The world’s best real estate brokerage came to Atlanta today, increasing the number of active listings available on Redfin’s site by a whopping 30%. But better than the Atlanta website is the team behind it, starting with the guy we hired to run our Atlanta business, James Marks.

From the moment James explained to us that he once ran a big customer-service team at Best Buy — and made sure every single car-radio installer set the clock — he had the job. James has been an Atlanta broker for six years. He has a gentle southern accent, a deep service ethic and the kind of humility you don’t see every day but what’s most striking about him is that he could probably destroy, seduce or charm any wild animal in a hand-to-hand encounter. He’s very resourceful and determined.

James will be offering our direct service in the Alpharetta, Buckhead, East Cobb, Intown, Perimeter, Suwanee and Woodstock areas. We’ll work with partners to serve West Cobb, Gwinnett, Peachtree City and Lake Lanier areas.

Redfin Invests in Local Teams
More important for our customers nationwide, we’re rolling out local real estate teams for every market we serve. This is a major service upgrade designed to give you the intimacy and personal service of a small team while still ensuring you always have someone to help you, seven days a week.

An agent runs each team, assisted by a coordinator for scheduling tours and handling the closing paperwork. Two or three field agents help you get into homes all over town on short notice. You work with the same folks throughout the process and one person — the agent — is responsible for your happiness. There’s technology behind the scenes to route service requests and phone calls to the right person on different days and at different times, but that’s only so it’s all simple for you.

It’s a big shift for us. The way it used to work, the agent was your main advocate, but you had to call into a Seattle call-center to schedule home tours. This allowed us to offer service every day of the week morning, noon and night. But it turns out local expertise was also really important to our customers.

So why didn’t we hire local teams before? Well, one reason is that we just didn’t have enough business. When you start out getting two or three offers per week for customers across Seattle, you don’t have enough business to hire a bunch of local teams. Getting local is easy for traditional brokers, because their agents are contractors, but Redfin hires employees.

Which brings us to the essential conundrum of an online brokerage. The online part scales very well, as you naturally want to bring the world’s greatest real estate search site to every market you can, as fast as you can. And the brokerage doesn’t scale so well, as it’s expensive to hire a team for every neighborhood, particularly when you’re finicky about quality and consistency.

But everything that works against you when you’re first starting out starts to tip the other way as you grow. Redfin serves Palo Alto or Newton or Santa Monica much better than we used to, just because our business has gotten big enough to support local teams that know those areas.

Of course, we still struggle when we open a new market, but even that’s gotten better, first of all because traffic in every new market grows faster than it did in the prior market. And second because we’ve stopped trying to take on an entire market on our own. Rather than covering all of Atlanta just with James’s team, we work with partner agents to handle the outlying areas so James can stay close to home.

We think teams is another big step toward becoming a mass-market service that blends the best of the traditional world with new technology, and a commitment to serving customers rather than chasing commissions.

What About All the Other Features?
As with every release, Redfin also included the usual grab-bag of goodies, starting with email alerts on recent past sales:

Whenever a property you’ve marked as a favorite sells, we’ll let you know by email. To get the photos, prices and other details for all the homes  that sold in your neighborhood, just click “Email Me New Listings” in the box that appears top left:

Now visit My Redfin, click on Saved Searches, then click the “Email Options” link to ask to be notified when “Listings Are Sold.”

You can make the same adjustments for any listing alert.

We also began collecting reviews on the local lenders that our agents recommend, relying on Rob McGarty to publish them to our site. Over time, we’ll automate this, but for now you can trust to publish every review, good or bad, for every deal, just as we do with all of our agents:

We also link to other lender marketplaces, so you can keep our recommended lenders honest on price. We don’t make any money from our recommended lenders because we haven’t figured out an ethical way to do this. When and if we do, we’ll let you know.

And that’s the new website! Happy holidays, and thanks to the entire team that worked so hard to deliver this release. It’s gorgeous! As always, we’re excited to hear what you think.

Michael Arrington published another hum-dinger of an essay this morning, this one on the future of blogging and journalism in a world of rampant theft: one writer takes another writer’s story, hardly bothering to rewrite it, and posts it somewhere else, with the Internet portal and search engines richly rewarding the copycat rather than the creator. “The rise of fast-food content is upon us,” Mike writes, “and it’s going to get ugly.”

Mike blames everyone for it, including the New York Times, citing a conversation he and NYT editor Damon Darlin had before last summer’s Naked Truth, when Damon said he reads Michael’s writing every day. Mike appreciated the compliment, but in today’s essay he worried that it easily leads to the New York Times’ taking a TechCrunch story and re-writing it for the NYT’s broader audience. I am not sure this is theft — when an article appears in the New England Journal of Medicine or in TechCrunch, the New York Times can reasonably conclude that my mother didn’t see it — but we can all agree with Mike that theft is wrong.

A few moments later on that day last summer, I asked Mike why stolen music, stolen images, stolen television didn’t bother him when presumably theft from TechCrunch would. Mike didn’t miss a beat. He said stealing from TechCrunch was fine so long as there was attribution:  spammers often take TechCrunch content word-for-word and re-post it under their own name, as if they had written it. I smiled, because it was an argument based on pride, not money: sometimes I think Mike is an artist posing as an entrepreneur. Even when you steal U2, Mike argued, you know it’s U2. It was a good point, but I still wondered if artists less wealthy than Bono would agree that this is the main point.

Now it seems that Mike, one of the most influential thinkers in technology and media, has broadened the scope of his concerns, to journalists who re-write his essays, not just those who re-post them. The problem, Mike now says in this morning’s essay, is that quality and originality are irrelevant when the “portals and search engines” “force feed” people whatever content is most profitable to display.

The argument that these Internet portals and search engines hold all the power has been dismissed as so much whining, even by TechCrunch earlier this month. In this morning’s essay, Mike cites AOL for linking to its own sub-par content, often re-written based on original reporting from TechCrunch and elsewhere. But he may as well talk about Google too, which only links to content that drives Google’s content-must-be-free business model (in Google’s defense, it’s algorithm rewards quality whereas AOL does not). In both cases, Mike can’t afford to opt out of AOL or Google, and bravely says he would rather use the Internet’s fire than fight it.

Hear, hear! But just noting that we should use that fire for good — and not cheer as it burns down everything in sight — is a huge step in the right direction. For years, artists, photographers, film-makers, writers and musicians have made less money so YouTube, EZNews, Napster & Boxee can make more. Sometimes we have been distracted by debates about whether once-bloated newspapers deserved to live or die, which allowed us to avoid the fundamental question of whose side we’re on: the creators or the distributors.

Theoretically, when Blogger eliminates the printing press and YouTube eliminates the movie studio, writers and directors should make more money, directly from their audience. It can still work out that way, and I believe it will, but the first step is to admit that it’s a problem that those who create are getting fleeced — to a greater degree than the publisher, record producer or studio executive ever could fleece them — by the technologies that distribute their creations.

Another way of saying this is that if AOL keeps screwing Mike, he’ll eventually stop taking the time to write such good stuff. And when he does that, the world will be a much poorer place… not just for Mike, but for all of us readers and for AOL too. My guess is that before that process is complete, the best and brightest in tech will start working for the artists, and not just the aggregators and distributors. A little balance in this regard will do us all a world of good.

(Photo credit: Randy Stewart, blog.stewtopia.com)

With Google as our mapping partner, we’re able to give you overhead views and street views for all the homes for sale on our site (and for sold homes too). Today, Google announced that it’s also making a new type of imagery available called perspective imagery, starting with San Jose and San Diego. Perspective imagery is “angled” overhead imagery giving you a view of not just the roof of a house but the sides as well.

We know there’s nothing more important than the photos of a house, so thanks to our engineers Jen, Navtej, Dan and Sasha for working with Google to add this to our details pages so quickly. You can now find this new imagery on all the homes in San Jose and San Diego in the Views section under Angled.

Here’s an example from a home we sold in San Diego:

As Google adds more imagery it will become available on Redfin.

Lastly, we’d like to send a big thank you to the folks at Google (specifically Mike, Manish, Mano, and Mickey) for letting us participate in this launch and helping us get it up and running. We hope you’ll enjoy it as much as we do.

On the last Tuesday of every month, I get up at 5:45 a.m., pour myself a bowl of cereal, and begin hitting the refresh button on my browser, waiting for the Case-Shiller data to come out on the housing market. Once the data go live, we crunch the numbers, make some charts and publish a newsletter summarizing everything that moved in the market over the past 30 days. We try to stick to the facts: foreclosures, mortgage interest rates, housing starts, sales volume, price indexes.

And then, because we are sensitive creatures who live for praise, we wait for the responses… When the market was going down, Realtors would complain that the newsletter was fanning the flames of an already catastrophic market while consumers said it was a breath of fresh air. Given Redfin’s history as a consumer advocate, this didn’t bother us. As Franklin Roosevelt would say about industry fat-cats, “They are unanimous in their hate for me, and I welcome their hatred.”

But now that our newsletters have taken note of a market up-tick in some areas, we get all sorts of outraged screeds from bubble-bloggers and market-vultures. Here’s one of the briefer responses to this month’s newsletter:

The NRA  [likely a reference to the National Association of Realtors, not the National Rifle Association] obviously your Master.

p/s i wonder about your resume.

Enjoy your turkey

And here’s one from last month:

Dear Glenn,

How stupid do you think we are? Housing prices aren’t rising anywhere. 10% of houses in America have delinquent mortgages. If we didn’t buy yet, how are rising prices going to get us to pull trigger? Face it- the market has run out of stupid people. You are actually going to have to tell your clients to lower their prices to make a sale, especially when rates go up.

BTW- Spreading rhetoric like this has made me decide to never be a Redfin customer. I thought you might be different than NAR but I guess not.

-Kyle

We’ve seen the same tone on our forums. Yes, by all means, let the fur fly. There’s a very good argument to be made that prices will decline further, and it’s largely hosted on Redfin’s site.

But it’s hard to understand complaints that we’re the ones boosting the market. Most of the screeds cite the huge number of foreclosures as evidence the market will keep dropping  (whereas we tend to think that a big increase in interest rates is the most important swing factor). But every Redfin newsletter already discusses foreclosures at length, using words like “scary” and “bottomless.” Here’s what we said about foreclosures last month:

What has been preventing any type of serious price recovery has been the seemingly bottomless pit of foreclosures. And the problem may be getting worse. Nationwide, foreclosure filings increased 5% in July – September as compared to April – June… Bank re-possessions increased 21% in the third quarter as compared to the second.

And here’s what we had to say about foreclosures in the latest newsletter:

But we don’t think inventory will drop much over the next three to six months and it will probably increase starting next year. As usual, we’re worried about the number of foreclosed homes banks will try to sell this winter and next spring… 14% of all home loans had at least one payment past due in the third quarter; 3.4% are 120 days past due as of October, up from 3.2% the month before. Michelle Meyer, an economist at Barclays Banks, does not expect foreclosures to peak until mid-2010.

For the bubble bloggers, it is not enough for Redfin to recognize that trouble lies ahead. We must also suppress any evidence that that good news has occurred in the past. The primary source of this good news has been the Case-Shiller index, which shows a price increase in most areas over the summer.

Anyone looking for bias in the Case-Shiller index is looking in the wrong place. The Case-Shiller index is the most well-respected, academically rigorous index in the world, created by Robert Shiller, aka “Mr. Bubble,” the only economist credited with predicting both the tech and real estate bubbles. Case-Shiller economists painstakingly cull sales records for months in order to throw out sale prices inflated by kitchen-remodels and the construction of big new houses.

When we report on the Case-Shiller data, we aren’t providing a projection on the future, much less our own opinion, neither of which we tend to offer in our monthly digest of market news. In fact, the only projection we’ve offered on real estate prices was last month, and it was the kind of projection designed to tell anyone buying a house now to wait six months: A research report published by First American CoreLogic — and touted by the Wall Street Journal — predicts that nationwide U.S. housing prices won’t bottom out until March 2010…

Like a broken clock that’s right twice a day, either one of those opinions is bound to be right sometimes, and bound to be wrong other times. As even the perpetually depressed philosopher Albert Camus once had to concede, “happiness is inevitable, too.” The truth is more complicated than any one ideology allows, but people need to hear it.

So we’ll put together a panel of enthusiasts and skeptics to talk about where they think the market is headed, and maybe that will provide a more balanced view of a very complicated subject. And we’ll keep assembling all the facts. If you’d like to be on the panel, send us your credentials. If you feel we’re suppressing important facts, let us know what they are and where to corroborate them, and we’ll include them in the next newsletter. And by all means, keep posting, commenting, arguing and writing us emails. We love the debate. We just want to keep it civil & fact-based.

We got our monthly newsletter out just in time for the holiday.  We sent it to 135,021 folks, up 7% from last month.  You can always read our newsletter here, but if you’d like to receive it via email, just sign up.

Enjoy!
Lisa

Happy Thanksgiving Redfinnians!

Lots of big Redfin news this month, and of course we also have the latest real estate stats, hot off the presses. The short story is that September prices ticked up only a bit, October sales volume spiked, mortgage rates just hit record lows, and the number of foreclosures is dropping even as delinquent loans keep piling up.

Redfin Floods the Airwaves

Before we update you on the market, here’s the latest Redfin news… We loaded in pictures and prices of homes that sold from two years to two hours ago, a near-quadrupling of the real estate data we store. We got featured in an iPhone ad during Monday Night Football, and closed a $10-million round of financing from Greylock, the investor behind Facebook, LinkedIn, ZipCar and Pandora. A thousand folks re-posted a Redfin-authored essay on TechCrunch to Twitter and Facebook.

Unprompted, customers raved about our service on their own blogs and in our Forums. We had another month of profits, and our agents were top producers in Seattle, Boston, DC and Chicago. We’ve also created Facebook pages for Redfin in all our markets: Seattle, the Bay Area, Sacramento, LA, Orange County, San Diego, Chicago, Boston, New York and DC.

But enough about us…let’s dive into the numbers on the market!

September 2009 Prices Up Slightly

The Case-Shiller data coming out Tuesday morning was mixed. Across the 20-city composite index, prices in September 2009 gained for the fourth consecutive month but only modestly: 0.3%, once you adjust for the tendency of prices to increase in the summer and to decrease in the winter.

Some markets declined slightly, including Boston, New York and Seattle; Seattle has been declining since its July 2007 peak. For the markets Redfin covers, the biggest winners were the Bay Area (up 1.7% in September) and Chicago (up 1.1%).

In the Bay Area, DataQuick also reported a price increase for October, up 6.8% for the month and up 4% for the year — the area’s first year-over-year increase in nearly two years, driven in part by increasing demand at the high-end. A year-over-year increase isn’t too hard to come by, since prices dropped significantly in October. That said, in our own brokerage we certainly have noticed that the Bay Area is humming.

Sales Increase 10.1%, Inventory Declines 3.7% in October

The National Association of Realtors reports that sales volume surged in October, with 10.1% more homes being sold in October than September; most of this gain was outside California, where October home sales increased a modest 2.6%. Seattle sales volume has been holding steady, propped up by a feeding frenzy at the low-end, for homes under $200,000.

The supply of homes for sale has started to significantly decline. Nationally the number of homes for sale declined 3.7% month over month, from eight months of supply to seven months, which means that if no new homes came onto the market, all the homes for sale now would be bought up by May. If we dip below six months of supply, the market will be considered by most to be a sellers’ market.

Foreclosures Decline Slightly, but Delinquent Loans Pile Up

But we don’t think inventory will drop much over the next three to six months and it will probably increase starting next year. As usual, we’re worried about the number of foreclosed homes banks will try to sell this winter and next spring. The good news is that actual foreclosure filings decreased 3% in October as compared to September, but this may reflect banks’ struggle to keep pace with the number of delinquent loans: 14% of all home loans had at least one payment past due in the third quarter; 3.4% are 120 days past due as of October, up from 3.2% the month before. Michelle Meyer, an economist at Barclays Banks, does not expect foreclosures to peak until mid-2010.

Competition Among Home-Buyers Eases Slightly

Not only could supply increase, but we usually see a seasonal lull in demand. Here at Redfin, demand was pretty strong — we saw a big bump in the second week of November — but that tailed off last week. And except in Southern California, the percentage of offers we make where there are competing offers declined slightly. It’s still pretty competitive though:

The First-Time Home-Buyer Tax Credit Extended to April

We don’t think the latest government incentives will make a huge difference in demand. Even though Congress ignored our objections and recently extended the home-buyer tax credit, many first-timers have already taken the bait. For those of you who still could take advantage of the credit, here are the criteria for saving $8,000:

• The credit remains $8,000 for first-timers, but $6,500 is also available for folks moving out of a home they’ve lived in for five or more years.
• The income limit increased to $125,000 for single folks, and $225,000 for couples filing a joint return. A reduced credit is available for folks who are over the income limit by $20,000 or less.
• The home can’t cost more than $800,000.
• The new deadline is April 30, 2010 to have a binding sales contract on a house, and June 30, 2010 to complete the purchase.

Mortgage Interest Rates Hit Record Lows

The real incentive for most home-buyers is interest rates. Despite our prediction last month that mortgage interest rates were likely headed up a bit, rates actually fell further over the past month to record lows. According to Bankrate, the average rate for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage as of November 19 was at 5.06%. None of the mortgage brokers or bankers that Bankrate surveys thinks rates will fall further, though many think they will remain unchanged. Because banks have had less government support in selling mortgage loans to investors, we have begun to see a surprising number of loans going belly up at the last second. But if you can get a loan to go through, you’ll get a great rate.

So it’s an uneasy truce between low interest rates driving demand, and a large number of foreclosures mostly keeping a lid on prices. The $24,000 question is whether interest rates will go way up before we work our way through the worst of the foreclosures. We’re not going to try to answer that one before the holiday!

Any questions, let us know. Otherwise, enjoy your turkey or your tofu or whatever you’re going to eat tomorrow, with whomever or whatever you love, and thanks for all your support.

Best, Glenn
Glenn Kelman | CEO, Redfin