The New Sweet Digs

Dear Bay Area Sweet Digs Readers,

As part of changes already announced two weeks ago, Redfin is changing up Sweet Digs to focus the format on proprietary, leading-edge indicators of what is happening to home prices in the Bay Area.

Up to now, we had tried to provide a personal review of individual homes for sale in the area, but as a broker and an MLS member, we were not in an ideal position to be objective about other brokers’ properties. We also found that the scale of the Bay Area required an army of writers.

The new format will largely focus on publishing pricing data to which we have unique access:

• Broker-only data on transaction-volume, median-price and inventory trends;
• Broker-only data on sale-to-list ratios by neighborhood;
• Redfin-only price-drop data, showing what neighborhoods have the highest fraction of price-reductions;
• Redfin-only reports on shifting search traffic patterns and price parameters;
• Local agent round-ups about how current-week offer dynamics anticipate pricing shifts;
• Analysis of Case-Schiller, Census and National Association of Realtor data.

We have been preparing a change in format for several months, informed by a survey many of you completed earlier this summer, so we have reason to believe that you’ll like the new Sweet Digs.

And we know you’ll keep foraging for all types of real estate information on your own.

Many of the writers who contributed hyper-local neighborhood and home reviews to Sweet Digs are up to the same tricks, on newly launched blogs of their own. The great Tracey Taylor, for one, is already up and running with an East Bay real estate blog, with continued support for Sweet Digs via cross-linking and occasional cross-posting.

We’ll keep you posted on other new real estate blogs as they launch.  For now, we just wanted to say thanks to the folks who helped us get Sweet Digs this far, for your dazzling wit and insight, your verve and dedication to your craft. And thanks to our readers for your steady support!

The new, more analytical blog posts start later this week. If there’s a particular type of analysis you’d like to see, just leave a comment to let us know.

Regards, Glenn

Glenn Kelman, Redfin CEO