Sunday, May 13, 2007

SIXTY MINUTES (3); REDFIN.COM

First, I owe Greg Swann of Bloodhoundblog.com once more for the brilliant device of using REDFIN.COM in a post, the more to attract search hits after the Sixty Minutes piece. I'm just venal enough to want some of that traffic as well.

So. Sixty Minutes. I feel like a Popular Mechanics editor who just sat through a Truther video. It was a parody of everything that's wrong with Sixty Minutes: preconceived story line, silly questions to silly people in order to puff that story line, demonstrably false proclamations by Glenn Kelman of Redfin, and absolutely no substantive rebuttal. It was so transparently bad I'm perfectly willing to let anyone make up his or her own mind: Here's the video. Redfin away. Let me know if you have any questions.

Use this as your guide: The same agent in the King 5 report that closed "as many as four sales a day", in this piece closes eight a week. Redfin released sales not long ago, and closed fewer than 300 as a company, in all of 2006. (Do the math!) They've never made a profit, and are living on venture capital, accumulated via Glenn Kelman's terrific salesmanship.

The marketplace will decide whether or not they survive.

So to the NAR and all other hand wringers: Much ado about nothing.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi there,

Thanks for noticing us on 60 Minutes this evening. Just a quick note - we have never downsized here at Redfin. In fact, we have been frantically hiring agents for quite some time.

Have a great night,
Trevor - Redfin Agent

Jeff Kempe said...

Thanks, Trevor, and my apologies. It was HouseValues that went throught the shakeup, not Redfin. I'll publish a correction.

Jeff

Anonymous said...

This post is now Googling seventh on "redfin.com". Very impressive.