No, No, the White House is Not For Sale

by Matt Goyer | 11 Comments

Over the weekend Urban Turf broke the news that we had the White House listed for sale. The news was subsequently picked up by Gawker, Slashdot and NBC Washington.

Of course the White House is not for sale, and if it were, $10 million would be a steal!

So how did the White House end up for sale on Redfin?

At Redfin we want to show all the homes for sale. So in addition to showing you homes for sale from MRIS, the MLS in DC, we also get for sale by owner homes for sale from Zillow, ForSaleByOwner.com and Oodle. Oodle in turn pulls for sale by owner homes from a number of different sources. Turns out one of those sources, Owners.com, shows the White House listed for sale. When we found out that we received this home for sale from Owners.com via Oodle we removed the listing from Redfin.

Our data team is obsessive about showing correct information; if you ever see something that doesn’t look right please let us know at techsupport@redfin.com and we’ll take a look.

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  • PIGME

    Yeah, that's not a great idea adding listings from community portals and FSBO sites, way too much opportunity for bad data to be injected into your system. To top it off most FSBO's won't pay your realtor fee anyway, so why do you do it? Do you try to turn those customers onto other properties?

    • http://dannyman.toldme.com/ Daniel Howard

      Redfin builds customer loyalty by displaying as many opportunities as it can, whether it can capitalize on them or not. That way, we end up looking at Redfin instead of having to shop around. I have yet to find bogus information on Redfin myself, but I was turned off of Trulia when after reporting bad data, their customer support was like “well, we just get that from this other site here.” I get the impression that once Redfin learns they have bad data, they clean it up, instead of passing the buck.

      Yeah, in fact, for what it is worth:

      http://www.trulia.com/property/1082864692-1600-…

      I <3 Redfin!! =)

      • http://dannyman.toldme.com/ Daniel Howard

        Added on Trulia: 58 days ago

      • Heather fr Trulia

        Hey Daniel – sorry you got that response from someone at Trulia and that you don't seem to <3 us :) . Truth is, we are really focused on ensuring our data is squeaky clean and we are constantly making improvements to make it better. Click back on your link and you'll see that we've also pulled the bogus prop from our site. – Heather from Trulia

  • http://twitter.com/metalistings twitrlistings.org

    Well, it's an awesome marketing gimmick. ^_^

    But when people do search for a house for sale on twitter, they don't usually type in “house”. Instead they type in homes.

    @PIGME I don't get why people would put bogus listings.

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  • http://blog.owners.com/2010/06/is-white-house-for-sale.html Byron

    Byron from Owners.com here. Believe it or not this wasn't a gimmick or a brilliant viral marketing plan, just an attempt to help our sellers understand how to write a good home listing in a fun way. Like Redfin we work hard to make sure our listings are current and accurate, so when we woke up and saw our “sample” all over the web we immediately corrected our feed, and then had a brief laugh over everyone's comments.

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