Eyewitness “Today” Account + Twelve Live TV Tips

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 what it was like to be on the show. Here is our starstruck eyewitness account…

The segment was scheduled to run at 7:40, and the producer asked me to arrive by 6:50. Outside the Today studio it was festive: there was a gigantic Christmas tree, and traces of snow still on the ground, and a crowd of tourists, and a security guard manning a velvet rope. It was windy and cold. Inside there was another security guard, and — what a thrill! — another velvet rope.

The green room was just around the corner. The carpets were comfortable and worn. I was alone with two production assistants who were surfing the web on an ancient computer and watching the show; the food was plentiful: doughnut holes, egg sandwiches, cookies, bagels, granola bars, a plastic bowl of cut fruit. The place was crammed full of newspapers and televisions, all tuned to NBC. “Mind if we see what else is on?” I asked. They shook their heads.

A contingent of cooks showed up with a truck-sized slab of beef that they were going to prepare on the air. Since it was so early, I asked the PAs if they ate the food from the cooking segments and they said, “Oh yeah.”

The mood was unruffled. Brian Boitano was in the building, and somebody said, “It’s Brian Boitano.” Julia Roberts appeared just after Redfin, but her segment was taped the day before. Unlike “60 Minutes,” which was as highly charged and carefully wrought behind the scenes as it was on camera, “Today” is sunny, relaxed and fast-paced. It is after all on for four hours a day, almost every day. All the make-up people and production assistants are very encouraging, almost like amusement park attendants.

Heading up the stairs to the make-up room, I walked through a door and literally ran into Matt Lauer. “Hi guys!” he said. “Do I really need make-up?” I asked and the make-up people nodded with religious conviction. I asked them about their favorite stars to work on and they told me “the stars bring their own make-up people.”

The producer called to say I would do great. I think I sounded nervous, which made him sound very nervous. We ended up reassuring one another. I wanted to ask if I could use the word “kick-ass” on the air, for reasons I can no longer remember, but then told him “forget it,” and he said “what?” and I said, “no, forget it,” and then he said “Just don’t get nervous.”

At that very moment I was thinking of a Post headline I saw on my last visit here, when the Mets choked in a pennant-race (”PAGING DR. HEIMLICH”), and the one from the day before, when Mike Huckabee had to apologize to Mitt Romney (”I HUCKED UP.”) A PA escorted me onto the set five minutes before the segment started. I shook hands briefly with Meredith Viera, and with 90 seconds to go, I was wired for sound.

While I sat in the bar-stool, Meredith Vieira’s executive producer kept making jokes in her earpiece that caused her to say “You’re terrible.” And “stop.” She turned to me and said “He’s just being mean,” though of course I had no idea what the executive producer was saying. She sized me up and then said, “Can I preview the out?”– the segue to the next segment which the anchors memorize in case at any moment they have to end the current segment.

I tried to remember the advice I got the day before from a friend of a friend, waiting on the outdoor platform for a train in an ice-storm, clutching a cell phone with a frozen, agonized claw (”How much time do you have?” he asked. “12 hours.” “Oh my God. And what’s all that noise in the background?” “It’s me, freezing to death.” “Ok, the first thing to remember is to sound happy — you don’t sound too happy right now, ha ha!”). Here was the advice we got from him, and an Omaha pediatrician with TV experience, both of whom were enormously helpful:

1. Enthusiasm, passion, conviction: The most important qualities
2. Always answer three questions: So what? Who cares? What’s in it for me (that is, the viewer)?
3. Assume the viewer is channel surfing and didn’t hear the question.
4. Look at the interviewer; let the camera-people worry about the angle in which to shoot your face.
5. It isn’t uncommon for the questions to change the night before the show.
6. Don’t lean back in the chair; scoot forward, as this naturally tends to improve your posture.
7. Tuck arms close to sides, as this also tends to improve posture, but don’t have your arms too close to your sides.
8. Talk with your hands if that’s how you’re comfortable.
9. Avoid correcting the anchor; validate the questions.
10. If you want to circle back to an answer, you can say, “Like we were talking about earlier…”
11. The interviewer usually chooses you because he or she is most interested in your area; assume she is interested in what you have to say.
12. It’s probably best to avoid wearing white or patterns of a finer weave than a centimeter. Wearing a blazer gives depth (”I left my blazer at home.” “OK then, wearing a blazer makes you look stuck up. Ha ha!”)

On the set, Vieira was very relaxed and amazingly good at scrolling ahead through the teleprompter script just before the segment started and then never really looking at it again. She was also friendly, which calmed me down. Then she kicked off the segment by saying that I was here to explain how everything a Realtor tells you may be wrong. I knew that somewhere at that very moment, a blood-thirsty mob of real estate agents was forming.

The rest of the interview, I was worried about what they would think. But then before I knew it we were done. The producer showed up and said we did great, not entirely convincingly. Swinging by the control room — eerily dark but for the light of forty television monitors — I saw on one monitor that Vieira was already doing aerobics with her next guest.

I met a children’s book author from Palm Beach when I went to pick up my laptop from the green room, and someone in the crowd outside cheered when I came outside. I checked my phone and saw nine text messages from Redfin’s well-wishers. And I felt very grateful to Today’s producers, and lucky to have such a wonderful team, and to work at such a great company.

My mom called to say I was “very informative. But why can’t you sit up straight?”

The Real Estate Scientist

Redfin is launching tonight The Real Estate Scientist, an initiative to use empirical techniques to improve the way our agents and clients buy and sell homes. We’re releasing our first report, which provides seven recommendations for home-sellers, and training our agents on the findings, which should allow us to have more informed conversations with our clients.

We developed this research because the housing downturn has made it harder to sell our clients’ homes. This in turn has made us more introspective about how we can use our special powers – our computer science background and our consumer commitment – to be the best brokerage, not just the best real estate website.

This has been a contentious process. At lunch we argue over the practical questions we have to address for our clients, like the best day to debut a listing or whether it’s really worthwhile to post an MLS property on craigslist. But why argue when you can experiment?

There are plenty of excellent academic studies of local real estate markets. And Redfin has data that most academics don’t: access to 17 MLSs with more than 250,000 listings, and a website used by hundreds of thousands of buyers every month.

We’ve tried to put this information to good use. We know that listings that debuted on Friday rather than Thursday drew 7.7% more visitors; that a vacant home increased the odds of a price reduction by 9.5%; that, because of how real estate websites filter on price, a listing priced at $351,001 got as much as 7.1% less traffic than one priced a dollar lower. A team of agents, engineers, statisticians and writers worked together to produce the report. Some of their findings are surprising, while others confirm conventional wisdom, which has value too.

We only worry that the name we’ve given this initiative, “The Real Estate Scientist,” will open us to being mocked. And too, we hesitated to give consumers simple answers due to the complexity of the underlying data. But in the end we chose the name because it was the one we had used all along, it was fun, and it was the simplest way to explain how our approach was different. We strove for conclusive answers because we have houses to sell every week, and customers who need straightforward guidance.

Consumers who have read early drafts of the report overwhelmingly found our recommendations useful and effective. The industry reaction will likely be different. Some will argue that the report substantiates already well-understood tactics, while others will take the exact opposite position, refuting our points one by one.

But the truth is that a discussion of how real estate brokerages can deliver better results, based on data rather than just opinion, is in everyone’s best interests. And the findings aren’t simply a prescription for how we’ll serve our customers, but the starting point for an informed conversation about pricing and marketing our listings. Hopefully you can contribute to this conversation too, suggesting future avenues for research.

And now we are going to be talking about the findings on “Today,” probably around 7:40 Friday morning. What fun! To get ready for the interview I got my first $50-haircut, by a young Albanian in midtown Manhattan who compared my current style to 1989 Depeche Mode, and suggested I try a different color. “Like blonde?” I said, intrigued. “Just not so gray,” she mumbled. Because I had 30 minutes before running for a train, she cut quickly, putting off a very stylish socialite who was demanding that her hair be wrapped for the ice storm.

And then it was exhilarating to run – really run – through the streets as the year’s first flakes fell and pedestrians looked up gratefully into the sky. On the sidewalks at nearly every corner, there was one guy pushing a salt spreader and, this being New York, another to stand there and tell him what to do.

I had a meeting in the coffee shop of a remote, pretty Connecticut town, covered in silence and snow. Now on the train back, a teenager next to me is reading an article entitled “Sex Snafus That Can Send You to the ER”; a culinary school student who cried after being short on the fare has asked if we could stay together through the connection; and a bald salesman has been eavesdropping on my cell phone conversations.

“You can’t live in fear,” he says, repeating what I just said when I hung up on my last call. Then he adds: “Guys like us, we’re not afraid.” I nod, thinking about the next day’s show. If only that were true!

Redfin on the Today Show … tomorrow!

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.

The Second Time Isn’t Always a Charm

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.)

Redfin Model on Kawasaki Blog…

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.

Redfin, By the Numbers, And an Experiment

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.

Redfin Hits The New York Times

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.

Bust Out the Doughnuts! Redfin Shows Up in the Weekend Papers…

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…

“Now, I’m Going to Kill You.”

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.

One Bowl of Grass Porridge After Another

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.”