The Case-Shiller numbers on April 2009 home prices came out this morning. Case-Shiller is a measure of how prices have changed for houses that have sold before without having been remodeled since; the goal is to measure only how demand changes, not how houses themselves have gotten bigger or better. Because it was originally developed by economists and is still calculated by a financial analysis business, Standard & Poor’s, Case-Shiller data are considered more reliable than data from real estate agents or home-builders.
The Case-Shiller report has some limits. It measures prices for an entire metropolitan area, like the entire Bay Area, not an individual city like San Francisco or Oakland. And we only have prices for April 2009 since it takes S&P a few months to gather and analyze the data. The absolute numbers themselves are arbitrary; like a stock market index, what matters is how the numbers go up or down. S&P set the base-line for each market at 100 in January 2000, and they’ve increased or decreased from there.
That said, the news was good! Even when seasonally adjusted — economists subtract from summer prices and add to winter prices to account for seasonal ups and downs in demand prices – prices were flat or increased in Chicago and Washington DC areas. And only New York and LA areas saw significant month-over-month price declines. In all markets, declines were much smaller than last month. Last month, almost all markets saw month-over-month declines greater than 2%.
The table below shows when each market peaked, and then presents the “equivalent month,” which says when prices were last at their current levels. So for example in the Bay Area, April 2009 prices dropped to where they were in July 2000, and in Seattle, April prices dropped to May 2005 levels. We also show how far the market has fallen from the peak; in California prices are down 41% – 46% from the peak, and then show year-over-year and month-over-month declines.
Metro Area
Date of Max
Equivalent Month
Change from Max
YoY Change
MoM Change
Last Months MoM Change
LA
Apr-06
Aug-03
-40.9%
-21.2%
-1.2%
-1.3%
San Diego
Mar-06
Jul-02
-42.2%
-20.0%
-0.8%
-1.4%
Bay Area
Mar-06
Jul-00
-45.6%
-28.0%
-0.5%
-2.7%
DC
Mar-06
Dec-03
-33.3%
-16.9%
0.1%
-1.3%
Chicago
Feb-07
Aug-02
-26.8%
-18.7%
0.0%
-3.0%
Boston
Nov-05
Nov-02
-18.4%
-7.7%
-0.4%
-2.1%
NY
May-06
Apr-04
-20.9%
-12.5%
-1.5%
-2.3%
Seattle
Jul-07
May-05
-21.4%
-16.8%
-0.6%
-2.3%
20-City Index
May-06
Apr-03
-32.0%
-18.1%
-0.9%
-2.2%
All the data in the table has been seasonally adjusted. Just looking at the straight numbers without the seasonal adjustment, San Francisco, Boston and Seattle also saw month-over-month improvements. As the Case-Shiller report (PDF) notes, “every metro area, except for Charlotte, recorded an improvement in monthly returns over March.”
Given how busy Redfin and other brokers have been since April, our own take is that Case Shiller numbers won’t decline much for May or June, but it’s still a mystery what will happen later in the year when more bank-owned listings hit the market — there was a moratorium on foreclosures through March that is still working its way through the sytem — and when the home-buyer tax-credit is scheduled to run out.
Walking out at 2 a.m. from the paparazzi-lined Chateau Marmont last fall with a few of the world’s nerdiest people*, I was nearly run over by two young women who careened through a parking lot in a brand-new Pontiac to ask us a simple, breathless question: “Do you want to party?”
I’d reached the point in my life when I no longer knew what this question meant. I held up a splayed-out hand to show them my wedding ring. Behind me, a friend said, “They’re professionals.” Another said, “They want to harvest our kidneys.” And a third: “They think we’re movie producers.” We stood there, petrified, staring at them. They stared at us. Then they tore off into the night.
But it has always stayed with me that I never answered their question. Because the answer is “Yes, I do want to party.” Which is why Redfin, Madrona, Fenwick & West and Square 1 Bank have organized another big Naked Truth event for Seattle’s tech community:
What: The Naked Truth: Show Me the Money When: July 9, 6:00 p.m. Where: The Olympic Sculpture Park on Seattle’s waterfront How Many: 400 people; the park limits attendance, so you have to sign up. Why: Understand how different revenue models for online consumer companies work Format: panel + party Panelists: Damon Darlin, Technology Editor, New York Times Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures, author A VC Michael Arrington, Founder & Editor, TechCrunch Jonathan Sposato, CEO, Picnik Brad Jefferson, CEO, Animoto Ethan Lowry, Co-Founder, Urbanspoon Glenn Kelman, CEO, Redfin Livestream: by Seattle 2.0; check back here the day of the event for the webcast How Much: $0 Hashtag: #nakedtruth
This Year’s Theme: Revenue Models for Consumer Internet Companies The topic for this year’s event is revenue models for online consumer businesses. We’ve asked entrepreneurs from a few of Seattle’s funnest consumer services** to talk about how they make money from ads, transactions, subscriptions, downloads. Using real numbers – on the cost of traffic, on the ratio at which that traffic converts into customers, on the revenues yielded per 100,000 visitor — we’ll dig into what makes different revenue models really work.
We’ve also got a few folks to report on what’s happening in the world beyond Seattle: Damon, Michael and Fred have probably seen more revenue models for Internet-consumer businesses than anyone.
Together, we hope we can give some useful advice to entrepreneurs trying to figure out the best revenue mix for their own companies. It’s something Redfin is still working through, too, so it’ll be good to get some help. Even though Internet companies everywhere are in a put-up-or-shut-up situation, you could go to a hundred Internet conferences and never hear a word — let alone a number — about revenues.
What You Need to Bring
So we hope everybody can come. The panel will run ’til 7 or 7:30, then we’ll start the party. We’ll try to commandeer a taco truck to set up at the park entrance, and the Olympic Sculpture Park folks will run the bar. If the grass is wet or your pants are white, you need to bring a blanket to sit on in the park’s amphitheater.
But you should try to make it. At the last Naked Truth, people fell in love, scores were settled, grudges were forgiven, the fur flew over all sorts of dingbat startup ideas, everyone was smiling, and folks dressed up like it was the prom. I need a haircut now but I’m waiting two more weeks so it will look perfect for the big night.
If you’ve got ideas for spicing up the event with jugglers, sword swallowers or tambourine troupes — or if you have questions you want to ask the panelists — leave a comment and let us know what you can bring to the party. Many thanks to Madrona & Fenwick for putting this event together, to all the speakers for agreeing to participate, and to Seattle 2.0 for streaming it.
(Photo credits: Chateau Marmont by John and Keturah, Olympic Sculpture Park by Jacobc on Flickr)
*Myself included! We were all nerds, especially compared to the rest of the Marmont’s clientele.
**We’re claiming Animoto as Seattle-based since the team went to high school here, and one of them still has an aunt in Tukwila!
I’ve never liked VIPs. At big moments in our lives – buying our first home, applying to college, seeing a doctor – it seems like we should all be equal.
It isn’t always that way. Friends in medicine told me that when the Clinton campaign or the Rolling Stones came to Seattle, their security detail asked Harborview to set aside emergency-room beds (the final car in a presidential motorcade is always an ambulance). But legendary ER director Michael Copass flat-out refused: the only VIPs in his world were firefighters and paramedics.
Here at Redfin, we’ve tried to avoid VIPs too, even though dozens of my friends have at this point become Redfin customers. It hasn’t been easy: in a multi-million dollar negotiation, everyone wants a leg up, and I don’t like to say no to any customer.
But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t VIPs at Redfin, or at every other online-savvy business for that matter. The difference is most of them come not from my social network but from online social networks in general: Twitter, Yelp and the blogosphere.
Redfin agents & engineers spend all day on those sites so when a client live-blogs every twist & turn of her real estate search, we all notice. And if one of our agents screws up with a customer who Twitters about it, a half dozen Redfinners are immediately emailing that agent to find out what happened (about 15% of the time the review is from a competitor who never used our service).
We’re not alone. A recent study in the Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics found that “an agent is more likely to bargain aggressively and capture a portion of the gains to trade for a client when the house’s sales price is closely related to the agent’s reputation and future business (referrals).” Other industries are no different: Redfin engineer Dan Fabulich told me that a fringe benefit of his mother’s food blog is white-glove service at any LA restaurant.
Translation: some customers are more equal than others. We judge their importance not by the old measures — the heft of their wallet or the fanciness of their title — but by the extent of their social network. More than any CEO, a stay-at-home mom with 2,000 Twitter followers is a force to be reckoned with. One of my favorite Seattle-area CEOs, Alex Castro, takes a screenshot of every Twitter complaint lodged against his competitors and mails it out to prospective clients.
And increasingly, consumers aren’t afraid to throw around the weight of their social networks. When Internet impresario Jason Calacanis tweets about the fantastic service he got from Tesla or asks someone at Apple or Dell or Canon to hook him up with new stuff, I can’t help but wonder if their response says more about the kindness of those companies or the power of his 70,000 Twitter followers.
What that means is social networks’ participants have sometimes figured out how to monetize those services ahead of the services themselves. Twitter may not host ads but Twitter’s users advertise good service all the time and are often rewarded for it.
I don’t like to think about how this affects the objectivity of Twitter as the new CNN, but it will have one big benefit: companies will invest more deeply in customer service not as a cost center but as a marketing channel. As Redfin’s Sasha Aickin argued in a recent directors’ meeting, we all need to stop worrying about how to make it easy for consumers to Twitter about us and just focus on giving them something good to Twitter about.
So how does Redfin square all this with our efforts to treat every customer like a VIP? We try to give everyone a voice by surveying every customer for a review, regardless of whether there is a close, and publishing every review on our site. Less than 1% of our clients have the gumption and the online following to review us on Twitter or Yelp, but 56% fill out the survey — which is so high that our agents have to assume any given customer can affect their reputation.
We’re used to running into one or two other couples or families if we’re in a well-priced house, but this weekend… we’ve never seen anything like it. There were 10 pairs of shoes outside of one home, another home had one couple or family in every single room while we were there.
Then an hour later, Marcella Branniff, who runs a customer support organization here at Redfin, mentioned in a meeting that she was touring open houses this weekend in Seattle and noticed that “every single one was packed.”
Meanwhile requests to tour properties and meet agents have remained at peak levels for Redfin in the first week of June, when normally we expect to see early-stage demand slacken from May.
Now of course, most of the folks in an open house are neighbors or looky-loos — and our clientele are notoriously careful to make a move — so it’s hard to figure out how much of this is real. This morning Redfin’s Adam Wiener queried our customer database to find out whether the competition was translating into more offers.
His findings: 71 of 108 (66%) offers that Redfin made in Southern California this May faced competition from other offers. We know that many other clients chose not to make offers after hearing about the competition, so the real numbers are in some ways even worse.
In a post-script to his email laying out the numbers, Adam mentioned that many of the agents in our partner program were “frantic,” a word I haven’t heard in years.
This isn’t to say we’re at the bottom of the real estate market. Because of the foreclosure moratorium that ended in March, a big new wave of foreclosed homes is scheduled to come online later this summer, on top of an interest-rate increase. And traffic on some large real estate websites has started to decline (though Redfin’s unique visitors in May still increased significantly over last month).
All the same, it seems like demand is up; some is seasonal, some is the result of the $8,000 first-time home-buyer credit, some is just tire-kickers; some is because banks are carefully titrating the supply of foreclosed homes to avoid flooding the market with supply. We don’t know how much demand will last beyond July or August.
So we thought we’d ask: what are you seeing out there?
Every time I Twitter, which is more and more often these days, I think about what evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller told the New York Times a few weeks ago about a different topic, the futility of consumerism. It seems like he should have been talking about Twitter:
“Evolution is good at getting us to avoid death, desperation and celibacy, but it’s not that good at getting us to feel happy,” he says, calling our desire to impress strangers a quirky evolutionary byproduct of a smaller social world.
“We evolved as social primates who hardly ever encountered strangers in prehistory,” Dr. Miller says. “So we instinctively treat all strangers as if they’re potential mates or friends or enemies. But your happiness and survival today don’t depend on your relationships with strangers. It doesn’t matter whether you get a nanosecond of deference from a shopkeeper or a stranger in an airport.”
Since we don’t have to worry about dying of starvation and most Twitterers are safely post-celibate, all we have to live for now is that nanosecond of deference from strangers, which is why so many folks take the measure of their prestige each morning — it is a simple number now — by counting the number of Twitter followers they won or lost.
Another way of saying this is that Twitter has turned us into a nation of Tila Tequilas, the woman who was first to get a million MySpace followers. Whatever fig-leaf of intimacy Facebook tried to protect for us non-Tequilas by securing our updates to a select group of friends has been traded in for a shot at small-time celebrity.
It’s hard to say whether that will really make us happy. Redfin’s Sasha Aickin somehow persuaded me to watch Tila Tequila’s MTV reality show, a grotesque affront to human dignity that he now claims to have recommended in an ironic way; what made it hard to bear wasn’t how silly everyone was being, but just how unhappy they all seemed vying for attention.
Would they be happier if they were competing in a real jungle for sex and food? Or is it better to fight for the attention of strangers?
I’ve been spending the weekend at a 40,000-person oncology conference in Orlando and finally wandered into a Saturday-night session on using the body’s immune system to fight melanoma. It’s the first time I’ve ever been to a conference outside of tech, and it struck me as immediately different and in some ways better:
It was so scientific. Speakers presented data from studies that supported and contradicted their conclusion. They presented data that they couldn’t explain. They hardly talked about anything except results, and they never talked about results without using data. I hadn’t realized how much mental energy it takes at most conferences to defend yourself from self-promotional hoo-ha until I walked into a room that seemed free of it. It was like Hawaii must have been before the mosquitoes showed up. How much further could we advance the state of the art if software conferences were more like this?
Speakers disclosed their conflicts of interest at the beginning of every talk, quickly and matter-of-factly.
Nobody used the word revolutionary. The gains a lot of oncologists fight for are measured in an extra month of life for 2% or 3% of patients. Instead of big eureka moments and public offerings, the state of the art advances by a thousand little increments. I wonder if that’s where we’re headed.
No celebrities: Big names are recognized, but nobody knows what they look like. There was no Mark Zuckerberg, and no Michael Arrington to interview him either, so a little zing was missing.
These people have no idea how to have a good time. It’s Saturday night, and the melanoma symposium was packed. Everyone was drinking iced tea. Almost everyone was wearing suits. I’ve never seen a software conference that wasn’t at least a little boozy by now.
I felt like a Yahoo visiting the land of Houyhnhnms, intrigued and a little awe-struck, but also glad after an hour to hit the pool, and still glad to be in software too… I’m not sure which type of conference is better, but I learned a lot from seeing this one.
It has all the big things I wished we knew three years ago when we first started tinkering with Redfin’s map…
Sasha talks about how we stopped piling on all the layers of data and graphics just so we could make the map page load four times faster (sometimes you have to ignore what consumers ask for and just look at what they click for)…
…and the incredible Alice-in-Wonderland quality of a web-based application that expands or shrinks to the size of your browser window so you never have to scroll around…
…and what to do when you have 3,000 houses for sale in San Francisco but only enough time and space to show 500, a problem that the mad scientists in Redfin’s San Francisco office are still trying to solve in a way that everyone can understand.
The writing in the essay is pure Sasha: worked so carefully as to seem effortless, awfully smart but approachable, and always fun to be around. If you’re in San Francisco next week and you’ve ever wanted to meet one of the big stars behind Redfin, swing by Sasha’s demo.
Happy Memorial Day Weekend from all of us at Redfin!
Redfin field agents take our customers on home tours, host open houses and attend inspections. As our mobile force on the ground, each sees on average 50 – 60 homes a week. Across all our markets, field agents toured a total of 5,795 homes in April. Exposure to that many properties gives them a great eye for evaluating what’s for sale and watching how their local market changes week to week.
Seattle field agent Kathi Kelly-Billings recently posted some great suggestions in our forums on how customers can get the most out of home tours. We’d like to share her tips:
Find Your Target Area Before You Tour
Drive the area: closest freeway entrance? Nearest grocery store? Traffic patterns? Attend open houses to get a feel for prices/neighborhoods. Try all of this on a Sunday when there are a lot of open houses.
Check the commute time: try the drive on a weekday, ask in our forums, or friends in the area.
Research schools: Schooldigger and GreatSchools are great websites. Even if you don’t have kids, buying in a good district with good schools will help when you decide to sell.
Know What You Want & Don’t Want Before You Tour
Make a list of all your needs, wants and no-ways: the list will expand as you get further into the process and then you won’t need one—you’ll just know. But it’s still a good starting point. Must have a large level lot? “Light and bright” very important? Would like a bonus room but not a necessity? Need a 4th bedroom for when granny comes to visit? Need space for a dog run?
Are fixers worth your time? Many fixers are foreclosures and can come with a lot of problems. The price may seem like a bargain; but in the end, is it worth it? Here’s what we often see:
o The roof needs replacing before the bank will consider financing.
o Furnaces and appliances are often non-existent or broken.
o Carpeting/flooring soiled past livability.
o Mold, siding, plumbing, electrical and structural issues.
o Most of these homes need at least $20-30K just be livable—not even considering aesthetic enhancements.
Also, dealing with banks and the tightening of FHA rules makes these processes difficult. Take some time to decide if repairs will fit in to your financial budget, time constraints and patience level.
Newer/New Construction lots are often smaller: everything is new and shiny–appliances, plumbing/electrical systems, carpeting. The living spaces are bigger/more open than older homes. They probably won’t need a lot of upkeep in the next few years. But if you are looking for a backyard to throw a baseball or plant a large garden or perhaps, practice with your band, these places probably won’t have enough room.
Older homes often have larger lots: but they may have older systems that need updating. Just think about what’s most important to you.
How to Visualize the Lot Size
Paying attention to lot sizes is a very easy way to whittle down your list before you tour, depending on your needs. So many times, I set foot in the door of a house with a touring customer and they say, “oh, this lot is too small–we need room for ____.”
If lot size is important to you, here are a few guidelines. Use the pictures to get a sense of the backyard’s size. (Unfortunately, wide-angle lenses can distort the pictures). Excuse the “baseball” comparisons…
Under 4,000 Sq.Ft.: will probably be just 5 feet (on sides) and 15 feet in front and back, or smaller, depending on where the house is situated on the lot. If it has a picture with a good sized front yard and is under 4000 sf, this means the backyard will be very small. Great for non-gardeners or workaholics. Rule these out if you want to put in a swing set or have large BBQ parties.
Under 6,000 Sq.Ft.: will have some yard but you probably can’t toss a baseball very hard. A small garden area is possible with small outside entertainment area.
Under 8,000 Sq.Ft.: you could toss a baseball, but not if you are playing anything above Little League. Enjoying a nice sized garden is possible along with a large outside dining area.
Over 12,000 Sq.Ft.: you could throw a baseball hard and hit a grand slam as well. Great tree-fort material, too.
Get In Touch With a Redfin Lead Agent Before You Tour
Experienced, top producers in their markets, Redfin lead agents handle on average 4 – 5 deals a month. Directly responsible for your success, they answer all of your questions, negotiate hard to get you the best deal and guide you through the whole process.
We’ve found that our first-time home buyers really benefit from connecting with a lead agent sooner rather than later in the process. Since over 50% of our customers are first-timers, more handholding is welcome and of course, expected.
The more you know what you want going into the process, the easier it becomes. And the better chance of getting the home you have always wanted.
In February (has three months already gone by?) we launched our partner agent program giving home buyers and sellers the opportunity to see and make offers on homes in areas where Redfin agents don’t serve. Home buyers use our site to search for homes and connect with an agent from another brokerage who shares our enthusiasm for great service, transparency and no sales pressure.
When we launched the program, in the dead of a grey Seattle winter, we expected a slow ramp up into the spring buying season. However, we were surprised to see the program take off from the start; likely due to the combination of low interest rates, a first-time home buyer tax credit, and a slow down in price declines in areas like the Inland Empire.
Let’s take a look at how the last three months have gone.
Home Buyers Are Looking For Agents
The busiest partner region, by far, is the Inland Empire where over 900 home buyers have requested to work with a Redfin partner agent on homes selling for, on average, $360,000.
Wanting to See a Home is the First Point of Contact
Most homes buyers on our site connect with our partner agents by requesting to see a home:
50% of buyers got in touch with an agent when they wanted to tour a home
40% of buyers wanted to meet the agent first likely to better understand the home buying process
10% of buyers contacted an agent ready to make an offer on a home they’d already found
We Let Our Agents’ Local Expertise Shine
Soon after launching the partner program, we made some changes in response to home buyer and agent feedback:
Reduced our partner’s coverage areas: we split some big, unwieldy service areas into more targeted areas. For example South Riverside County became Moreno Valley & Perris, San Jacinto & Hemet, and South Riverside County (mostly Temecula and Murrieta). Our partners and their clients are happier when the agent is covering a more focused area.
Show recommended agents: with our last release, we show the agent we recommend you work with on every listing details page. We pick the agent based off of how many deals they’ve done in the area. We’re working on loading every deal our partners do, whether it’s with a Redfin client or not, to make our agents’ profiles even richer and improve our recommendations.
Home Buyers are Happy With Our Partners
We survey everyone who works with one of our partner agents, whether they close on a home with a partner agent or not and publish all the results – the good and the bad, so that you can make an informed choice about an agent. Most of the reviews are overwhelmingly positive. Check out what a first-time home buyer in Port Orchard, WA had to say about their experience buying a home with Beth:
As first time buyers, we had no idea what all the procedures were in buying a home. Beth made sure that we knew everything going on in the background process which was extremely helpful. She was always available by phone or responded quickly to emails and SMS. I would recommend Beth to any fist time home buyer.
Our Partners Are Happy With Our Clients
Our top partner agent in Northern California, David in Santa Cruz, says that our home buyers are, “knowledgeable, sophisticated and an absolute pleasure to work with.”
In three months a few of our partner agents have done quite well, connecting with 10 home buyers a month in the Inland Empire, San Francisco and Chicago.
Here are the top three agents based on gross commissions:
We have stringent requirements for our partner agents to ensure that they are of the same caliber as Redfin agents; we ensure the agent has done at least 15 deals, we check at least three customer references, we interview them in person and we survey all their clients. Read J Philip’s first hand experience joining us as a partner agent.
These requirements and a busy spring home buying season has made recruiting tough. So even though we now have over 60 partner agents we need more!
We’ve tried recruiting via craigslist (which unfortunately doesn’t allow advertising of referral programs and blocks our job postings in some markets), Google ads and scouring Google in targeted areas for the top agents. We’ve partnered with some great agents, but we still haven’t hit on the best way to reach out to progressive agents who put clients first. If you know any agents who shared Redfin’s passion for the customer, transparency and no sales pressure here’s our pitch to them. Or if you have ideas on how to reach them let us know.
Up Next: Online Tools & More Cities
Over the next few months we’ll be working on tools that allow our agents as well as partner agents to work together with customers online. We’ll also be looking at bringing Redfin to a few new cities.
Thanks to our charter partners, the home buyers who have reached out to them and everyone at Redfin who helped bring the partner program to life!
Last week we released the latest round of the Redfin By The Numbers reports. With these posts, we’re trying to give some insight into what’s going on in the market right now by looking at what our clients have been doing.
This is the national roundup, for the local numbers, check out the reports for:
Of the offers we submitted to listing agents in April, 19% were on bank-owned homes, down from 24% in March. San Francisco Bay Area (38%) and Southern California (35%) had the highest percentages of offers on bank-owned homes. In both of these areas, listing agents are aggressively pricing bank-owned homes to attract buyers and generate multiple offers.
From what we’re hearing from our agents, this tactic is working in the Bay Area and Southern California: if you see a good home with a price that looks like a deal, so has everbody else. You should expect the home to have multiple offers that will drive the final price above the list price.
Outside of California, bank-owned homes are not nearly as prominent. In Boston, Chicago and Seattle offers on bank-owned homes made up only 5 – 7% of all the offers we submitted to listing agents. In these markets, more bank-owned properties are coming on the market, but they are still not near the levels in California.
Sale To List At 95.5%
The sale-to-list price for Redfin deals that closed in April was 95.5%. This means that Redfin customers paid, on average 4.5% below list price, up slightly from 4.4% in March. On a $500,000 home, this represents a savings of $22,500, not including the Redfin rebate.
We pay our agents to do the right thing: Redfin agents earn a salary and bonuses based on customer-satisfaction surveys, not commissions. As a result, our agents negotiate hard to get the best deal for our clients. With Redfin, there’s no sales pressure, just great service at every step from negotiation to close.
It’s Taking 40 Days To Close On Your Home
In April, it took Redfin clients an average of 40 days from when buyers and sellers agree to terms until the close of the deal, up from 39 days in March. It took our Boston clients the longest at 49 days while Seattle and DC clients had the shortest escrow periods of 36 days and 37 days respectively. A year ago, it took our clients 35 days to close.
Why is it taking so long to close on a home? Lenders are much more careful about approving loans. In addition, banks are so busy with all the refinancing they’re doing that new mortgages sometimes end up on the back burner.
The good news is our clients are getting mortgages. While escrow periods are increasing, we haven’t seen a change in the rate our clients’ deals fail to get financing. For April 2% of our deals didn’t close because of problems with financing, the same as in March. Lenders are being more careful, but not stingier.
Brokerage Activity Up 24%, Website Visits Up 15%
Our clients toured 24% more homes for sale in April than in March. In DC, the increase was 40%. We’ve hired 27 new field agents since the start of April to meet the increase in tour requests.
Visits to Redfin.com were up 15% in April. The largest increases were in Boston (19%), Seattle (18%) and the Bay Area (18%).
This indicates we’re ramping up into the busy season as more buyers are online searching and are out touring homes.
Redfin Has The Top Three Buyer’s Agents In King County, WA
This means our clients work with the some of the most active and successful agents around. With the numbers of deals they work on every month, Redfin agents know what’s going on in the market right now.
97% Customer Satisfaction
Our clients love working with Redfin. In April, 156 out of 161 respondents, or 97% said they would recommend Redfin to a friend, the same as in March. This number means a lot to us because it tracks how happy our clients are and our agents get paid based on it.
We ask every customer who signs a listing or offer agreement with us to rate the likelihood he or she would recommend Redfin to a friend on a 0-to-10 scale. Customers who answered 6 or higher count as people who would recommend Redfin to a friend. We post all of the unedited responses online so clients can make informed decisions about which agent they want to work with.
Look For The May Reports
In early June, we’ll post our analysis of our May numbers. Let us know what numbers you’d like see in the next Redfin By The Numbers posts.
Redfin's corporate blog is the place to read what Redfin employees have to say about Redfin, the real estate industry and other topics such as life at a startup or usability and web design.
