasaki, Slashdot, Techcrunch) drives more traffic? We’ll post the answer Friday.
September 8, 2007
The front page of yesterday’s New York Times business section discusses traditional real estate agents who are leaving the industry, those who have stayed, and — woo-hoo! — Redfin’s growth.
The article has been the #1 most-emailed business story, but in the general polls still trails an expose of microwave popcorn’s role in lung disease and a review of the great publisher Knopf’s equally great rejection letters to prominent authors (”This time there’s no point in trying to be kind…”), often written by Alfred A. Knopf or his wife, Blanche.
August 12, 2007
Much to our surprise, Redfin’s conversation with Guy Kawasaki about why a start-up can seem hard instead of easy cropped up in The New York Times over the weekend, rising to one of the top spots for most emailed business articles. Rumor has it that Redfin founder David Eraker will even be making a cameo in a version of the article coming out online later in the week.
You can read comments on the blog posting in Digg or del.icio.us or just subscribe to all the Redfin news here… Many thanks to Guy for letting us publish the original essay on his stupendous site, and to all the entrepreneurs who have responded to it with encouraging email. Our goal was supposedly to encourage you, but we’re glad to get your support nonetheless.
And thanks to our mysterious but trusty Friend of Redfin for being the first to spot the news…
July 12, 2007
Redfin is one of Time Magazine’s “50 Best Websites of 2007.” We woke up yesterday morning feeling historic, as if we had suddenly become a statesman, a perky Olympic athlete, a consumer craze, a major health trend. We looked for a Time Magazine logo to embed in the page and found this delightful graphic instead:
Jim Lamb, ace Stanford marketing intern, math super-puzzler, ex-football star, prodigious sushi eater, home-sick Seattleite, crunched the numbers on how being in Time affected our traffic:
Thought I’d share a little bit of [Google] Analytics data regarding the Time.com story that came out yesterday. The data is pretty rough but it gives us a better idea of the impact of appearing in an article like that. As of a few hours ago, about 750 people had linked directly from the article to our homepage. Traffic numbers from yesterday suggest that perhaps a few hundred more typed “redfin.com” into their browsers after seeing us in the article. A few other stats on these visitors:
–> about a third were from WA/CA/MA
—> majority checked out the homepage and then left, especially those in other regions (non WA/CA/MA)
—> over 90% had never been to our site before
–> 1 in 10 viewed a property details page
–> 1 in 20 visited the Buy silo
Doesn’t seem like it will be driving us any immediate business, but the article was pretty nice for general exposure/branding purposes which we can’t really measure. It made it to digg.com front page twice (1,750 total diggs) which typically means a ton of pageviews.
We also have a few bonus links for you, the first an obituary for the great-great-grandson of Prince Otto von Bismarck:
Count Gottfried von Bismarck, who was found dead on Monday aged 44, was a louche German aristocrat with a multi-faceted history as a pleasure-seeking heroin addict, hell-raising alcoholic, flamboyant waster and a reckless and extravagant host of homosexual orgies.
Meanwhile, the New York Times describes a 1985 fight between Yankees’ manager Billy Martin and hillbilly pitcher Eddie Lee Whitson; the fight started in a bar, spilled out onto the street and ended, humiliatingly, in a hotel corridor: Whitson, who was tall and sturdy, kicked Martin squarely in the groin, a blow that made everyone watching wince. Martin crumpled for a second, but then stood up and in a calm, but firm, voice said, “Now, I’m going to kill you.”
Whitson then broke Martin’s arm, an injury that Martin told reporters was the result of a bowling accident.
Both links are from a Friend of Redfin.
June 3, 2007
Redfin showed up in some unexpected places over the past week.
The most e-mailed article in The New York Times today is a farewell posting from Damon Darlin, author of the weekly column “Your Money.” Damon originally profiled Redfin in The New York Times. In his latest article, he acknowledges that his wife has scolded him for giving advice that could reduce our existence to “just one bowl of cold grass porridge after another.” But he also maintains that there are still “rules of life worth considering.” His first rule, in a greatest-hits survey of his advice over the years: “never pay a real estate agent a 6 percent commission.”
Redfin meanwhile inadvertently antagonized a new segment of the American economy last week with a guest article on Guy Kawasaki’s blog encouraging start-ups to to consider talking to the press on their own. In the comments section, which ran to over 5,000 words, publicists described the essay as “obnoxious,” “degrading” and “upset[ting.]” We have no beef with PR agencies, several of whom saw the article as evidence enough that we needed their help and sent us a business pitch. The article was posted to del.icio.us more than 200 times over the past week, sending it to the top of the charts.
And finally, there is a blog posting from Michael Palermiti, a Microsoft program manager who helped us find a performance bug by using our web form to send us feedback; the feedback arrives via an e-mail to Redfin executives and product managers. Some days, when we’re all in a tizzy to make the website faster and better, to answer the phones on the first ring, to hire great people, it’s nice to get encouragement from bloggers such as Michael: “I personally know a couple people who have sold their homes this past year with the help of Redfin and the process according to them was painless. They also raved about the customer service.”
You can see this article and everything else about Redfin in the new del.icio.us feed we use to distribute Redfin-related news from other sites to our employees.
Two bonus links: one sent to us under the title “greatest nature video ever?” The other is an amazing soccer goal.
In search of a photo for this entry, we discovered that a band exists called “Throbbing Gristle.”
May 14, 2007
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 beat the penguin,” so I guess we’re back on top).
Here in Redfin Seattle, we watched the show in a conference room with a mixture of apprehension and desire; people brought their families and we all made fajitas. Seattle PI reporter John Cook showed up and began taking video with his digital camera.
Then the segment got rolling. Our favorite moments:
–> Rob McGarty wearing a blazer for the first time in his life, Kelly Engel stealing every scene, Fadi Hafzalla rolling up his sleeves and getting down to business.
–> The strange Borat-like moment when the traditional realtor was asked if she had refunded any commissions last year (”absolutely… NOT”).
–> The traditional agent’s explanation of why real estate agents charged nearly four times per transaction what they once did: increased postage costs…
–> The terrifying loss of perspective as the camera panned back on the National Association of Realtors’ sign as if it were a Star Wars spaceship.
–> B-roll of me complaining about our $4,000 copy machine, which is just so typical, cheap and mean-spirited (I HATE that thing).
Everyone in the conference room got quiet when the CEO of a company that had once embraced a business model similar to Redfin’s told Lesley Stahl he’d lost $33 million. Then we all cheered up when someone said we don’t have to worry about that because no one will give us $33 million.
And then the phones started ringing off the hook, and all of us — developers, executives, testers — scampered back to our battle-stations to answer them.
The website groaned under the load; first from 4:40 to 5:00 p.m., after the piece aired on the East Coast, and then again from 7:35 to 7:50 after the piece aired on the West Coast. Before our routers tapped out, we had served 40 times the volume of content that we normally do. We put up an emergency home page with search disabled. But without the Google Analytics tags on our standard home page, we could not see to see: we have no idea how many people saw that page.
It was fun working the front-lines. Many folks wanted to know if we could sell their property in Aruba, Italy, Mexico and Canada (Redfin’s dedicated agents immediately volunteered to handle Aruba, Italy and Mexico). One disgruntled 60 Minutes viewer called Donald DeSantis and told him he hoped he “died a slow, excruciating death” with one delicate body-part somehow wrapped around his neck.
A man with an ecumenical-sounding “SpiritJohn” e-mail address asked if I wouldn’t mind some constructive criticism; sure, I replied. Then he called me a “sissy” who “has been defrauding the American public for decades” (I started at Redfin just over a year ago; I wasn’t able to drive two decades ago). A third called and asked for Kelly Engel, then told her off. A very nice real estate agent e-mailed me offering herself as a corporate hair-stylist. A far-right radio show host asked me to name the “government bureaucrats” who blocked real estate reform.
Robert Scoble and Greg Swann reported a huge disturbance in the force, as hundreds of “60 Minutes” viewers descended on their site in search of Redfin (Robert’s blog about Redfin is the 7th Google search result for a Redfin search; we weren’t able to find Greg’s in the result set). A blog post that challenged Redfin’s facts began by noting I was a Harvard MBA (I never went to Harvard, I do not have an MBA). Another real estate blog argued for higher commissions (”6% is squat”) and lusted after Lesley Stahl (”what I wouldn’t do to have that blond hang out with me for one day as I go prospecting”).
For all the consumer enthusiasm, thousands of real estate agents and brokers have mobilized against CBS. The President of the NAR sent an e-mail to all 1.4 million members describing herself as “disappointed and dismayed” and encouraging agents to give CBS a piece of their minds. The real estate paper Inman News describes an industry in uproar. CBS News posted the text of the piece, alongside 46 pages (and counting) of comments.
Now it remains for us to sort through all the e-mail, call everyone back, and pick up where we left off building our little business. Thanks to everyone for all your kind wishes. If you have further thoughts on the segment, please just leave a comment below.
May 11, 2007
As you may have heard by now, Redfin will be on 60 Minutes this weekend. In an online teaser, Lesley Stahl has compared the Internet to a shark in “Jaws,” set to devour the real estate industry.
The National Association of Realtors distributed to its 1.4 million members a memo about the piece with a vaguely military ring: “Operation Tip-Off Publicity Alert.” The first media talking point for members was that the segment, which no one outside of CBS has actually seen, “could have been much worse.”
The NAR boasted that it had managed to convince 60 Minutes that the Department of Justice lawsuit was too complex to explain to consumers; CBS, it said, was only able to publish a “highly abridged version” of the story it originally wanted to air.
This is one of those mind-boggling lies that brought to mind Paula Poundstone’s reaction when Hillary Clinton claimed she hadn’t thought about running for president. “It’s like one of those lies your teenage daughter tells you where you can only ask, ‘Why? Why?’”
60 Minutes is a television show whose ENTIRE PREMISE is based on the length of its segments. Its logo is A TICKING STOPWATCH. Every show runs three segments, and every segment runs 13 minutes.
Taping the show was fun.
The occasionally clueless Bahn Lee walked right up to Lesley Stahl holding a home-movie camera. The cameraman who powdered my nose said, “we never do this for the bad guys” (I later learned they do it for everybody). In awe-struck voices, members of the crew said “Lesley’s an animal” and “Lesley is hell on wheels.”
I agreed to be shot riding my bicycle into work, but still tried to look commanding in a blazer, scarf, helmet and cycling shoes. The producer got one gander of Allie Howard jabbing her finger into a table and said “that, I want that.” All the equipment blew our circuit breaker and, on one of our busiest days, the office went dark.
Then, when the lights went up, and three different cameramen called out their time-codes, and the sound guys crouched forward with their boom mikes, we froze up like idiots. Before Lesley Stahl had even climbed into the car that would take her back to the airport, we all wished that we had done much better.
Tune in Sunday night at 7 and tell us what you think!
(A bonus shark link from a friend of Redfin.)
