This Friday, Netflix is premiering six episodes of a reality-TV show featuring Redfin. On the show, called Buy My House, people try to sell their homes on the spot to four real-estate entrepreneurs: Brandon Copeland, an NFL linebacker; Danisha Danielle Wrighster, an investor; Pam Liebman, the Corcoran Group CEO; and me.
The Audition
The production company that made the show contacted Redfin about an audition in 2019, and visited Seattle with a camera crew that July. I wanted Redfin to have the option of being on the show, but had misgivings about my own participation. My wife had made me watch an episode of Bling Empire as a cautionary tale. Our chairman said it might be good for Redfin, but bad for me. “I wouldn’t do it,” he said.
We told the producers we were passing. Then a few months later, on a drive through the mountains, my wife asked me how I’d feel if the show featured our competitors. As soon as I got a cell signal, I called to see if a slot was still available. A meeting was arranged with the executive producer.
The Amazing Moira Ross
That producer, Moira Ross, turned out to be a lovely person: soft-spoken and canny, kind, British, charismatic but in sensible shoes. She has produced The Voice, So You Think You Can Dance and the Masked Singer. I’d later learn from her how well a team can perform under the stress of any major production when the leader is calm and appreciative. She told me she wouldn’t make a show that was a sham or a food fight. I was in.
George Martin, my neighbor’s high-school-age son, became my fashion consultant. Netflix gave us a $300 budget for three copies of the same outfit and George and I spent nearly all of it on one pair of sneakers. Everyone on the show wore the same clothes each day so footage from one day could be spliced together with footage from another.
The Shoot
We shot the show over eight days in July 2021, at the top of a mountain in Albuquerque next to the sets for Better Call Saul and Stranger Things. I rented a bicycle that I rode each day up the hill to the lot, then took a shower in my trailer. The best part was riding home. I saw a thunderstorm drifting down a mountain range 50 miles away. It was often dark by the time I got to a trail in the valley along a canal. Once, I was hit in the face by a swarm of bats.
The shoot itself featured RedfinNow, Redfin’s business for buying homes from their owners on the spot. We bought six homes, though one owner later reneged. It’s too bad the show didn’t film the conversations I had with local RedfinNow employees about the neighborhoods where we’d be making bids.
They warned me about under-funded school districts and noisy roads. We pored over recent sales, and analyzed local laws permitting AirBnB rentals, which increase the number of people who might be the ultimate owner. It would’ve made a better show if Redfin had bought more of the outlandish homes, a winery or a golfing complex, but the middle-class places with standard layouts are easier to price and trade.
My favorite was an earthship in the middle of the high New Mexico desert. I also fell in love with a San Antonio development of homes built out of compressed earthen blocks, which the owners imagined could become a bizarre theme park. Instead of buying the development, I invested my own money in the technology for making earthen blocks, in part because this owner was a Navy veteran who drives a Toyota Forerunner with 250,000 miles on it, in part because the money would be used on an awning for the workers operating the machine during the Texas summer. Earthen-block homes are good for the environment.
The Only Fiction
But when I used Redfin’s money, I used Redfin’s process, which doesn’t depend much on me or my gut; it involves local experts and data-driven models. What I said on the show was mostly an expansion of what I’d learned from those colleagues. This was the show’s only fiction, that the success of a business comes down to one person instead of a team. It’s the same fiction when CEOs appear on the cover of a magazine, or ring the bell at a stock exchange.
The Cast
Since the show’s premise was that Brandon, Danisha, Pam and I were bidding against each other, I worried we’d become rivals. But Brandon set a different tone when he asked us to join hands and pray before each morning’s shoot; you could see why he had captained his college team. Danisha was the media veteran who made us all feel more comfy on camera; she gave the show its personality.
Then there was Pam, the stone-cold closer. When Redfin was the only bidder, I’d warn people not to take the RedfinNow offer unless it was in their best interests. Pam lost patience with all the hemming and hawing, standing up from her chair and walking toward the owner, hand outstretched to shake on the deal as if it were her deal. I felt dismayed but also relieved. She couldn’t stop herself from being a broker, even when the buyer, Redfin, was itself a broker. She’d turn to me afterwards and say “they’d have been crazy not to take that offer.” She never pushed for a deal that wasn’t good for everyone. Brandon, Danisha, Pam and I still text and Zoom.
Meeting My Maker
It was also fun getting to know the people who made the show. The woman who put gel in my hair was a competitive cowgirl who showed me her barrel-racing videos. I got to meet the Netflix execs overseeing the show at the hotel’s fancy rooftop restaurant; I was there for a to-go order, in a triathlon suit still dripping with pool water, when they waved me over to their seats. They asked why Redfin rebuffed the show at first and I told them about Bling Empire. Then I learned that their last show was Bling Empire.
“We’re All Carnies”
But the people I miss the most are the crew. They had come together from all over the world for eight days, some from places as far flung as the Survivor set in the Philippines. Though they had just got to our set themselves, everyone knew where to be and what to do. We hit a casino the last night of the shoot and, driving back, I felt like a teenager, tipsy in the backseat, close to a world I would never belong to, trying to catch every word of the conversation. A production assistant offered me a cannabis gummy.
Everyone had worked with everyone else on different shows, often years ago, and already they were making plans to break down the set and drive it in a convoy back to LA. “We’re like carnies,” a crewmember told me, but the way I felt when finally I got to go home was like someone who had gone to camp, who’d never forget the people he met there, but also might never go back.
The Error Lies in the Not-Done
It’s good to be home. The effort to be interesting on set felt draining in the way that a daily blood-draw might be, unnoticeable at first, nearly life-threatening a week later. Though I haven’t watched the show, I can’t regret giving it a shot, for the same reason that the journalist George Plimpton once tried out for an NFL team, because it was fun and different. More importantly, it’s also just my job to do everything I can to spread the Redfin word. I hope the show helps people understand the tradeoffs between an immediate cash offer and holding out for more money on a brokered sale. I hope it’s fun to watch.
Many thanks to Moira Ross, Tyler Furstman, Tracey McAteer, Doug Weitzbuch, Sophia Kiam and Matt Pickel who worked on the show, to George, Danisha, Brandon and Pam, and to all the Redfin people who supported me: Jason Aleem, Orlando Ford, Max Heilbron, Lisa Taylor, Myron Curry, Chris Edwards, Kelly Etue, JD Hefferin, Jennifer Hoffer, Michelle Hopkins, Denny Leroux, Melissa Martinez, Nadine Nyguyen, Kaila Pucci, Perry Sanders, Esther Sirotnik, Raechel Terry and many more.
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