Matt Goyer’s Real Estate Blog

(RED)FIN t-shirt

I think Closing Escrow is now in everyone at works Netflix queues.

Before taking photos consider cleaning:

Inman News, The Price of Hiding Price:

Listing agents who are members of RE InfoLink can pay $500 for the first instance in withholding sales price, $1,000 for the second instance, $2,000 for the third instance, $4,000 for the fourth instance and $5,000 for the fifth and subsequent instances to withhold price information, according to the policy description, and agents must enter the code “SPWHLD” in the confidential remarks for those property listings.

Find out more in their August 1 compliance update.

Ridiculous! This information will soon be public knowledge when the sale records with the county unless they also go to the effort to have that information hidden.

What the market needs is more transparency, not less.

In order to improve Redfin we’re running a survey and we love to hear what you think, Redfin August 2007 User Survey.

Forbes, A New Measure Of The Housing Market:

With housing markets roiling and tumbling across the country, debt markets in a tense and fragile holding pattern, and nervous but plentiful global capital waiting on the sidelines, a former investment banker, in partnership with some powerful investment banks and a rocket scientist, is preparing to launch the latest in real estate indexes in an attempt to break open the derivative market for residential property.

I’m too busy to dig into this now, but how is this different than CME’s Housing Futures and Options [pdf]

http://texty.com/ is a neat idea:

Simple Content Management and Syndication

Never open a HTML page again for a minor text change!

* Step 1: Input the text you want on your webpage below.
* Step 2: Copy and paste the Texty into your HTML source code.
* Step 3: Edit your Texty anytime at this website.

Yesterday we were in an offsite meeting discussing “the future” when someone checked their email and found out in an email sent to the whole company that we were on the front page of Yahoo. Simultaneously everyone asked is the site still up!? And then reached for their laptops and cell phones. The funniest part was that the first reply to the email was ‘well that explains why the phones have been ringing off the hook for the last two hours’ followed by an email from our IT department threatening to break our fingers if we watched the videos at work (we are extremely bandwidth constrained (but we are moving to new offices with much faster Internet soon.))

Watch it: Real Estate: Buying & Selling Online:

What are the pros and cons of buying and selling your home on the Internet? Correspondent Lesley Stahl looks at the online real estate market in the high-tech mecca of Seattle, Washington.

I’m now in San Francisco for the Inman Real Estate Connect conference. Sadly I missed Glenn’s blog talk (he called me last night at 7pm first for help with content and then again at 10:30 to try and convince me to catch the 6am flight to appear onstage with him; I don’t wake up at 4am, even for the CEO!) The sessions I am look at attending are:

Wednesday, August 1, 4:00 p.m. – 4:30 p.m.
Welcome Address – Open Source, Open Data, Open Debate

Wednesday, August 1, 4:30 p.m. – 5:15 p.m.
Connect Duet: NAR and Zillow

Wednesday, August 1, 5:15 p.m. – 5:30 p.m.
User Generated Content: You Are No Longer in Control

Wednesday, August 1, 5:30 p.m. – 6:15 p.m.
Connect Duet: Trulia and Prudential

Thursday, August 2, 9:15 a.m. – 9:45 a.m.
Story of an Entrepreneur

Thursday, August 2, 9:45 a.m. – 10:15 a.m.
Connect Duet: John L Scott and Redfin

Thursday, August 2, 10:15 a.m. – 11:00 a.m.
Keynote Address: What is Happening With Social Media?

Thursday, August 2, 11:00 a.m. – 11:30 a.m.
Connect Duet: Craigslist and Realogy

Thursday, August 2, 11:30 a.m. – 12:15 p.m.
New Kids on the Block

2:00 p.m. – 2:45 p.m.
Blogging: Set your voice above the Web noise: I’m on this panel

2:45 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.
Data Mining: Information as Business Edge

3:30 p.m. – 4:15 p.m.
Consolidation & Data Sharing

3:30 p.m. – 4:15 p.m.
Using Search Marketing & SEO

3:30 p.m. – 4:15 p.m.
Mapping: Mash up and stand out

Friday, August 3, 9:00 a.m. – 9:45 a.m.
What’s New with the Search Giants?

Friday, August 3, 9:45 a.m. – 10:00 a.m.
Innovator Awards

Friday, August 3, 10:00 a.m. – 10:45 a.m.
Innovations with Real Estate Portals

Friday, August 3, 10:45 a.m. – 11:30 a.m.
Where To From Here: What’s Next for You and the Industry?

Trulia Voices - 71 day pulse check:

• The average response time for a question is 20 minutes (I don’t know about you, but I don’t even email Pete back within 20 minutes…and he pays the bills)
• Each question receives an average of 3.2 responses (unless you are this question, or this question)
• 80% of questions come from consumers; 75% of answers come from RE professionals
• Hottest topics: home buying advice, market conditions and quality-of-life stuff

We’ll have to do a pulse check on Redfin Forums soon though I have no idea when 71 days will be because I have no idea when we launched it because I am in startup time warp land.