Category: Redfin.com (page 3 of 8)

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Redfin.com has news this midnight, but it’s the sort of thing I would normally ignore: It’s basically the kind of rah-rah-for-us stuff I leave for the vendor cheerleaders and the mainstream media. But: I gave Redfin a lot of grief last year when they made a similar announcement, so today I’ll give them a bit of their own back:

Online real estate broker Redfin Corporation today published an analysis of the last 12 months’ public real estate records in Seattle and the San Francisco Bay Area that shows its buyers and their Redfin agents negotiated a better price than buyers who used other brokerages. Redfin’s average negotiating advantage was $5,048. The company also reported a 95 percent customer satisfaction rate for users of its home-buying service, and an average commission refund of $10,520.

This is the actual news, which you will not find in any news source: Redfin beat the field for the second year in a row. Is it plausible that particular agents beat Redfin? Not just plausible, highly probable. I don’t know of any teams of buyer’s agents like the kind of team Russell Shaw runs for listing agents, but a team like that would be much more useful for comparison purposes than the entire field of Realtors in three MLS systems. But give Redfin its due: The company deploys the kind of task specialization common to every sort of business except residential real estate brokerage. It’s very hard to resist the idea that specialist negotiators, more often than not, could out-dicker ordinary jack-of-all-trades Realtors.

And all of that is caviling, and wasted caviling at that. Stand in awe as Redfin.com CEO Glenn Kelman illustrates the high art of PR triangulation:

“Why do Redfin customers consistently tend to negotiate a better price, in different markets and different market conditions?” said Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman. “Last year, we concluded it was because of our agents, whom we pay bonuses based on customer satisfaction rather than commissions. Others argued that it was because of our deal-savvy customers, who benefit from Redfin’s transparency to take a more active role in the deal. Today, we think it’s Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here’s the news, snipped to the quick:

Online real estate broker Redfin Corporation today released Redfin Listing Metrics, a dashboard for Redfin’s listing customers to analyze neighborhood inventory trends and recent sales, and to compare their listing’s online traffic to that of other listings in the neighborhood.

That sounds slick, doesn’t it? A Redfin listing is a hybrid between a full-service listing and a for-sale-by-owner. This new software is a hybrid, too. On the one hand, Redfin is providing real-time access to information you wish you were getting to your sellers once a week. On the other, the Seattle start-up clearly intends for sellers to micro-manage their own listings:

The Listing Metrics dashboard, currently available only to Redfin listing customers, graphs how key marketing and pricing trends change day to day and week to week:

• Online traffic to the listing on Redfin.com as compared to the neighborhood average, so Redfin customers can determine if their listing is competing for online buyers’ attention;
• Sources of online traffic to the listing on Redfin.com, so Redfin sellers can evaluate the effectiveness of promoting their listing on other sites;
• The number of competing broker-listed properties in the neighborhood, so Redfin customers can evaluate supply and demand to determine if pricing conditions are changing; and
• The average days on market for broker-listed properties in the neighborhood, so Redfin customers can determine if their property is taking too long to sell.

The dashboard also provides an overview of nearby similar listings, so Redfin sellers can compare their listing’s pricing, photos and amenities to those of its competition, and an overview of recently sold properties in the neighborhood, so Redfin sellers can evaluate closing prices as well as listing prices. Using the dashboard, Redfin customers can also schedule and promote open houses.

Okayfine. Few blessings come to us unmixed. Sellers will surely like the greater control, even though an experienced lister might try — and fail — to warn them about the unhappy consequences of “over-marketing” a listing. But, guess what? Their house, their money, their risk. Redfin might not be giving sellers what you or I might think they really need, but it is proving itself Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Oh, wait, that’s not the big news from Redfin.com. In fact, I reported the really big news last night:

Redfin will either make money or it won’t, and, in the long run, if it endures into a long run, it will become more like traditional real estate even as traditional real estate becomes more like Redfin.

So here’s what’s changed, as of 12:01 am EST: Redfin agents are going to squire buyers around for free four times as much as they have in the past. No news on who’s buying lunch.

Online real estate broker Redfin Corporation today rolled out a 75-day trial of a new home-tours policy that allows visitors to its site to arrange four Redfin-hosted home tours without paying any money up-front or making any commitment to Redfin. The first two tours would be free, and the third and fourth tours would cost $250 at closing, with any subsequent tours costing $250 in advance.

Sounds complicated, doesn’t it? My experience is that home-buyers are not the most assiduous readers of fine print.

There’s more:

The new tours last two hours, and require the buyer to provide a mortgage pre-approval letter documenting her ability to buy the homes she is scheduled to visit. Redfin deducts the $250 charges for the third and fourth tours from the commission refund, which has averaged roughly $10,000 at closing. Customers who do not complete a purchase with Redfin do not pay for their third and fourth tours. Previously, Redfin only provided one free three-hour home tour, charging $250 in advance for each additional tour.

I’m thinking there can be too much red tape even for the INTx gnomes who find Redfin appealing. What is clear is that pay-as-you-go has a less-than-ideal gnome appeal.

I can do four houses an hour with normal buyers. I normally do 12 houses in three hours, then make the buyers stop. After 12 houses, their eyes glaze over. If we limited ourselves to two hours, that would be eight houses. Four two-hour tours would be 32 houses. This is nothing at all like the original Redfin game plan — shoving the expense of showing homes onto Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

John Cook fingered this mash note to Redfin.com in Forbes Magazine. More of the same four-legs-good, two-legs-bad crap we expect from the mainstream media, but it’s short enough that the bias is almost too obvious.

Consider the attributions for quotes:

• “says Kelman, 37”
• “Kelman says.”
• “one Redfin representative wrote recently”
• “read another posting”
• “says Steven Del Bianco”

These are all people of whom the writer approves.

But you can’t write a morality play without a villain, so take note of this item, quoted in full:

“In our area the consumer is savvy enough to know that they want value and a high-quality agent,” sniffs Gary Bulanti, a Realtor with Alain Pinel Realtors in Menlo Park, Calif.

Did you sniff out that “sniffs”? Kelman says, then says again. Redfin’s minions write and post. Even investors in past failed discount brokerages get to have their “say,” as it were. But if you are anti-Redfin in even the smallest way, you sniff — you bloated, soul-sucking, counter-revolutionary pig!

It’s all one, really. Redfin will either make money or it won’t, and, in the long run, if it endures into a long run, it will become more like traditional real estate even as traditional real estate becomes more like Redfin.

But just stop for a moment to take account of this:

In a national forest near Yosemite National Park someone affixed fake Redfin bumper stickers to signs, trees and rocks to make the company look like a shameless promoter and defiler of the environment. After Redfin staffers removed the stickers, which they have never used to pitch the Seattle company, the trickster started tossing the signs, attached to weights, into branches of sequoias.

First we have some some kind of demented, Edward Abbee-like monkey-wrenching counter-revolutionary pig of a Realtor, who traipses off from densely-populated Seattle to a national frolicking forest to smear Redfin. And then we have a yellow school-bus full of happy, happy Redfinions — red caps, blue kerchiefs, khaki tunics and cargo shorts — racing off to that same forest to repair this horrendous damage to the natural world, praying all the while to Gaia to heal the deeper wound. On the way home they sing Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I don’t want to be mean to Redfin.com. It’s Christmas, for one thing. Plus which, Cynthia Pang, Redfin’s PR Queen, is even nicer than David Gibbons. And, all things considered, Redfin’s latest bold PR thrust is not all that awful. But still, it is funny…

The fact is, these Dilberts don’t actually work in real estate, or they never have until now. Not just Redfin.com, but all the venture-funded Realty.bot mechanics. I think there were people at Zillow who really did believe that real estate could be sold without intermediaries. And Redfin beams with an infant’s delight every time it discovers something actual working professional Realtors have known for years — had to learn in order to survive as actual working professional Realtors.

But, take just a moment to consider this idiocy, which was on BusinessWeek’s Hot Property weblog earlier today. What is it? Fake news generated by a Realty.bot and spoon fed to a mainstream media outlet. The “story” itself is stoopid, but the transaction is atrocious, exactly the kind of media whoring that all of us should rebel against — exactly what the mainstream media has always been and what the world of weblogging should never be.

In this light, Redfin’s press release is not so bad. The advice it proffers is actually good, even if it is comically obvious to anyone who has gotten good at getting paid for doing this job. It is going to form the core of Redfin’s agent-training program, and that really is funny — though maybe not so much if you’ve sold a home with a Redfin agent who didn’t know this stuff.

In any case, it is in that light that I am going to cover it, albeit briefly. It’s funny to me. It should be funny to anyone reading this here. But it’s not as bad — all things taken together — as it might be.

So here we go, with a death grip on the obvious: “Seven tactics for selling a home.”

1. Don’t overprice your property. You just can’t make this stuff up, kids.
2. Set your price to show up in web searches. That means pricing in Read more