What he found: 38% of currently active listings have undergone a price reduction at some point since going on the market. But it was the average magnitude of the drop from the original list price that shocked everyone here: 10.7%.

The data-set hasn’t been scrubbed for outliers, and it doesn’t account for price drops where the seller pulled his listing from the market and quickly re-listed at a different price. But it still provides a quick portrait of a market where discounting has begun to spur more activity among buyers.

A Seattle broker mentioned this morning that he sees sellers racing to find a buyer before Halloween, which may explain why we’re now seeing such big drops. What’s happening in your market?

Thanks to Matt Goyer on Twitter for the tip.

We spent two months grinding through the data because every day, we see buyers with born-to-lose tattoos on their foreheads making lowball offers doomed to instant failure. And then sometimes they win.

Nuts! Figuring out fast when a deal will fly and when it won’t is the key to making our margins work.

We’ve tried to sort out when a seller will give ground, a posting that immediately set off a discussion at Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report and across the blogs. We’ve talked about it on TV.

Meanwhile, pricing discussions have been all the rage in our discussion forums, with visitors asking how negotiable new construction is, or even what to offer on an individual property.

Enter the real estate scientist, who shreds MLS data, website logs, academic research and tax records to provide reliable answers to practical questions: what really works when marketing a listing, what type of listings sell in less than seven days, whether high commissions lead to faster sales (they don’t).

Today’s report is about how to find the sweetest deals. Redfin’s Rob McGarty and Mose Andre crunched the numbers for all 9,053 sales of single-family homes in Fairfax (Virginia ‘burbs), King (Seattle area) and Los Angeles counties, between April 15 and June 15 this year, to look at homes that sold for a lot less than the asking price.

What surprised us right off the bat was how small the average discount was: after all the bad news about the housing market, it was still less than 2.5%. We were also surprised to see that a small fraction of listings got a huge discount, of more than 10% off list price.

This means that 90% of the time, lowballers are wasting their time. But that 10% of the time, they’re saving $50,000. The trick is finding the listings ripe for a discount.

So for each market we split the sales into two buckets: those that got the biggest discount (top ten percentile, an average of 11.4% off the final asking price), and all the rest (the 90th percentile and below, which got an average discount of 1.5%).

Then we compared the two groups to see what the sales involving a big discount had in common:

1.    83% more likely to have been on the market for 90+ days.
2.    73% more likely to be marketed as fixer-uppers.
3.    20% less likely to feature a noteworthy remodel.
4.    28% more likely to have already been price-reduced (though there were some confounding factors).
5.    52% more likely to have been seller-owned for 20 years or more.
6.    9% more likely to have been seller-owned for less than five years, a slight but surprising correlation.
7.    Only 9% more likely to be a short sale or bank-owned. Most consumers expect this correlation to be much stronger.

The portrait that emerged is  of a bimodal market (much like the VC market right now) — a few homes in the most sought-after neighborhoods sell for well above asking price, most sell near the asking price and anything distressed or run-down (more homes are run-down now than before so the drop in prices is in part a reflection of the drop in the quality of the homes being sold) just keeps dropping and dropping.

The bottom-line is that the condition of the home and its length of time on the market — surprise, surprise — are the main drivers for discounting — but how long the seller has owned the home is a big factor too. And foreclosures aren’t as negotiable as people think.

The report has already gotten picked up by the LA Times and now the Seattle Times too (FRONT PAGE!!!).

Get the full paper (PDF), which breaks out all the data by county, and goes into the methodology too.

But then again nothing can make you feel how infinitely varied and desultory life can be like morning television. The star of today’s show was a 44-pound cat, which had entered the building on a red carpet, with ABC interns posing as paparazzi. Competition between the morning programs for the cat interview had, I was told, been fierce. In the green room, the cat tucked into the small feast that been laid out for him.

Diane Sawyer’s producer came in, and looking down at the grazing animal with a mixture of disgust and what may have been wistful envy, asked if the cat had “like, an endocrine problem.” The cat’s handlers, a group of funny Jersey ladies,  said, “let’s not go there.”

Barbara Walters came through the studio in a magnificent King-of-the-Mountains-style dress, walking gingerly, with delicate eyelashes and a well-muscled man in a very tight shirt and bleach-blonde hair carrying her purse, to air an interview with Carla Bruni. I’ve been watching her since childhood, and wish I had said hello. It was strange to hear her talking so matter-of-factly about Carla’s orgies. I was interviewed by Diane Sawyer, whose youthful relationship with Henry Kissinger I had also just read about, awestruck.

We ploughed through some questions around some real estate science we’re publishing next week, remembering the advice “not to get into it” with any of the nuances and qualifications we would have dearly loved to make.  As soon as the segment was over, the producers swooped in to escort Ms. Sawyer to Bryant Park, filled with teenage girls and already a little sticky with heat, for a production of Rent and a Jonas Brothers concert.

Earlier in the day, I’d asked, “Who’re the Jonas Brothers?” The entire green room fell into shocked silence.

“Dude,” the producer said, apparently having never struggled with the sense of scale that any visitor to New York’s big stage immediately gropes for. “They’re huge.”

We found there really are (hot) pockets of sunshine in the Los Angeles housing market, and this is not according to my trusty Magic 8-ball. We analyzed 2,364 real estate records for single-family listings in Los Angeles County, Calif. that entered the market between Oct. 1, 2007 and March 31, 2008, and sold.

We looked at the Los Angeles real estate market next because, well, you asked.

Here’s a rundown of the neighborhoods with the most listings that sold within seven days on the market; the numbers in parentheses calculate the hot properties as a percentage of the total houses that sold in those areas:

• Beverly Center, Miracle Mile: 12 (26%)
• Brentwood: 12 (27%)
• Los Angeles, Southwest: 10 (12%)
• Sunset Strip, Hollywood Hills West: 10 (11%)
• Westchester: 9 (17%)

For the areas where there were a significant number of hot properties, we compared the listings that sold in seven days or less with everything else that sold in those areas. Our goal was to develop a clear portrait of the hot property, so our buyers would know when they really had to hop to it. And here’s what we found:

• Beds and baths were the same for both types: there was no pattern in terms of bedrooms and bathrooms. Hot and “not” (not properties took more than eight days to sell) properties both had three bedrooms and two bathrooms. The coasts agree!
• Hot properties are bigger, slightly: The median square footage for hot properties was only slightly larger (.2%) than not properties, but the median lot size was 3% larger. Clearly, the LA sprawl doesn’t mean buyers get more space. Boston homebuyers got 13% larger lots with pretty similar sized homes – 1,669 square feet in Boston vs. 1,735 square feet in LA.
• Hot properties are newer: the median year built (1948) for hot properties was four years later than for the nots. Bostonians bought slightly older homes, but maybe that’s because most east coast homes are older?
  Hot properties are expensive: it turns out that hot properties weren’t exactly priced to move. In fact, the median list price of hot properties ($1.1 million) was 16% higher. And the high price isn’t just because the houses are bigger: the median dollars per square foot was nearly 16% higher for hot properties ($633) as compared to the nots ($548). The median list price of Boston’s hot properties was $459,000 … you can get two for the price of one in Boston.

There wasn’t a huge difference in the days on market for the hot areas (43) and the entire Los Angeles market (45), but, on average, the hot properties sold in almost five days (Boston hot properties sold in about 4.5 days).

The bottom line is that hot properties are slightly bigger, newer and more expensive. There are distinct areas and house types where properties still sell fast, which continues to support our reason for doing this study in the first place — the real estate market isn’t really clinically depressed; it’s more of a split personality, with the good stuff selling fast, and the rest languishing.

Did you just buy a home in one of these neighborhoods? What was your experience?

Bonus link: The Wall Street Journal reports on the heartwarming side of the housing bust. [Warning: shameless Redfin plug] Read about a couple who escaped their 100-mile, LA-freeway commute.

Whereupon further fur flew. Someone said that the only common characteristic would be a fire-sale price. Others talked about school districts, sex offenders, safe neighborhoods. And then someone quoted the founder of modern surgery, a corpse-stealing pragmatist who challenged the French mania for grand medical theories: “why think when you can experiment?”

Why indeed!

So the Real Estate Scientist leapt into his white lab coat and began sorting through 9,212 real estate records: single-family listings in Suffolk County, Massachusetts that were sold between October 1, 2007 and March 31, 2008.

Why the Boston real estate market? Because our ex-hippie, oils-painting, die-for-the-customer, hired-all-his-cousins market manager — Alex Coon — laid it on the line, betting that such listings exist, even in the dead of the miserable Boston winter, and that most of them would be in Newton. He was right!

Here’s a rundown of the towns with the most listings that sold within seven days on the market; the numbers in parentheses calculate the hot properties as a percentage of the total houses that sold in those areas:

• Arlington: 18 (23%)
• Boston: 21 (7%)
• Brockton: 16 (8%)
• Haverhill: 11 (12%)
• Needham: 14 (20%)
• Newton: 27 (16%)
• Wellesley: 12 (14%)

But it’s not just the location of the listings. Even in these markets, the average days on market was 85 days. The average for the entire Boston area was 105. This suggests that at least one reason hot properties were hot was the property itself.

So for the areas where there were a significant number of hot properties, we compared the listings that sold in less than seven days with everything else in those areas. Our goal was to develop a clear portrait of the hot property, so our buyers would know when they really had to hop to it. And here’s what we found:

• Beds and baths were the same for both types: there was no pattern in terms of bedrooms and bathrooms. Hot properties and pariguayos (party-watchers, aka slow-to-sell properties) both had 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms.
• Hot properties are bigger: The median square footage for hot properties was 7% larger than the pariguayos. The median lot size was more than 13% larger. Maybe that seems obvious to you — bigger is often better — but when we began the analysis, we had imagined hot properties as cute little cottages.
• Hot properties are older: the median year built (1949) for hot properties was 29% earlier than for the pariguayos.
• Hot properties are expensive: it turns out that hot properties weren’t exactly priced to move. In fact, the median list price of hot properties ($459,000) was 78% higher than the pariguayos. And the high price isn’t just because the houses are bigger: the median dollars per square foot was nearly 40% higher for hot properties ($275) as compared to pariguayos.

The bottom line is that hot properties are bigger, older, and more expensive. That there are distinct areas and house types where properties still sell fast supports Chris’s notion that the real estate market isn’t really clinically depressed; it’s more of a split personality, with the good stuff selling fast, and the rest languishing.

You could take that theory a step further, and say one reason the market is bad is because the inventory is low-quality, first because some of the least appealing properties are being forced onto the market by foreclosure and second because lots of unappealing inventory is hanging out from the year before when the rate of new listings was higher. We’ll have to test that theory out on another day.

Bostonians, what do you think of these findings? Real estate watchers, what other markets would you like to see us analyze? Many thanks to Redfin’s Rick West for doing all the hard analytical work.

Bonus Link, from the Original Friend of Redfin: Washington Redskins cheerleaders stun massive Indian cricket crowd.

Also, since cycling season is about to begin, we are releasing some new footage of the Redfin cycling team on a training ride:

Photo: Shutterscript on Flickr.

Because we’re curious masochists, we decided to answer that question. But first we had to establish what constitutes a “higher” commission. Higher than what? While traditionally the seller has offered the buyer’s agent 3% of the final home price and reserved 3% for his own agent, the very existence of a standard commission has been hotly disputed. Again, some notes from the fray: Realtors from Canada to Florida insist that a standard commission doesn’t exist, while professors from Berkeley and the Hudson Institute insist that it does.

Of course, Redfin’s business model demonstrates that it’s possible to charge different commissions. But Redfin has always been careful when listing a home to encourage our clients to offer the buyer’s agent 3%, even while accepting a lower fee for ourselves. In this at least, we’re like everybody else. We analyzed commissions paid to buyers’ agents for all broker-listed residential homes sold in King County in 2007, and found that 79% paid commissions of exactly 3% to buyers’ agents. Whether 79% adoption constitutes standard behavior or not, it is certainly common behavior.

The average commission, factoring in the lower and higher commissions as well, was 2.88%. The chart below (source: NWMLS) shows the average commission grouped by list price of the house. Most agents will tell you that the commission as a percent of the list price is lower for more expensive homes. We found this to be true: for list prices above $2 million, the average commission started getting closer to 2.5% than 3%.

Because of the difference in commission rate for more expensive homes, we broke our data set into two parts: homes listed above $2 million and homes listed below $2 million. We focus here on the homes listed below $2 million because it’s a more interesting set– it’s much larger and the effects are a lot greater as well. This data set included 22,673 home sales.

Table: Home Sales, King County Residential Homes, 2007

Rick West in our real estate group and Chris Wilkins in engineering ran the numbers, and the results were not as expected. That’s exactly why we created The Real Estate Scientist: to ferret out the data behind the myths and assumptions.

Homes offering a commission higher than 3% actually had a lower sale-to-list price than homes offering a 3% commission, by about 0.82%, or the equivalent of $4,095 on a $500,000 home. We had hypothesized that a higher commission would correlate to a better result for the seller. In contrast, homes offering a commission below 3% did get a better result for the seller: they had a higher sale-to-list price, by 0.54% or the equivalent of $2,719 on a $500,000 home.

The real difference between these groups was in days on market: homes that offered a 3% commission took 68 days to sell, while homes that offered a lower commission took about 30% longer, and homes that offered a higher commission took almost twice as long.

According to our data, setting a higher commission to get better results doesn’t work. It’s best to be typical, with respect to commissions.

How should we interpret this data? Is it the doing of the seller’s agent, who offers a lower commission on a property he knows will sell, and a higher commission on a property he thinks will be difficult to move? Or was the high commission itself a signal of desperation that encouraged negotiating? We tend to think that unusually high commissions are a symptom rather than the cause of a distressed listing. Whatever the case may be, the Seattle data suggest that offering buyer’s agents an unusually high commission isn’t worth it. If you have a different take on our results, just leave a comment.

We are an (online) broker ourselves, but have argued that consumers should be able to choose the real estate services for which they pay, so I’m not sure we have a dog in this fight. In the past, we have welcomed studies showing that buyers and sellers can get along without a broker, and argued that a client working with an online broker negotiates a better price. But in this case I was surprised that the Freakonomics team didn’t evaluate the Stanford economists’ methodology.

The Stanford study only evaluated 800 homes sold on the Stanford campus, “the ownership of which is limited to Stanford faculty and a limited number of senior staff.” In such an environment, marketing is much easier because of the small number of potential buyers, trust is high because of the buyers’ affiliations with one another, and supply is extremely limited: many academics would kill, or even teach an extra freshman survey course, to live on the Stanford campus.

Moreover, there is no broker-operated MLS on the Stanford campus, and likely no other broker representing the buyer, so there is no rationale for buyers’ brokers to steer clients away from properties not paying a commission. It seems like a leap to draw conclusions from this data set for the typical consumer, who is probably selling a home in a larger market, with more competition, to strangers largely represented by brokers.

In real estate and in life, college is a smaller, more perfect vision of how the rest of the world could be. We thought it was interesting that the previous academic study on brokers’ effectiveness focused on Madison, Wisconsin, because this is also a small college community where alternative approaches to real estate have reached critical mass. Maybe these communities point the way to a post-brokerage world waiting for all us, where both sides abandon their brokers, where we can access information for ourselves online, where we can come to terms more easily and economically.

For now though, we should at least take such findings with a grain of salt, because the Stanford campus isn’t the Hobbesian jungle of, say, the Orange County real estate market. We revere the Freakonomics team, who inspired us to offer real estate e-commerce in the first place, but it seems a bit too credulous to present these findings without acknowledging that Stanford, far more even than Madison, is a different world.

Bonus link: a consumer reviews the best real estate search sites… photo credit: To Mr. “Leaning Right” on Flickr.

Also, the NYT obituary on William F. Buckley is unusually good:

“No other act can project simultaneous hints that he is in the act of playing Commodore of the Yacht Club, Joseph Goebbels, Robert Mitchum, Maverick, Savonarola, the nice prep school kid next door, and the snows of yesteryear,” Norman Mailer said in an interview with Harpers in 1967… For Murray Kempton, one of his many friends on the left, the Buckley press conference style called up “an Edwardian resident commissioner reading aloud the 39 articles of the Anglican establishment to a conscript of assembled Zulus.” A friend of mine was, as a teenager, once fundraising door-to-door in Buckley’s Stamford neighborhood, and William F. Buckley invited him in and held forth at length on obscure topics…

The Cornell study, which evaluated empirical data for 27,000 home sales in Florida and Long Island but also included a controlled trial, took the next step to understand the consumer behavior behind the numbers: when researchers presented 90 college undergraduates with a hypothetical home for sale at different prices and asked if the home were overpriced, the subjects were more likely to say that a home was overpriced if the asking price was a round number. Professor Thomas and his colleagues posited that consumers associate round prices with high-priced items such as a car, and precise prices with low-priced items such as a pair of jeans.

It seems like his findings could help plenty of people: despite the conclusion that a round price is associated with an unfavorable result, Professor Thomas found that more than 63% of homes sold in Long Island and Florida had an asking price ending in three zeros. Of course, since real estate is a competitive marketplace, if everybody took this advice, it wouldn’t help anybody.

It is interesting to compare the Redfin study with the Cornell research:

• Redfin organized home sales into different buckets according to the last three digits of the asking price, and found that homes with an asking price ending in -500, such as $391,500, had the highest sales price-to-asking-price ratio. By contrast, Professor Thomas found that every zero in the final three digits was correlated with a lower final price.
• In Redfin’s study, the size of the effect for the last three digits of a house price was never greater than a .58%, whereas in the Cornell study, the effect was as great as .72%. In either case, the effect is significant: .58% of a $500,000 home is $2,900

Unlike Redfin, Professor Thomas excluded transactions from his consideration with an asking price ending in $-999, as this price invites a specific, already well-studied consumer reaction. Professor Thomas also studied houses and condos together, whereas Redfin published separate numbers for each. Neither Redfin nor Professor Thomas evaluated Kevin Boer’s excellent suggestion for Pacific Rim sellers, of ending a price in 8s to appeal to superstitious Chinese buyers.

We’ll add Professor Thomas’s research — and perhaps our own, too — to our summary of practical, data-driven advice for home-sellers. Thanks to a Friend of Redfin for bringing this new research to our attention, and also for submitting our bonus link for today.

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?”

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!