Few people are better than Redfin CEO glennkelman at describing American real estate as simultaneously an economic, social, and psychological frenzy. viajoshhunt reports
Photo-Illustration: Curbed; Photos: Getty Images In the first week of April 2020, Glenn Kelman made a bad decision that was still on his mind 15 months later, because, he told me, “I get paid a lot of money to make good decisions.” Like so many bad decisions, this one seemed at first like a good decision — perhaps even the only decision.
When I visited Kelman at his home in Seattle one hot afternoon in July, he met me at the front porch dressed in chinos and a black polo with a full head of silver hair pushed back over furrowed eyebrows. His wide, toothy grin and soft monotone lent an air of calm reassurance to everything he said, but that was the extent of his mollifying.
In the years after those reforms were enacted, construction of new housing slowed to a crawl and inventory continues to drop. By this time in 2019, Redfin had 1.1 million active listings; now it has little more than half that. This shortage is what primed the real-estate market for its current boom, but what touched things off was the Federal Reserve’s decision to stimulate the U.S. economy with near-zero interest rates last spring.
It had put him in a mood to reflect somewhat darkly on the future of housing in America. “The original premise of my stint at Redfin was that we’re selling the American Dream and the idea that everyone can afford a house sooner or later if they work hard and play by the rules,” he said.
They treated his brother well, though, and Kelman, inspired, decided to become a doctor himself. He took the MCAT and was accepted at the University of Washington School of Medicine. At his wife’s urging, however, he began shadowing doctors, which soon gave him reservations. “I realized I admired the idea of being a doctor but wouldn’t be very good at the work itself,” he said.
“In San Francisco, I’d go back and see my tech friends, and they’d say, ‘Oh, look, it’s Glen, he’s a real-estate agent now,’” Kelman said. Despite being proud of his workers and of himself for taking a detour from “the road that leads to being a douche,” he couldn’t help being wounded by such comments. “Deep down, I’m still an arrogant software person,” he told me.
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