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Redfin Attacks SoCal’s INTx’ers

Kevin Boer, Broker Owner, 3 Oceans Real Estate, Inc. ()

February 8th, 2007 · 6 Comments

While Glenn Kelman was co-hosting an event in San Francisco with Socketsite, his compadres were putting the finishing touches on a Southern California launch, which, per the embargoed-until-7am-press-release, “increases the number of properties for sale on its site by more than 340 percent.”

Greg Swann has previously pointed out that Redfin’s target markets are high-priced INTx-heavy metro areas — translated, for those of us not familiar with Myers-Briggs personality profiles, as high-priced markets with lots of geeky, web-savvy, technical, analytically-minded people. Why high-priced? Because when you take home only 1% of the purchase price as your commission, you have to sell expensive homes to make it worth your while. Why geeky, web-savvy, and so forth? Because grandpa and grandma, or even mom and dad, definitely ain’t gonna be buying real estate online.

Does SoCal meet those requirements? Let’s see what Neighboroo has to say about housing prices…

Redfin's Expansion

High-priced? Absolutely! Redfin’s Seattle home (1) is but a pin-prick of expensive (red) real estate in a sea of otherwise affordable green. The company’s second market, the Bay Area (2), is a reliable splash of red, as is target (3), southern California.

Alas, Neighborhoo doesn’t yet have a Myers-Briggs mashup available, so we’ll have to do with a rough approximation by looking for, say, well-educated Gen-X and Gen-Y’ers — a certain percentage of which are bound to be INTx’ers.

Seattle’s population is solidly Gen-X… (dark green)… and Gen-Y (again, dark green)…

Seattle's GenX populationSeattle's GenY population

…and college-educated:

Seattle's College Education Level

The Bay Area’s demographics look quite similar:

A heavy sprinking of Gen-X and Gen-Y’ers…

Bay Area Gen-XBay Area Gen-Y

…and all apparently reasonably well schooled:

Bay Area College Education

The greater southern California area looks very similar:

Plenty of Gen-X and Gen-Y’ers:

SoCal Gen-XSoCal GenY

and a generally well-educated populace, though not as reliably dark green as Seattle and the Bay Area:

SoCal College Education

Perhaps the good people from Neighboroo could help us figure out Redfin’s next markets? They’ve publicly talked about Boston, New York, and Chicago, but what about other areas? Austin? Probably not — prices aren’t high enough.

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Tags: Glenn Kelman · Neighboroo · Real estate · Redfin

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