September 16, 2009: "We think that people are rushing to get homes under contract," Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman said. "Usually, the peak of the summer season is in July. The peak of this season will be in September, and that's almost entirely an artifact of the government program."
September 3, 2009: Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman says that Redfin's "app has much better data and is more integrated with both Redfin.com and starting the home buying process. Remember, Redfin isn't just about listing searches, it's a broker as well."
Sep. 2, 2009: Critics say the real-estate industry has been slow to react to new realities, using outdated methods of business. But one Seattle start-up is trying to shake things up.
August 31, 2009: Attention real estate obsessives: Redfin launched what could eventually be the mother of all time-sucking iPhone apps.
August 31, 2009: "There hasn't been a major consumer application for the iPhone that shows all the homes for sale," said Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman, adding that Redfin also shows for-sale-by-owner and bank-owned listings. The app is available in the 10 markets where Redfin does business.
August 24, 2009: Redfin provides the same information that real estate agents have in their computers, like price history, pictures and comparables.
August 6, 2009: Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman says that "we never promised that Redfin is going to be this breakaway hit, but what we have said is that Redfin is going to stand for something."
July 10, 2009: "The DOJ is hitting the real estate industry from one side, and Redfin is hitting them from the other. The result? A better deal for the rest of us."
July 3, 2009: Redfin CTO Michael Young explains that "we were pretty embarrassed last June when Adhost had a similar electrical fire and took our site down for 8 hours (well into our core business hours) with brown-outs a day or two after that had us scrambling. 'Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me' resonated in our brains. So by October 2008, we basically instituted a disaster avoidance plan where we had redundant-everything for our mission-critical databases, servers and networks in separate buildings."
June 29, 2009: "I think there was rationality a couple of years ago that the more house you bought the bigger the opportunity you had to sell it at some sort of huge profit," says Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman. "Now it seems like everyone wants to live within their means. Partly it might be an environmental shift; mostly I think it's due to the recession. We see it in almost every city we do business."
June 17, 2009: "If someone sends us a paper resume folded in thirds, stuffed in an envelope, it's hard to take it seriously," says Glenn Kelman, chief executive of Redfin, an online real estate brokerage.
June 3, 2009: Redfin DC market manager Karen Krupsaw said that in the entire DC area, the number of listings on the market has gone down, and a lot of listings draw multiple offers. And those sales prices will favorably affect the appraisals of other homes when they come to market. Krupsaw said things are particularly strong in the District, Arlington and Alexandria.
June 1, 2009: Glenn Kelman, chief executive of Redfin, an online real estate brokerage, contends that Web start-ups that do not carry ads are forced to excel at certain things that are essential to Silicon Valley's promise, like developing software that solves users' problems and upending the way certain industries run.
May 25, 2009: A few months ago, Cyd Gold bought her current home in Eagle Rock after finding it on the Redfin website. She was able to get the house for $20,000 less than she had planned because she listened to the advice of the Redfin agent.
May 11, 2009: When raising money for his online real estate brokerage, Redfin, two years ago, Glenn Kelman got the cold shoulder from many Silicon Valley venture capitalists. His entrepreneurial deficiency: The revenue was going to come from fees paid by people buying and selling homes on the Internet--instead of from sales of advertisements on the Web site.
May 10, 2009: Although the inventory of homes for sale here has dropped since 2008, Midwest Real Estate Data, the principal home-listings service in the Chicago area, showed nearly 85,000 houses, condos and townhouses listed in early May. And that still-high number doesn't include many for-sale-by-owner properties and builders offerings, according to Mark Reitman, market manager for Redfin, a Chicago brokerage.
May 8, 2009: Michael Daly heads the Long Island operations for Redfin. He said the online service offered transparency and access to data previously available only to brokers. And, harking back to the issue of pressure, he added, "Consumers are itching for openness, honesty and to not be sold, not be pushed."
Apr. 25, 2009: First-time home buyers Kevin and Laura Wolfe used Redfin.com, a brokerage, as their buyer's agent. Redfin offers buyers a rebate of part of the sales commission, so at closing, they expect to receive 1.5 percent of the home's price back. "That will quite nicely cover a large portion of the closing cost," Wolfe said. Wolfe also posted queries about home buying on Redfin's forums so he could solicit opinions on questions he faced along the way.
Apr. 22, 2009: Despite a tough real estate market, Seattle upstart Redfin continues its march across the country.
Apr. 22, 2009: Regional online brokerage Redfin is expanding into parts of New York for the first time, including Westchester, Long Island, and Queens (Manhattan and Brooklyn still remain beyond its reach). And in California, it now covers Sacramento and the Central Valley. These will be added to its existing markets of Boston, Chicago, Seattle, Washington DC, Baltimore, and the San Francisco Bay Area.
Apr. 17, 2009: "Sellers want to generate a bidding war, and it's working," Redfin Los Angeles agent Joyti Goundar says.
Mar. 29, 2009: "If it's been on the market 120 days, maybe it has already come down 5 to 10 percent," said Alex Coon, Boston marketing manager at the online real estate brokerage Redfin. "And maybe cumulatively you can get 3 to 5 percent off the sale price. You've saved, maybe not 20 percent, but 15 percent."
Mar. 6, 2009: "The further you get from the city, the more prices have declined, and that's where we see sales increasing," said Glenn Kelman, chief executive of Redfin, a real estate brokerage firm. "Eighteen months ago, the city was the only place where people were still buying homes."
Feb. 16, 2009: "The market value of a home is really being determined by what the buyer's willing to pay for it and what the seller's willing to sell it for," Redfin realtor Febe Cude said.
Feb. 11, 2009: "We've got nearly half a million people browsing our website in areas where we can't afford to have agents," Redfin Chief Executive Glenn Kelman said. "So we're asking those folks if they want to work with a traditional agent, but on Redfin's terms."
Feb. 4, 2009: Jumbo financing may be tight, but "the real issue is, there are so many homes in the $800,000- to $1-million range that used to be over a million, why would you take that leap to spend more than a million, said Irvine real estate agent Mark Bennett.
Jan. 20, 2009: "Fixers are increasingly common as sellers grow discouraged and foreclosures increase," says Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman.
Jan. 14, 2009: To conserve cash, we enlisted Redfin, an online brokerage that splits the real-estate commission -- generally 2.5% or 3% of the sale price -- evenly with buyers. If a Redfin agent earns $10,000 from a deal, the buyer nets $5,000.
Jan. 12, 2009: Banks, overall, are getting better about getting foreclosed properties on the market as they finally establish a set of local brokers to move the homes, said Glenn Kelman, the president and CEO of online realty company Redfin.
Jan. 9, 2009: Seattle-based Redfin.com is an internet-based real estate company that is using web 2.0 tools to help people buy and sell homes, saving buyers and sellers money on what they would be paying for traditional commissions.