There’s always something to howl about.

The numbers are clearly bogus, Mr. Kelman. Show us the files . . .

Kevin Boer thought he found an error in Redfin’s accounting of its MLS results. What he found turned out to be trivial, which led to another round of war-hooping from the Redfin tribe.

Meanwhile, our new contributor James Hsu has demonstrated that Redfin’s horse runs behind the middle of the pack among big-name Seattle brokerages. In other words, as predicted, experienced traditional agents do out-perform Redfin’s salaried agents.

I finally took a look at Redfin’s spreadsheet today, which they were kind enough to share with me. There are two formulae for calculating the Sales Price to List Price ratio, but I’m not sure that matters. Ten houses sold for less that 65% of list, which I find amazing. More amazing still, nine sold for more than 150% of list. One of them sold for 1,068.526% of list.

One condominium sold for 10% of list price. At that price, I think I might have taken more than one. Condo buyers are smarter, though. Only four of them were willing to pay more than 144%, although a whole bunch sold for more than 110% of list. In Phoenix, they’d be investigating for loan fraud.

Here’s the cute part: Redfin sold 45 condominiums, of which 20 sold for more than its vaunted average performance of 99.340%. Okayfine, fewer than half. For residential listings, however, Redfin kindasorta sucked: Out of 125 sales, 70 homes sold for more than their average.

I named all kinds of reasons for holding Redfin’s claims in doubt. The overarching question — tough agents or tough clients? — is the one Redfin seeks to avoid. Its claims all week have been a textbook example of the Fallacy of Affirming the Consequent: If P then Q, Q therefore P. If Redfin’s agents are tougher than average, then its ratios should beat the market. Redfin’s ratios beat the market (a specious if not actually false claim in any case), therefore Redfin’s agents are tougher than average. The conclusion does not follow, and the raw numbers seem to argue eloquently that the results achieved by Redfin’s clients were caused by Redfin’s clients, not by its agents. The skinflints did well, and the rest did worse than the market as a whole.

Yet again, there is a way to find out for sure. In the RE.net, Glenn Kelman does not control the debate. He cites Kevin Boer, ignoring James Hsu, but all of the rest of us can see a church by daylight. This whole debate is easily settled, and I might yet be silenced utterly: Your numbers are bogus, Mr. Kelman. Show me the files…

Further notice: In my original post about this imbroglio, I cited a weblog entry by Marlow Harris that in turn cited a report by the NWMLS system. I had doubted the veracity of the claims in that report, since it asserted a much greater SP/LP ratio than I would expect. I was not endorsing the report, I was simply making the grand rounds of links that I knew about at that time. It may be that that report has since been revised or retracted — not that this has anything at all to do with any argument I have made here or anywhere. For future reference, if you want to know if I am endorsing or merely citing a link, look for language like this: “Hot damn! Katie Kastensmith is really onto something!” I know it can be hard to peer through the murky mists of my impenetrable self-restraint, but you’ll manage somehow.

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