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Insanity ruled the evening as bloggers from around the country made their way to the Inman Connect Bloggers ‘n’ Beer shindig this evening at the Thirsty Bear. Shunning actual real food products, I challenged myself to try each of the 7 organic ales brewed at the pub, comforting myself in the knowledge that Guinness is still given to nursing mothers in Ireland and brown ale to mothers in Belgium and it’s apparently still made available to blood donors and stomach and intestinal post-operative patients in those parts, but I digress……

The crowd eventually made its way to the John Collins to collect Trulia schwag of custom T-shirts emblazoned with “I’m too old for My Space, come visit me on Trulia Voices” and drink cocktails with the free drink tickets Trulia was so kind as to hand me on the way in. The room was groaning with real estate mafia, everyone selling something to someone, or at least trying to…..the place was so packed, I was surprised the fire marshall didn’t come and close the party down. Apparently Trulia is hiring and a flurried exchange of business cards was taking place over tiny finger sandwiches and cocktails in the corner.

As I staggered back to the hotel in the wee hours, I was disappointed that Soup Freak was closed, but hope to visit tomorrow in the light of day. Hope Crab Bisque is on the menu……

I’ll be speaking tomorrow on the subject “Finding Your Voice”, however, I’ve temporarily lost mine sending shout-outs to my various cohorts across the crowded bars. But if I find it in time, expect a lovely panel discussion. More to come!

connectsf

Joel Burslem visited Seattle a few weeks ago and invited some area real estate agents, bloggers, movers and shakers up to the 46th floor of the Wells Fargo building, breathtaking home of Zillow headquarters, for videos for the new Inman TV. I got to meet Zillow employees David Gibbons and Drew Meyers and sat down for a 10-minute interview. Unfortunately, only 5 minutes of it got online, but maybe the rest of the world didn’t need to know how I sold a vegetarian’s house in Fremont, that had a concrete meat smoker in the backyard, by turning it into an Elvis shrine. Of course.

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Note: It’s not to late to attend Real Estate Connect and Bloggers Connect in San Fransisco 7/31-8/3. I’ve already been invited to 1/2 dozen after-hours meet-ups, parties and martini-tastings. Go for the seminars, stay for the booze and write it all off.

We in real estate love the Open House and the Street of Dreams-type tours builders and developers sponsor every year. The Ballet or the Opera might do a designer showcase house for charity, or the local historical society may offer a tour of an architecturally significant property.

That’s fine for some, but nothing can compare with the annual “Home Bar Tour” put on by Terrence Gunn every year here in Seattle.

You pay your money and you get your ticket to the best two-day home tour and excuse for a party on wheels, and this time our “Dead Elvis Lounge” at our house on Capitol Hill is the first stop.

Here’s this years itinerary:

Friday, July 20th:
The first day of the event will take place at Pete’s Monkey Skull Voodoo Lounge (one of Seattle’s best — if not THE BEST — home bars). Check in/meet and greet will be from 5pm-7pm. During this time ticket reservationists will check in, receive their ticket and Aloha bag. DJ Terence Gunn will be playing Lounge, Exotica, Calypso, Hawaiian, Surf, Pop Jazz, and Latin throughout the evening. Complimentary appetizers and tropical libations will be available. At 7pm a backyard BBQ will take place, will plenty of food and drink for all. Round 8pm-ish Seattle’s own Atomic Powered Surf band, The Mercury Four, will break the musical waves. A raffle will take place round 9pm, followed by more live and DJed music. Please note: there may be a vendor or two at the event, but there will be no vendor’s section this year.

Saturday, July 21st:
The following day, beginning at 5pm and going until 11pm, will be a six-hour chartered tour of 4 Seattle-area home bars. Complimentary drinks and food will be provided at each stop. The meet up, departure and return location for bus boarding will be in (undisclosed location unless you buy a ticket!) Look for a large orange-yellow school bus and a gathering crowd of folks in Aloha shirts. Meetup time at Lincoln Park will be between 4.30pm and 4.45pm. The bus will depart at 5pm. Bring your ticket/boarding pass with you (provided in your Aloha bag the previous day). Please allow ample travel time to the Park so you will make the bus on time.

The Tour
Stop #1. The Dead Elvis Lounge (at my house!)
Stop #2. The Atomic Lounge/Cabana Bar
Stop #3. Fantasy Island
Stop #4. The Shrunken Head Lounge

This is the best party on wheels by far. And beats them dry Sunday Open House tours, hands down…….

Tickets: TerrenceGunn@Yahoo.com

Photos from the 2006 Home Bar Tour of the Monkey Skull Lounge

The Riviera Room

The Zanzibar

The Castaway Lounge

I think I’m just going to change the name of this blog to “Redfin Watch”….. Here I was, enjoying my lovely summer vacation, when I read the news of Redfin snagging another $12M in funding. I ran the latest numbers on Redfin, comparing them with Buy Side and a few other companies around the Puget Sound area and found 218 sales of SFR’s with an average sales price of $547K and 68 condos at an average sales price of $343K. I also found 194 listings sold.

Based on those figures, if we go on an average commission of solds of 3% and they’re keeping 1% of that, commissions received on solds would total $1,192,460 for SFR’s and $230,520 for condos. They’re charging $3K for each listing, so that would bring in another $582K, for a total of about $2M in commissions.

On the other hand, they have 34 sales agents listed in the Seattle area. I’m not sure what they’re paying them, but it’s got to be at least $40K a year, so that would be labor costs of $1.3M. Maybe a dozen tech people at a very conservative $50K a year. That’s another $600K. And let’s just say they pay their managers $300K a year….. Now we’re way over the $2M they’ve made so far…… I’m just not seeing how this is a viable business concern, but CEO Kelman doesn’t seem fazed. “So far, the business has been growing really well,” Kelman told Inman News. “All this concern about whether or not the model can make a profit hasn’t really been based on anything we’ve seen.” He also went on to say “It takes about six months for a new market to become profitable for Redfin”, but I’d be very interested to see which market is now profitable for him, in that the company brings in more money than it makes.

In John Cook’s post, he writes “Since its launch 17 months ago, more than 500 homes — valued at more than $350 million — have been bought and sold through Redfin.” So using those figures, if they’re keeping about 1%, they’ve made $3.5M, but that’s over the last 17 months, where my $2M figure is just from 1/1/07 until today. Cook pegs total Redfin employees at 75, which at a conservative average of $50K per employee (less for administrative, lots more for management), brings the yearly labor tab at $3,750,000, not counting other overhead and tech costs.

I thought we were going to have to wait until next weeks Naked Truth or the big Inman Connect conference in San Francisco to hear their news, but I guess the timing of the announcement allows him to now discuss his expansion into D.C. at greater length rather than performance of the markets they’re already in, such as Seattle, San Francisco and L.A.

I was surprised the champion of transparency didn’t discuss the sale of his own home and purchase of a smaller townhome in Seattle at greater length, like Rich Barton of Zillow did when he sold his house earlier this year. Not that it’s necessarily the public’s business, but using your own real estate company to sell your own house is interesting to readers and investors and certainly worth blogging about.

Redfin’s performance in the Seattle market has been excellent compared to Buyside’s entry (total sales for 2007 in Seattle: 0), and I expect that Seattle will continue to outperform any of the other markets, at least for a while. Redfin’s big news in Seattle because they’re based here and we have a high tech culture and focus. However, with no John Cook, venture blog or other champion of limited service realty in these additional cities of expansion, Kelman will have to find a new dancing partner to keep the beat and up the buzz he’s attained here.

Kelman is one of the speakers at the Real Estate Connect conference at the end of this month, as are Rich Barton and Craig Newmark and I look forward to meeting them and to hearing more about market trends in the real estate industry. If you’re coming to San Francisco, I’ll be speaking on the panel “Finding Your Voice” at Bloggers Connect. They say that personality is key to successful blogging, so we’ll be discussing methods to infuse color into a blog, even if Redfin hasn’t come to your city yet

Other panelists:
Ardell DellaLoggia, Associate Broker, Sound Realty
Philip Ferrato, Editor, Curbed SF
Drew Meyers, Community Relations Specialist, Zillow.com