Matt Goyer’s Real Estate Blog

Rhonda picks up on a difference between Zillow and Redfin after touring our respective offices, The Bus has left Ardell’s: Blog Tour USA:

After Zillow, we hoofed it over to Redfin’s office. There was quite a contrast between Zillow and Redfin’s offices. For starters, Redfin is getting ready to move to a new location and they had a big party the night before (umm…and we were still running on our zestimated time…fashionably late). There is a different atmosphere between Zillow and Redfin. When we jokingly asked, “Where’s your ping pong table?” The Redfin reply was “We’re too busy to play games here”.

The Tribuet News’ real estate blog has a post with a nice comment about Redfin, Agents: How are discount brokerages impacting your biz?:

We checked [Redfin] out and thought what the heck if can’t be worse than the last two agents, they would only do the paperwork, right? Wrong, Redfin did so much more. We drove by the perfect home the Friday before Easter, our Redfin agent gained access to the house for us that day (and 2 other times so we could measure the kitchen for new appliances and show our parents while visiting from out of town), negotiated the price below listing to 96% of original asking price (well within our original budget), came to the inspection, and we closed in 28 days from the original offer. This was the smoothest real estate transaction we have ever made.

Last night we all had a blast at the Naked Truth party.

Leaving work at 5pm was kind of surreal (though I do normally skip out at 4:30 on Tuesdays for sailing). In fact we got stuck in traffic because none of us anticipated that there would be any. After arguing about whether we should pay for parking Jeff, one of our VCs and myself got turned away at the door because we weren’t on the right RSVP list. Thankfully after chastising us Angela sorted that out!

Once in the Havana parking lot it was journalists arguing with journalists, lots of food, tequila shots with Zillow, bumping into friends at Microsoft looking to leave, trying to sweet talk potential recruits and lots of ribs.

Zillow and Redfin partied late into the night and while not completely hungover, I’m certainly not 100%!

Something interesting that Alex pointed out was that there was a surprising lack of young entrepreneurs. Most were people in there 30s and 40s. Besides our interns there were no college kids and besides the Zillow and Redfin employees very few people in their 20s. Where are the young entrepreneurs in Seattle hanging out? Or do we not have any because they’re all at Stanford/Berkeley and hanging out in the Bay Area?

The YSlow plugin from Yahoo! looks interesting. I know we’ve gotten a lot of mileage from the draft of High Performance Web Sites by their CTO.

ChrisN pointed us to a neat tool for analyzing your blog: aideRSS for blog.redfin.comhome adult made movieswedding movies adultamateur home sex movieforum amateur moviemovie farm animalmovies sex animalsbangbus moviesbonita movies saintcheetah girls moviemovies nudity in child

From the LA Times Land Blog, Kate’s Commission-Cutting Crusade:

Traditionally, when you buy a house you just give the purchase money to the seller and the seller pays the 5% commission out of that. But when you think about it, you are agreeing to pay 5% more for the house, and that translates to a bigger down payment, a bigger mortgage and bigger property taxes every year. So I figured it would be brilliant to subtract the 5% off the purchase price and pay the agents’ commissions separately myself. Seems like no big deal, right? Wrong.

Today we expanded to Washington, DC and Baltimore!

Bryan has the numbers:

• +50,000 homes for sale
• +~3,000 square miles of land
• +6.1m people and 2.1m housing units

The Washington, DC / Baltimore Redfin service area includes:

• District of Columbia
• Maryland: Anne Arundel, Baltimore, Howard, Montgomery and Prince George’s counties in
• Virginia: Arlington, Fairfax, Loudoun, Manassas, Prince William and Stafford counties as well as the cities of Alexandria and Falls Church.

We also raised $12 million. Cynthia has the numbers on that:

• $350 million in real estate transactions
• Refunded $6 million in commissions

But most importantly we got our first mention on Valleywag. And having met Emily last week I can say that she, like the rest of our board, is very sharp. I think she’s a great addition to the team.

And last but not least we’re throwing a party next week. I’m looking forward to it since I meant to go to the last one with resume in hand to give to Glenn but I unfortunately was sick that night. Fortunately, I was still able to get a job here.

I saw this quote from Charles Eames on DWR’s door last night:

The details are not the details. They make the product.

After many late nights at work we released a new version of Redfin last week! I promptly went on vacation for the Forth of July which is why this post is delayed.

What did we add?

Redfin Forums, http://forums.redfin.com/. More on forums in a separate post. But let’s just say our second place name was Redfin Discussions and I’m glad we beat Zillow to the punch.

Overhead Map on the details page for a listing or a past sale shows you the lot outline if we have it or the house location if we don’t.

Search by lot size, year built and status have been the three most requested search features. Finally we have them. Let me know what you want next.

Listing update email infrastructure was completely re-written. You’ll now get the e-mail at the same time every day. We also improved the format a bit. The e-mail has a new title which tells you how many updates you have, the photos are larger and we added the city and state information.

New buttons to improve the discoverability of buying or touring a home through Redfin.

Improved readability by making the content pane’s background white and the text black. Whose idea was it to use a non-white background with a non-black font color!? :)

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