We pulled out all the stops for Redfin.com’s announcement yesterday because we thought it was important news. Such insiders we are, like Obscure Sports Quarterly subscribers glued to ESPN-8 for the Women’s Curling Semi-Finals. On and off all morning, I combed Google and Technorati for news, linking to what I found. Bottom line: Big yawn.
Redfin employee Matt Goyer provides a similar rundown, catching a few that I missed. Goyer also does the kind of stupid Realty.bot math trick that we have learned to expect from fawning news coverage of stupid Realty.bots: In adding three agents, Redfin.com grew by 340%. No, the number of MLS listings on its stupid Realty.bot grew by 340%. Redfin grew its head-count and its burn rate.
The only truly amazingly stupid math I saw, though, was at The Real Estate Economy, which cannot tell an apple from an orange, but which knows they must be equal if there are a million of them:
When Redfin gets up to six cities, it should carry a total of about a million listings on any given day, roughly the same that rival Trulia currently stocks.
It would take an hour to sort out every idiocy in that one sentence, and that may be the actual problem: The Realty.bot revolution is being fomented by geeks who can’t do the math and is being heralded by dinks who can’t think at all.
Marlow Harris, by pointed contrast, shows us what can be done with a fully-functioning mind and an insider’s insight:
One of the problems I have with Redfin is their continual commoditization of the bad-boy stance, their claim of being the outsider, the renegade ready to fight against The Man, ready to defend their clients against the Real Estate Industrial Complex, when in reality the business is made up of hundreds of thousands of individuals. There’s no cartel. There are thousands of little real estate offices all across the U.S., with 100’s of MLS’s, each with their own rules. Redfin has co-opted the power of dissent by appropriating the language and symbolism of non-conformist youth and tech/geek culture. By inserting themselves into the real estate equation, Read more

