On Monday, we looked at what makes a property hot in Boston, so we’re closing the week with a look at a market on the other coast: Los Angeles. The big question: will we see the same trends coast to coast? We found there really are (hot) pockets of sunshine in the Los Angeles housing… Read More
Redfin’s Chris Glew — Redfin Advantage essayist, Boston hockey fan and student of ancient Mexican turds — stopped another fur-flying meeting in its tracks last week with an arresting observation. He said that even in this slow real estate market, he could tell just by looking when a new listing was going to sell in… Read More
A recent Redfin Forums contributor raised the question: Does a higher buyers’ agent commission = faster sale? From Baltimore to Seattle to Southern California, real estate agents and journalists have endorsed the idea of offering unusually large commissions so buyer’s agents will recommend a listing. Because we’re curious masochists, we decided to answer that question…. Read More
Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt renew their argument that real estate brokers aren’t worth 6%, citing a study (PDF) conducted by Stanford economist B. Douglas Bernheim and one of his graduate students, Jonathan Meer, which shows that using a broker has no effect on a home’s average selling price. We are an (online) broker ourselves,… Read More
This month’s issue of The Atlantic reports on research by Cornell University’s Manoj Thomas and his colleagues which found that consumers perceive round prices, such as $390,000, as being higher than prices such as $391,534. Round prices were in turn found to be correlated with a lower final sales price. Professor Thomas’s research, posted to… Read More
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… Read More
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… Read More
With more than 70% of home-buyers looking on the Web for real estate to buy, we wondered if it made sense when pricing a house to take into account the parameters used on most real estate search sites. For example, since every site lets folks filter on price in increments of $25,000 at lower price… Read More
Last February, when the rain wouldn’t stop and we were bored out of our minds, Redfin released a year of sales records indicating that our buyers on average got a better deal than customers of other brokerages, on top of the commission savings. Mose Andre, Redfin’s compulsive stats man, has only recently recovered. Hundreds of… Read More
There are very few people with Matt Bell’s zeal for negotiating. He is 6’5”, with a large, slow smile that seems to bespeak an unused capacity for terrific violence, and he is faultlessly congenial. The best way to summarize our friendship is to say that he taught me to shotgun a beer for the first… Read More