Matt Goyer’s Real Estate Blog

On someone’s blog today I saw a link to this blog post, Social browsing vs. technology-enabled navigation:

The research found that the contact lists is what forms the social network backbone of the site - and they call this new way in which people interact with information social browsing.

Apparently people use social browsing more so than searching for information using tags, groups, calendar, maps or any of the other ways through which Flickr offers users to search for subscribe to content.

The research in question is this paper, Social browsing on Flickr [pdf]. The blog post also references this paper, Social Networks and Social Information Filtering on Digg [pdf].

I’ll try and read those on the plane tomorrow.

Sellsius has a post about how Why The Internet Buyer Is The Preferred Client. It seems to draw on conclusions from the California Association of Realtors study, 2006 Internet vs. Traditional Buyers Survey. I’ve e-mailed CAR to see if I can get the full study.

In the meantime here are some relevant stats:

IB spend 2.2 weeks, on average, with their agent before buying, while the non-internet buyer (so called traditional buyer) spent 7.1 weeks with their agents.

IB previewed 6.7 homes while the traditional buyer previewed a whopping 15.4

Sellsius, Redfin: Rebel With A Cause?

Being the underdog has its advantages. For one thing, there are no expectations of you, other than the fact that you’re expected to lose. There’s little to explain if you fail. Sympathy and understanding await you, along with “you’ll get ‘em next time” hugs and kisses.

Little does Sellsius know that here at Redfin we often create photo mashups. Our graphic designer, Savan, is the king of the photo mashup which he then sends out to the whole company to embarrass his subject.

Trulia API now open to the world! Time for Redfin to get cranking on an API!

I put my condo on Zillow as a ‘Make Me Move’, 124 Bellevue Ave E # 504, Seattle, WA and today they added page views. I’ve only had 3 people look at my place :(. Though one of those there e-mailed me about it (a Zillow employee none-the-less.)

Everett Herald, Buying a house for less:

“I want to do this myself, I don’t want someone telling me what I like,” said Ward, a 42-year-old freelance video and film producer. “A couple of good photographs and a description can really narrow things down and all that’s available on the Internet.”

So Ward bypassed the regular real estate route and tried Redfin, an online brokerage company that offers no field agents and a deeply discounted price.

He said he and his wife saved $9,000 on the purchase of their Mountlake Terrace home, money they put toward new appliances.

There were hiccups: The Redfin people didn’t update him as often as he would have liked during the sale. He had to have access to a fax machine, and there were some problems with the signatures becoming fuzzy from copying.

About the hiccups, we are striving to put more and more of the transaction online. I know that I desperately want the days to end where you need a fax machine to buy a home.

My Microsoft Google Yahoo Stories is an interesting blog post comparing someone’s experience interning at Microsoft, Google and Yahoo.

Every summer we hire interns for both our San Francisco and Seattle offices so it’s good to keep in mind what our competition is up to.

How do we compare:

• Free food: Yes, we have lunch catered in Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Plus we get lots of different snacks shipped in from Costco. (Currently this is a Seattle only perk.)
• Free drinks: Yes
• Favorite Perk: Friday happy hours
• Research lab: Mose works on stats research in his spare time so I guess our research lab is pretty small.
• Office type: Two to three people per office in Seattle, in San Francisco everyone has a desk in a big open concept office. One to two people per office in Seattle (we’re in bigger offices now), in San Francisco two to three people per office and cubes (we’re in bigger offices now.)
• Location: Seattle or San Francisco
• Computer Monitors: Dual 19″ LCDs
• Archnemesis: The real estate industry A declining real estate market
• Bureaucracy: None
• Biggest Fear: People don’t want to buy real estate online
• Cutting Edge App: www.redfin.com
• Favorite App: www.redfin.com

What makes us standout?

• You will ship code to customers. Our longest release cycle is two months :).
• Our team is small and so your ability to make an impact on the company is much larger
• Visibility into the business, whereas at a big company your visibility into the financials is about the same as an outside shareholder

If you’re interested in interning be sure to e-mail me your resume: matt.goyer *at* redfin.com.

Update: I made some updates on April 11th to reflect some changes around here.

Transparent RE, Deconstructing the Redfin Debate.

Can a seasoned top producing agent negotiate and purchase a home on a full 3% commission basis that will be financially more rewarding to the buyer than a Redfin agent working on a net 1% commission basis? In other words, will a top producer be able to negotiate a deal that is over 2% better than the Redfin agent?

The way I would spin that is can a seasoned top producing agent who makes less commission by negotiating down the price (if the house is listed for $500,000 and the agent is making 3% they stand to make less money if I offer $450,000) negotiate a better deal than a Redfin agent who is compensated based on customer satisfaction and not on commission?

Two funny articles from this weekend’s New York Times. The first, When the Food Critics Are Deskside:

Never mind that his boss, Stephen Viscusi, who runs his own headhunting firm in Manhattan, would prefer that employees not pollute the workplace with lunch. “Bringing food into the office dynamic makes things too familiar, more like the free-for-alls that might have taken place in your family kitchen growing up,” Mr. Viscusi said.

At Redfin our lunches are catered in three times a week and with no lunch room we all eat our desks or in one of the two conference rooms. Last Friday we had Longhorn BBQ which was great but really smelled up the office. To celebrate such a meaty lunch I bought some beers. I assume that drinking and eating at your desk would not fly at most New York businesses :).

The next article, When Flirting at Work Is Flirting With Trouble, is humourous because there has been a wee bit of inter-office dating here even though our office is very small!

Q. You often see two colleagues flirting with each other in the office, and their behavior offends you. What can you do?

Chicago Board of Trade, CBOT to Launch Dow Jones U.S. Real Estate Index Futures Feb. 21 (thanks Donald):

The Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT®) today announced that its new futures contract based on the Dow JonesSM U.S. Real Estate IndexSM (DJUSRE) will launch on February 21, 2007. The electronically-traded DJUSRE Index futures contract is designed to allow market participants to capitalize on changes in the real estate sector of the stock market, and better manage commercial real estate exposure.