Archive for the ‘Redfin in the News’ Category
November 19, 2006
Last week, seven computer science students from the University of Washington interviewed at Redfin.
Remembering my own college interviews, when borrowing my brother’s prescription glasses led me to bypass an interviewer’s outstretched handshake for his navel, I dressed up for the occasion. Most of the candidates wore jeans.
We catered a creamy Indian buffet for lunch, despite some interviewers’ volcanic lactose intolerance. Holed up in my smallish office, one candidate began teaching me how to solve his favorite math problem. I began to panic until I realized that he was panicking too. The problem remained on the board for the rest of the afternoon, and I asked everyone else to solve it.
A second candidate told me her “greatest challenge” was waitressing at a steak house for a cast member from Buffy The Vampire Slayer, a good answer to an embarrassingly boring question. She asked if I was a Buffy fan, though it was hard to say if she meant the show or Buffy herself.
A third candidate said he liked our blog entry about not competing with Zillow and then, before I could smile, asked “But don’t you really?”
My interviews used to be fun-filled brain-teasers until one day seven years ago, a Harvey Mudd student said my questions were insultingly trivial, then asked me one I couldn’t answer. I became so excited by his cheek that I excused myself, looked back to give the other interviewer a huge thumbs up as I walked away, and promptly gored a wall with my nose.
When I returned from the bathroom, my shirt was still drenched in blood and my nose was twice its size. The candidate, waxing poetic about hacking his classmates’ e-mail accounts, never noticed.
Now, for Berkeley and Stanford recruiting, we’re trying to figure out a good challenge for a student coding contest. We need a fun project, like graphing the volume of news published to the Internet about Jessica Simpson, Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. But better than that. If you have any ideas, post a comment; we’ll pay you $100 for anything we can use.
November 10, 2006
Yesterday’s The Wall Street Journal article – “Do Real-Estate Agents Have a Secret Agenda?” – reported on the well-known, but often undisclosed, practice of sellers offering buyers’ agents additional incentives to close a deal.
Sometimes when properties, typically new developments, are not selling as fast as the builder had anticipated they offer additional incentives. Similar to a car manufacturer’s “0% financing” or “Friends and Family” programs, sellers will offer buyers incentives such as a granite counter upgrade package, free closing costs or a year of free homeowners” dues.
Other times the incentives are hidden. Just like when you pay the invoice price on a car, the dealer still gets paid. The same thing happens in real estate. As the WSJ article points out, there are some pretty serious incentives being offered to the buyer’s agent such as 10% commission as opposed to the usual 3%.
Redfin is just as transparent about incentives as we are about commissions. If the incentives are monetary, we share them with our clients the same way we share our commission –a two-thirds refund to our client. If the incentive is something else like a vacation or free homeowners’ dues, we directly pass them along to our client.
Jing Feng, a Seattle-area, first-time homebuyer used Redfin to purchase a condo this summer. She used the $6,000 commission refund to pay down her closing costs. A week later, we received a $2,000 bonus check from the builder and cut Jing a check for two-thirds–an extra $1,334. Jing was shocked and excited to hear she was getting even more money back from Redfin that she decided to go to New York City with friends this weekend. She just called form Fifth Avenue and told me, “I just bought a coat that I wouldn’t have been able to afford otherwise.”
Starting today there is a new category in our local blogs (San Francisco and Seattle) called “New Construction” that will highlight any promotions we are aware of. If you are a seller that has an incentive and want to get the word out, please let us know by e-mailing support@redfin.com.
November 8, 2006
A few months ago we launched a feature called Ask an Agent and Ask About a Listing. Answers from our experienced real estate team are just a click away. Since launching the program we have answered hundreds of questions ranging in complexity from “When is the open house” to questions as vague as “Can you tell me anything else about this property?”
The most entertaining of all came late Saturday, Oct. 21 from an intoxicated fellow who was fed up with the real estate market. He asked us several rhetorical questions about the price of homes using mostly four letter words. Here is what he had to say about this $799,950 Capitol Hill home
Are you @#$%ing serious?????? Your asking price is so far outstide the bounds of reality that it make me laugh. A lot. Good luck, dumb ^#@$s.
Coincidentally, the home is actually priced within reason at $392 per square foot compared to the average price per square foot of $448 for homes listing within a five block radius.
There are many ways to access the feature from the Redfin site, with the most common being from the listing detail tab. This image shows the link to “Ask a question” on the right side (circled in green below).
Last week’s most interesting question came from a San Francisco Bay Area Redfin user about a $67,000 listing in Richmond, CA. The user asked, “This property is not listed on the MLS. Looks like a duplex. You call it a bungalow. But on Zillow it is a condo. Its a teaser, right?” Even I was surprised to find something in the Bay Area for that price–I would have guessed there was a zero missing at the end. Our local expert, Rosemary Vo, quickly researched the property and replied “This listing is actually a co-op. It is a true listing, however, the reason it is priced low is because it is difficult to get a loan for this type of property. ”
If you ever have a real estate question you can’t find the answer to or just want expert advice, take advantage of our Ask an Agent functionality. We will get back to you in two hours or less during our agent’s normal business hours (9AM-6PM Monday-Friday, noon-6PM Saturday and Sunday), otherwise we will get back to you before we open the following day.
October 16, 2006
The Redfin engineers have been hard at work this past month and I’m sure we all took advantage of this weekend’s rain to spend a few days indoors catching up on some much-needed sleep.
Now what were we so busy working on?
Helping you find bargains
With the real estate market slowing down and the number of listings increasing we have heard from a bunch of users that they’d like to be able to quickly find bargains. To help users do this we have added two new searches:
Unsold in 90+ days: Selecting this checkbox in our search box will find listings that have remained unsold on the market for more than the average time for that particular market (Seattle is 45 days, San Francisco is 90 days). If you decide to make an offer, consider an aggressive one!
Fixer-Uppers: Selecting this will find listings that match our proprietary super confidential fixer upper algorithm. These listings more than likely require that you know how to use a hammer or have enough money to tear the house down and start over again. There are currently ~100 of these in Seattle and ~400 in the Bay Area.
Now even if you don’t explicitly search for unsold properties or fixer-uppers you might still see their icons on a listing balloon or a details page letting you know to either make an aggressive offer or to bring the toolbox.
We also took some time to respond to your feedback that the ‘Time on Market’ search feature wasn’t as useful as it could be. Now you can search for properties that have been on the market either less than 7,14 or 30 days, or more than 7, 14, 30, 45, 60, 90 or 180 days.
Bringing you Zillow integration
Every time we run a survey or hold a sushi fueled usability study we hear that users want to see Zillow information, like the Zestimate, alongside Redfin’s information on the listing. As of today, thanks to Zillow’s easy to use API, the days of finding a listing on Redfin and then firing up another browser and tracking it down on Zillow are over. We now display Zillow’s Zestimate, Zestimate Ranking and a Zestimate Value Change chart for every listing alongside the photos, marketing remarks, amenities, past sales and historical tax information.
We hope this also puts an end to the questions we often get about how Redfin and Zillow compete. We always answer that we don’t, but now we can point to not just how complementary our two Seattle based companies are, but to our actual integration together on the Redfin site (I hope that last sentence isn’t too marketing-y :) ).
What will you find?
We’re a little worried that by adding these new features we will cause you to spend even more time surfing for that next perfect real estate project instead of enjoying your current place. But hopefully you resist the urge to browse while at work. Now, it’s expected that I spend a part of my day hunting and here’s one I found in just a few minutes when I searched for fixer-uppers that have been on the market for more than 45 days in Seattle: 221 1st Ave in the Central Area.
This is what the agent has to say:
FIXER. . Great investment opportunity!!! Restore for Victorian living, renovate for rentals, or tear down and build for cash. Interior of house has already been gutted and is ready to be remodeled. Lumber on site. Plans and permits already obtained. Potential to add on another unit in the back w/ 3 bedrooms, 2.5 baths (floor plans completed). Access to the back would be on the right side of the house with front fenced is removed.
At $360,000 it’s $45,000 less than Zillow’s $405,098 Zestimate. And I’m sure Zillow isn’t taking into account the lumber on site or the permits already obtained. So with a Zillow estimate range starting at $348,384 its tempting to make an offer at $345,000, but I’m a condo guy so this place is all yours.
See the features in action
Last week, Bahn our videographer spent some time with Bryan, our Director of Product Management, to put together a quick videocast of the new features in action:
That’s all, happy house hunting, and be sure to let us know what other tools you need to find the home of your dreams!
October 11, 2006
Free home tours are finally here! Customers screamed for it, the marketing department lobbied for it, yet we didn’t do it because we thought it was too reminiscent of irrational dot com behavior like Kozmo-we all know how well that worked out.
Customer feedback from a recent focus group prompted us develop the new Redfin Red Carpet Services: free home tours, free pre-inspections, and the ability to ask an agent a question online.
We prepared ourselves to be inundated with requests and give away home tours by the car load, but so far only a few people have taken us up on the offer. So next time a listing agent gives you drama or you want to see a string of houses let us know.
We have been experimenting with the free pre-inspection program for several months. It is a great way to make your offer more competitive by allowing you to safely waive the inspection contingency on your offer. Plus you will save a couple hundred bucks because Redfin will pick up the tab if you close on the property.
We are answering about 60 ask an agent questions a week. We get everything from questions as vague as “Can you tell me anything else about this property?” to people comparing homes to their marriage like this customer that said “It [the house] is a perfect opportunity as my hubby is the fixer upper type (I am the finder type…).” We haven’t been stumped yet so now is your opportunity to ask us something that even Ken Jennings can’t answer.
Don’t be shy, our agents are standing by.
September 15, 2006
We found a flick about us on YouTube in which a guy by the name of Joel manages to bring together water closets and real estate. At first we thought this was a secret test by our beloved Marketing department trying out our first TV spot. But then it dawned on us that Eric Heller and Glenn Kelman are on vacation. This is for real.
We liked how Joel compared plumbers and real estate agents. We have often made a similar reference to booksellers. When Amazon.com (where several Redfinnians worked in a prior life) launched its website in 1995 and received immediate and widespread attention, the bookstore owners cried foul. The press talked about the demise of the old-fashioned bookstore. Some bookstores that could barely support themselves were crushed by Amazon.com and similar online plays.
However, the viable bookstores are thriving. Some of our all-time favorites include Elliot Bay Books in Seattle, Kepler’s in Menlo Park, or the famous City Lights bookstore in San Francisco. Not to mention Powell’s in Portland, which now has a booming online presence on Amazon.com. In addition to these tried-and-true booksellers, Amazon.com created a new breed (and a new generation) of penny-booksellers. Their business model is to give away books they get for free and charge only for handling and shipping. They make $1 per order on the handling.
Book shoppers now have a choice — buy the book new for a discount, or, used at a rock-bottom price. Get the personalized advice from the good ol’ book store keeper, or the power of customer feedback. Almost everyone wins. We believe the business of real estate will change in similar ways.
We’re just not quite ready to accept that waterless toilets with a composting bin underneath are the wave of the future. Joel has started to convince us though.
Sebastian and Rob
September 12, 2006
Redfin and other real estate-related topics are being discussed on Seattle NPR station KUOW (94.9) today, twice. Once right now on “The Conversation,” from 1 – 2 p.m. (sorry for the late notice) and again tonight at 8 p.m. (“The Works”). The early program is a call-in show with Lennox Scott of John L. Scott, so feel free to dial (206) 221-3663 with your strong opinions about Redfin. “The Conversation” features John L. Scott’s Lennox Scott and Freakonomics author Steven Levitt.
You can listen live, or e-mail feedback.
P.S. You can listen to a recording of the “The Conversation” by clicking here, and a recording of “The Works” by clicking here.
September 4, 2006
Redfin appeared this weekend in Damon Darlin’s New York Times article about the conflict between online home-buyers and traditional realtors. For the past two days, the article has sat atop the charts as the most e-mailed, ahead even of news that Australia’s crocodile-wrestler died of a stingray shot to the chest.
And now the fur has started flying.
In blogs about the article, traditonal real estate agents are compared to drug-addicted prostitutes and encouraged to pursue careers at Burger King. Elsewhere agents accuse Redfin of manufacturing controversy, then wonder aloud whether they’ll be murdered by Redfin buyers (belying claims that reluctance to show properties is “an absolute absurdity”). Others predict that our business will collapse because our prices are too low only to have the same person later wonder whether our prices are too high. On the news-rating site Digg, the NYT article has over 250 votes, and over 50 comments.
We all had fun being part of the story. Bahn Lee spent an hour on the road with Damon, driving to a customer meeting in Bahn’s 1991 Mazda Miata. Allie Howard and Rob McGarty told the journalist about the crazy, early days of Redfin Direct, and I was quoted saying something David Eraker once said to me, about being able to find out more on the Internet about pez dispensers than about real estate.
(Note: in an earlier version of this post, we had compared predatory tactics for procuring cause to praying mantis mating habits, mostly so we could include an interesting photo, but after realizing this seemed hostile toward all agents rather than toward a particular tactic for limiting consumer choice, we are removing the comparison and the photo. We apologize to agents unjustly tarnished by the comparison.)
August 21, 2006
Our recruiter, Aimee Cook, just stopped by to complain about our recent blog posting, in which we described her as “a competitive bodybuilder.”
I was just about to apologize for the invasion of her privacy when she said, “I’m not just a competitive bodybuilder. I’m a TOP 2% BODYBUILDER.” She seemed surprised by the inquiring looks, familiar now to every strength and endurance athlete at the top of her field, then said: “And that’s NATURAL people!” Which is very important to her.
Then she went striding down the hall to set up a workout regimen for all the Redfin weaklings excited to learn of her double life.
Leaving us to browse the Web for her pictures (the physique looks like Linda Hamilton’s would look if Linda Hamilton ate Linda Hamilton for breakfast) and wonder, if there were performance-enhancing drugs for business people, would businesses allow them? Or install dispensers next to the coffee machine?
Kirill Sheynkman, one of three of us who co-founded Plumtree, wanted to experiment with (secretly) caffeinating employees’ water supply… this was the germ of the idea that led to Redfin’s free-lunch program.
August 18, 2006
Redfin has been hiring like crazy. Actually, we’ve just been interviewing like crazy. Actually, we’ve been going crazy trying to hire people.
Want a job at Redfin? There are a few things we’d like you to know first:
–> We’ve hired a competitive bodybuilder as our recruiter. Do not mess with her.
–> We’ve gone pro: we just edited our auto-reply for resume submission to eliminate phrases like “eager beaver” & “black abyss.” The process now seems perfectly soulless but it isn’t. We’re really glad to hear from you.
–> If you’re an engineering candidate, prepare for a bizarre decathlon of technical challenges.
–> If you fail at all ten challenges, don’t worry! I did too. Switch gears & talk about hiking.
–> Read Guy Kawasaki’s blog on job-hunting before applying. It gives away all the answers (except the part about being plug-and-play; it’s ok to learn a little on the job).
–> Prepare for an entrepreneurial environment: every day, I watch the drug-dealers just outside our office take down big scores. This evening, someone stole Angela’s car. But there’s also a nice bookstore (with doughnuts) around the corner, bridal parties posing for pictures under pergolas, and an amazing, terrifying, faceless memorial of firefighters in a losing battle, which I have to walk by to get to work.
–> Think of a few ways you’d make Redfin better. If nothing comes to mind, click here.
–> Be a little idealistic: it’s always nice to meet people who care about ideas…
–> And don’t worry about thank-you notes: we’re the ones who are thankful to meet new people.
