Redfin is Making Real Estate News Credible Again

Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman

Last week, Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman was quoted by CNBC's Diana Olick, saying:

The real estate market is like a fat man that can't get up. The U.S. government has modified loans, extended tax credits, lowered interest rates; we've fired a lot of our guns, and at this point the market is just going to have a long slow period of decline.

(Kelman is good with quotes: "I've sometimes wondered if God calibrated the size of our brains and the amount of fuel in the sun to give us just enough time to figure out the universe & send a space-ark toward a new galaxy, but the only guys who could figure this out are working for Wall Street.")

This is the kind of wry observation that appeals to skeptical inquirers like Seattle Bubble, who have applauded Redfin's entry into monthly real estate data reports: "Redfin has taken a page from the NWMLS playbook, torn it out, shredded it, burned it, flushed it down the toilet, and written a whole new book from scratch on the subject of monthly data releases."

Full disclosure: the Bubble's Tim Ellis contributes to Redfin's "Sweet Seattle Digs" blog, but this would only seem to add to Redfin's credibility, since the Bubble's readership is, if anything, more critical than Ellis, and would probably turn on him in minutes if he slipped up. (In this I seem to disagree with 360Digest's Marlow Harris, who couldn't see any point to noting real estate was over-priced, back in November 2008, and questioned Redfin's viability. She will have to wait a bit longer for Redfin to fail.)

But Redfin's credibility isn't simply derived from a refreshing bluntness. Old school real-estate watchers often sound like they have a crystal ball secreted away somewhere--they employ the astrologer's and psychic's tools of saliency and confirmation bias. They are exquisitely sensitive to the "mood" of the market, so far as ad hoc rationalizations go. In the absence of a testable, fresh-data-driven model, there's a tendency toward superstition and making bets. (As Dan Ariely points out, our intuition works best when drawing on observable cause-and-effect, throw in a time-delay and we're mainly guessing.)

In his post, "The Rise of the Quants," Kelman offers a different model, which he (SEO savvy) compares to Facebook's data mining. There, he makes a distinction between the privacy issues Facebookers are always yelping about (not for nothing), and what actually makes money: "It dawned on me then that Jeff hadn’t come to talk about how Facebook stored all your messages and status updates; he came to talk about what turned out to be a far larger data set: how Facebook stores data about what you were doing before posting that message, and what you do next."

Data mining has leveled up. Redfin looks at behavior, not specific content, which is a huge difference. "Bad" real estate news, "good" real estate news--it's a return to the Chinese proverb about good and bad luck. There's a strong human impulse toward labeling the good and the bad, but Redfin's instantaneous firehose of data blasts away at habits of thought, preemptive categorization.

What you see may or may not be the wisdom of crowds, but in a marketplace, it's often the crowd that makes the difference.