Briefs

Redfin studies sales to come up with adages

Aubrey Cohen, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, December 30, 2007

There's a simple reason why the folks at Redfin started mining real estate data for lessons on how to sell homes.

"We couldn't sell any homes," Glenn Kelman, the Seattle brokerage's chief executive, explained last week. "Now, that's an overstatement, but in the fall we started to really struggle to sell our listings."

Redfin found that, while there's a lot of conventional wisdom - "voodoo," Kelman calls it - about the best way to sell a home, it's not necessarily backed up with numbers. So the company's computer scientists started dissecting real estate sales, then released the first seven conclusions from its study, which included a review of existing research and fresh number crunching.

Don't set a price just above a common search threshold was among other conclusions acknowledging the power of the Internet. Being just above the upper limit for most buyers in a neighborhood cut a listing's traffic by as much as 7.1 percent, according to an analysis of Redfin Web traffic.

And listings on sites like Craigslist, which don't get automatic feeds from multiple listing services, are viewed more than those just on listing-service sites.

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