Redfin is launching a new feature today that allows prospective home buyers and sellers to better estimate a home’s value. Anybody who has ever searched for a house or tried to sell one is probably aware of Zillow’s Zestimates – even though they are mostly automated and can’t quite take aspects like locations, view, noise, neighborhood and other details of a house into… → Read More
Online real estate broker Redfin just launched a new feature called Offer Insights, which not only tells you what houses are on the market, but also what the actual purchase process was like for homes its agents sold in a given neighborhood.
Because Redfin employs local agents – unlike companies like Zillow, which focus more on lead generation for other brokerages – it has access to a lot more… → Read More
Editor’s note: Glenn Kelman, is CEO of Redfin, a technology-powered real estate broker, backed by Greylock Partners and Madrona Venture Group, with more than $7 billion of home sales. He previously co-founded Plumtree Software, which had a 2002 IPO. He writes a quarterly column on Silicon Valley real estate for TechCrunch.
When Michael Arrington calls, you answer. Even if you’re perusing… → Read More
Real estate is a market that’s full of inefficiencies, headaches, and price gouging. Thankfully, there are a handful of startups looking to fix it, one of which is Seattle-based Redfin.
Today the company — which has proven to be so disruptive that angry real estate professionals were harassing the startup in its earlier days — has just raised another $14.8 million for its quest to turn… → Read More
Redfin, the online platform for real estate search and brokerage services, has made some noise in the past, building a service that’s currently being valued at $230 million, at least according to trading on SharesPost. It’s been a little while since we’ve heard some big news from the Seattle-based company, but this morning the real estate brokerage is releasing a cool new feature that puts real… → Read More
“On Monday, federal prosecutors accused 11 people of being part of a Russian espionage ring, living under false names and deep cover in a patient scheme to penetrate what one coded message called American “policy making circles.””
They weren’t particularly good spies, apparently. They were directed to gather information on nuclear weapons, American policy toward Iran, C.I.A. leadership… → Read More
I sat down with Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman and investor/board member James Slavet to talk about the continued success of the Seattle-based company. Warning in advance – the interview was done at the end of the day and we were drinking beer from our new kegerator, and we rambled at times. Perfect for a Sunday afternoon viewing, in my opinion.
Kelman announced in the video that Redfin is now on a $30… → Read More
When we split the atom, Einstein remarked that everything changed but our way of thinking. You could make the same argument about acquisitions and option pools.
As Mark Suster recently noted, employees will never see a big payday at most startups unless the company shoots for the moon. This is probably why investors’ case for a company to sell early focuses exclusively on the founder: in most… → Read More
For startups, Christmas comes in November. Partners come back from vacation in September and deals start closing a few months later; since the credit crisis deferred fund-raising for most of the past year, November 2009 will probably end up being especially busy.
Redfin is one of the companies that just closed a round. Already the process has resulted in a huge shift in our mindset: from just… → Read More
Seattle based Redfin, an online real estate startup, has raised another $10 million in a venture capital round led by Greylock Partners. Existing investors Madrona Venture Group, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Vulcan Capital and The HIllman Company all participated in the round, and Greylock’s James Slavet joins the Redfin board of directors.
This was a safety round, as Redfin announced profitability… → Read More
Online real estate broker Redfin is revamping its website to add recent data and photos of recent home sales as well as links to blog discussions of a listing. The Seattle-based startup, which is profitable, represents buyers and sellers in home real estate transactions for far less than the industry rates that take 5%-6% of the sale price of a home and split it between buy and sell brokers. On… → Read More
An interesting tidbit from today’s Naked Truth event in Seattle: Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman said his company just turned profitable. Since I was sitting next to him on the panel, I asked him off microphone what revenues were. He said the run rate is around $15 million. 2007 revenues were $5 million, 2006 revenues were $1 million.
That’s great news for everyone except the real estate industry. The… → Read More
Taking place tonight in Seattle is The Naked Truth 2009, a Redfin-hosted conference to give entrepreneurs advice. Michael is there participating as an expert to discuss industry trends. This year’s topic is revenue models for consumer Internet startups. The four presenting startups, Redfin, UrbanSpoon, Picnik and Animoto have some interesting information to share via their slides, which we’re… → Read More
The real estate slump is still dragging the economy down, but real estate sites that can help people save money or cut down the time it takes to find a decent home are still hanging on. Today, 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… → Read More
In a surprising move, online real estate brokerage Redfin is entering into partnerships with real estate agents from more than a dozen other brokerages in areas that Redfin’s in-house agents can’t reach. Redfin appears to have changed its tune from its founding when the firm wasn’t really getting along with real estate agents. In fact, Redfin seemed to be founded with the mission that consumers… → Read More
The economy is in the hole, and real estate is in an even deeper hole. What better time to invest in a real estate search engine? Shasta Ventures just led an $8 million series B financing in Roost, a real-estate search engine that is grabbing data from MLS listings (actually from something called the IDX, or Internet Data Exchange, which is a close proxy to MLS listings). As a result, Roost… → Read More
Startups can be the most conservative organizations in the world. We spend so much energy nurturing our delicate egos against naysayers and self-doubt that we can hardly admit mistakes. This is especially true of first-time CEOs. Thousands of new web companies were born in the last few years, and many of us just got the job.
We set off with the same directions: tackle a big problem, listen to… → Read More
The largest Multiple Listing Service system, MRIS, covers real estate listings from 60,000 professionals in the mid-Atlantic region of the U.S. (Maryland, Washington DC, Northern Virginia, and parts of West Virginia and Pennsylvania). Like their sister MLS organizations, they hate services like Zillow, Redfin and Trulia which give everday consumers access to real estate information.
But they… → Read More
Earlier this week in a post comparing real estate sites Trulia and Zillow, I suggested that the most important success factor for these sites is how comprehensive they are. The more listings the better because home buyers want to go to one place to find every home on the market. They want a single dashboard from which they can filter down the choices. But just how comprehensive are these sites… → Read More
Seattle based Redfin, a service that you use in lieu of a buyers broker or agent when buying a house. We explained their model in detail when they launched in mid 2006. A year later the company was interviewed on 60 Minutes. And all along the way there have been lawsuits and litigation threats against the Redfin model – a home buyer replaces uses the Redfin service instead of a broker or… → Read More
Venture capitalist Josh Kopelman has stated that he likes startups that shrink markets – “We love investing in technologies and business models that are able to shrink existing markets. If your company can take $5 of revenue from a competitor for every $1 you earn – let’s talk!” And while he isn’t an investor in Seattle-based real estate startup Redfin, I’m… → Read More
In an interview with 60 Minutes, Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman said that “Real Estate is by far the most screwed up industry in America.” That may or may not be true, but one thing is certain: a lot of people have had negative experiences with realtors and wish there was a better way to buy and sell houses. And whenever we write about how screwed up that industry is, the realtors come out and start… → Read More
Seattle-based Redfin, a real estate website that allows users to bypass most of the fees associated with using real estate brokers, has closed a $12 million Series C round of financing. This is on top of the approximately $8 million they raised in their previous two rounds. The round was led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Previous investors Madrona Venture Group, Vulcan Capital, BEV Capital and The… → Read More
Seattle-based Redfin, a real estate company that we started tracking a year ago, will be featured on 60 Minutes tonight at 7 pm Pacific on CBS. The video of the segment is here. This is great mainstream coverage for this startup. 60 Minutes has 13 million TV viewers, most of which knew nothing about Redfin until today. They have an intruiging and aggressive business model, which is summed up by… → Read More
Seattle based Redfin is making two major announcements today. First, they’ve closed an $8 million Series B round of financing, from Vulcan Capital, BEV Capital and Madrona Venture Group. This follows a (roughly) $1m Series A round in January 2006. New CEO Glenn Kelman, the founder of Plumtree, joined the company in September 2005. Second, Redfin is expanding their service out of the Seattle… → Read More
Austin, TX
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
Boston, MA
Disrupt Europe: Berlin Hackathon
Berlin, Germany
