blog.mattgoyer.com

There’s a good article on Inman on How to build a new real estate model.

Essentially, a second real estate industry is emerging alongside the traditional train track. We call them new models. They’re replete with upscale services built on a new pro-consumer practice. They come across as real and truthful. Traditionalists can argue about the merits of their pro-consumer tradition but the facts don’t support that claim. Let’s compare.

Thankfully I work at a company trying to build a new pro-consumer model.

What other industries are not pro-consumer? How can they change?

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Big announcements today at work.

Your first home tour is free:

The first home tour with a Redfin agent, up to three hours per household, is free. Future tours are $125 per home or $250 for a three-hour tour. To schedule a free home tour, send an e-mail to tours@redfin.com or call 1-877-973-3346.

We have refunded $1 million dollars to customers:

Redfin reached the million-dollar milestone in less than six months by refunding $1,011,985 in commissions, for an average refund of $9,825, to 103 home-buyers in California and Washington. In addition, 28 home sellers have used Redfin to sell their home saving $289,173 in commissions, for an average of $10,328.

And if you’re a Microsoftie or a Googler we refund even more than our usual 66%.

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Thanks for coming out to Startupalooza! We didn’t know how many of you to expect and you certainly didn’t disappoint; the place was packed with lots of startups and people interested in them. I know we got lots of resumes, hopefully you get a call back. But oddly enough we had left over beer.

And if you weren’t able to attend, check out our jobs page. We’re still looking for rockstar candidates.

Here are some photos and I hear the video will be up on Youtube soon :) :

CIMG1994 Hosted on Zooomr

Don’t mess with Aimee Hosted on Zooomr

Cynthia our PR and beer expert Hosted on Zooomr

I don’t know Phil but he’s dressed to find a job Hosted on Zooomr

Update: Bahn has his wrap up on the corporate blog.

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We’re in today’s Investor Business Daily, Beyond Search: Tools For Buying, Selling Homes Expand Online:

Posting your home’s sale listing online is so 2004. Checking your agent’s blog for new listings is so 2005. In 2006, buyers and sellers are using sophisticated, interactive tools on real estate Web sites.

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It’s now been one week at Redfin. Here’s a quick and short list of what comes to mind:

• It’s scary, intimidating and humbling to start a new job. There is a reason why I don’t take up new sports.
• Free pop/soda
• Free snacks like Cliff Bars
• There’s a fancy coffee machine but I don’t drink coffee
• Free lunch Monday, Wednesday, Friday, every time from a different restaurant. I love this.
• I work in a cube though most people are in offices (doubled though). Being in a cube is fine for me. I’m not a coder so I don’t need peace and quite, instead, being able to over hear everyone’s conversations is important. I did order a pair of headphones though.
• It takes about 15 minutes to bike to work (and then five to eight minutes more to get dressed), 20 minutes to take the bus (#14), 30 minutes to walk
• Things move at a much faster pace here. We ship a new version of the site very often.
• My manager took a short notice vacation and so I’ll be learning a lot being the only product manager around for a week
• The hours can be long. Yesterday was 12+ hours. But everyone here works hard and is passionate
• DIY-culture
• We have very passionate customers. Keep sending us feedback!
• If you’re a friend of mine in Seattle and looking for a house/condo, let me know. I spend a lot of time on our web site and I’m getting bored of looking at Capitol Hill condos.
• I wasn’t able to escape Sharepoint though I really miss Product Studio (Bugzilla isn’t very user friendly)
• At Microsoft it took me months to bring in personal items to decorate my office. Meanwhile, here I’ve brought in a calendar and my Aeron chair
• It’s a small company. I get to work directly with the CTO and CEO. That sure never happened at Microsoft :).
• Most everyone I talk to about my new job has already heard of Redfin

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Dwell, Interlocking Puzzle Loft [PDF]. I want a cool living space! (Instead of these lame wannabe condo interiors everyone is marketing).

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Redfin, may favorite Seattle real estate tool, added stats today. Here are the stats for Capitol Hill.

Average cost per square foot is $406.

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Do any Waterloo locals have information on Auburn Development’s $140 million BarrelYards project going on the Canbar lands? All I can find is this Waterloo Chronicle article about it.

250 luxury rental and condominium apartments into a seven-building layout on the 12.7-acre site. In addition to the seven to 17-storey condo and apartment buildings revealed at a press conference at the CIGI last Wednesday, there will also be a 120- to 150-room all-suites hotel on the site, and an upscale office building with 15,000 square feet of space.

Is anything else going on in Uptown? What’s happening with Waterloo Town Square? Is it still a ghetto? Any changes taking place on Erb Street?

I still own property on Erb and am wondering what to do with it :).

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I wrote this post a while ago but was waiting for the urbnlivn thing to get soft launchable before posting…

The other week I bought a one bedroom west facing view condo on the fifth floor at The Meritage, a new development several blocks south of my apartment.

This came as a shock to several of my friends because since moving to Seattle I’ve been a big believer in the imminent bursting of the Seattle real estate bubble. See interest rates were going up, incomes at the local tech companies have been flat, zoning changes have resulted in more supply, rental prices are low, foreclosures are raising… However, while sales have slowed, the market is still hot, properties have continued to appreciate, the local tech companies have continued to expand, some believe prices will go even higher, interest rates are likely plateauing,…

I definitely should have bought two years ago. But better late than never, right? (I swear I never said that when buying Pets.com stock at it’s peak!).

Now during my real estate investigation I got frustrated about a few things. For one the hot sites just provide listings but no analysis. I want a site that allows me to look at the average cost per square foot (min, max, median) and track that over time. Also other data points like # of new listings, average length of time on the market, closing prices… Looking at Redfin and Zillow both have a lot of work to do in the area of real estate analytics. Speaking of Seattle’s two hot real estate states, I use Redfin almost exclusively (in conjunction with a RSS subscription to a key word feed on Craigslist), while Zillow is useless for me because it only seems to work for single family dwellings.

My other frustration was with the quality of agents at pre-sale centers. Generally, they’re awful. They don’t ask you any questions or try to understand what you’re looking for. Instead they’re busy trying to sell you something that might not even be appropriate; they’re worse than used car salesmen. The agents also have this crazy obession with guarding the prices of the units forcing you to ask about every unit that you might be interested in.

It’d also be nice if there was a new construction portal that did a good job of aggregating pre-sale information giving you the ability to see what was on the market, what was coming up, and what had already come and gone (for historical pricing information). None of the current sites seem to offer this, which is why I built Urbnlivn.

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I got so frustrated that there was no list of new condo construction in Seattle that I built my own and in true web 2.0 style named it Urbnlivn.

And for the record, I hate developing in Javascript. I don’t know how all these web 2.0 kids tolerate it. I’ve been pulling my hair out for weeks now trying to understand why my code doesn’t work.

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