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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.)...

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By coincidence, the same morning I sat down to discuss the success of private bus guides like One Bus Away with King County Metro's general manager Kevin Desmond, One Bus Away released its iPhone application.

The question I had was this--given Metro's well-documented budget woes, was there more than customer convenience to be gained from letting private software developers take on a larger role?

OBA is the brainchild of Brian Ferris, a grad student in Computer Science & Engineering at the UW. Ferris is studying human-computer interactions, so in a sense, Seattle's bus riders are living inside Ferris's experiment.

"What he's done is terrific," said Desmond, who is thin, monologue-prone, and data-driven. In fact, data is the next thing he brings up, pointing out that OBA runs on top of Metro data. "The issue for us with the private developer world is how can we better meet their needs. What standards should we use? We're planning a developer's workshop, probably in late October."

OBA's website and iPhone...

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