January 30, 2012
Real estate has a weird side, and we at Redfin think it’s about time the public had a glimpse into it. We’re proud to introduce Real Estate Confidential (@REConfidential), a new Twitter feed that lets the public in on the strange and sometimes inexplicable things our agents encounter when they’re giving home tours.
Of course, we remove the names and identifying information to protect the innocent and quirky, but these are true stories shared directly by our agents. A first dozen covered drugs, sex and aggressive tenants. Here are a few of our favorites:
Real Estate Confidential is just the latest way that Redfin is taking our “there’s-no-such-thing-as-too-much-information” philosophy to the next level. We still have Agent Insights, where our agents who have toured a home give you the inside scoop that you won’t find in the listing descriptions. We still survey every customer and publish every review. And now, there’s Real Estate Confidential, giving the behind-the-scenes dirt on what really happens on a home tour.
Got your own home tour stories to share? Tweet them to us at @REConfidential!
May 12, 2011
Hours after news broke that Osama bin Laden was dead, Jeff Jarvis wrote that “Twitter is our Times Square on this victory day.” The New York Times published a photo of the actual Times Square, where firefighters cheered the announcement.
I sat in a cab, watching the tale of the tribe scroll by on Twitter. The friends I reached out to just chided me for not finding out sooner. But Twitter, which I often feel diffident about, came through.
I didn’t have to run around asking five different people about it or to switch TV channels, because Twitter was running around and switching for me, from anger to jokes to opinions and questions, amplified, added to, challenged. I’ve never been so transfixed.
I tried to remember when the U.S. had last won a clear-cut battle. But now I’ve been thinking about how events of this magnitude bring us together, and why this event felt so different this time.
The first national tragedy I ever felt part of was the 1986 Challenger explosion, 73 seconds after takeoff. I was a freshman in high school, on a hall pass in an empty corridor. A shaggy guy who never came to class rounded a corner. He was a “stoner,” which means he probably smoked a joint once, so I had been terrified of him.
He had seen the explosion in the AV lab. He walked up to me and said, “The space shuttle just blew up.” It was one of the first times TV showed someone actually dying.
We talked about it. I liked how being kind to him made me feel, and I was glad he was kind to me. Even a year later, we’d nod at each other passing in the hall.
For any event like that, you remember exactly where you were when you found out, just because the moment before seems like this eternity of innocence.
For example: a decade ago, I was at Phil Soffer’s wedding in Manhattan when the U.S. declared war on Afghanistan. Phil got word via a hand-written note, and no one else heard the news; could you imagine that happening now?
At the reception, Phil’s mom told us to smile for the camera. The way other people, before each shot, say “Say cheese,” she liked to sing out, “Say premature ejaculation!”
Earlier of course, news traveled even more slowly. You can hear wails and gasps on the recording when Robert F. Kennedy tells a mostly black audience in Indianapolis that Martin Luther King had been shot, though it had happened hours — hours! — earlier.
What did the crowd think when Kennedy, unaided by a speechwriter, found himself citing Aeschylus?
In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.
Indianapolis had none of the riots that other cities did, perhaps because people there felt something different, together. I hope, in moments of victory and despair, we can be that together again. I don’t think the Internet has delivered that kind of experience yet, but one day hopefully it will.
September 14, 2010
Here at Redfin, we’ve been thinking a lot lately about Twitter as a development platform. The problem with that platform today is that nearly all Twitter applications are applications for using Twitter, not applications that use Twitter for doing something else.
Redfin, for example, doesn’t want to build another Twitter client. We want to build a Twitter-powered real estate application, that allows our users to follow a neighborhood on Twitter. Any new listing, new sale, price change, agent insight or market update would show up as a tweet in neighborhood followers’ timelines.
This would broaden Redfin’s reach, and give users an easy way to see what’s new in the market in real-time, without our having to ask anyone to register an account, define her own queries, or even open an email. Even better, Redfin users could get text-message alerts via Twitter when a new listing came on the market.
To support this, Twitter would have to build a high-scale system for bulk creation and administration of tens of thousands of Twitter accounts, one in our case for each neighborhood, which I believe Twitter will support one day soon. And the load imposed on Twitter would also be imposed on Redfin, as Redfin.com would have to process queries against every neighborhood, every few minutes. Twitter’s real-time scale challenges would become challenges for the whole Web to solve.
But it would be worth it. As Cloudera’s Jeffrey Hammerbacher recently noted in an engineer-to-engineer talk at Redfin on Hadoop, machines produce far more data than people ever will.
The possibilities for Twitter-ifying the Web are endless, as almost any series of events recorded on the web could become a Twitter stream: every time the Cal football team scores, whenever a friend uploads a photo to Flickr, or a customer lodges a complaint, I want it in my timeline. If Twitter is really going to be the pulse of the planet, it has to let websites — not just people — create and manage millions of accounts.
Twitter, I hope you take the plunge. If you do, the real-time web could increase in size by an order of magnitude.
UPDATE: Robbie Allen at StatSheets responds to our post, explaining that the company tried to deliver exactly what we wanted for sports enthusiasts, which Twitter initially discouraged and then embraced.
