Recent Stories with tag redfin

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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Matt Goyer of Urbnlivn and Redfin.

"It should find the place that's for sale right here," Matt Goyer said, gesturing toward Trace Lofts as we stumbled blindly down 12th Avenue between Pike and Pine, both of us staring down at our iPhones as rush-hour traffic idled at the light. "So, it pulled out 1408 12th Avenue, number 407, so that's one of the two units for sale right now."

This was last Friday afternoon, and Goyer was giving me an on-the-spot demonstration of Redfin's iPhone app (click here to launch iTunes), along with some insights into a couple other apps that deal with real estate and neighborhoods. His day job is actually at Redfin, where he works in marketing, but in certain circles he's better known as the author of Urbnlivn, one of Seattle's best condo blogs.

Like Tim Ellis's Seattle Bubble, Urbnlivn was a product of Seattle's housing boom, but whereas most real estate and condo blogs were little more than marketing efforts by real estate agents, Goyer won his readers by offering thoughtful (and frequently...

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