“Real estate, by far, is the most screwed up industry in America,” he told CBS News’s 60 Minutes in 2007. “We feel like things that Amazon or EBay (EBAY) or Yahoo! (YHOO) have done in other industries, we can do for the real estate industry.” Kelman [CEO of Redfin] now regards that statement as an error. “The biggest mistake I made in starting out at Redfin was bringing some Silicon Valley swagger into a traditional industry,” he says. “It was unnecessarily provocative.”
Daily insights for city builders, delivered every morning at 6 AM ET. I’m Brandon Donnelly — a Toronto-based real estate developer and founder of Globizen. I’ve been writing here since 2013.