Ashley:

Hi I’m Ashley, one of the producers here at Pitchfork Economics. This episode is a special one recorded pre-pandemic in early 2020, probably one of the last interviews we recorded in our office studio. And we’re so excited for you to finally hear it. Jessyn Farrell, the Senior Vice President of Civic Ventures joins Nick Hanauer for a conversation with Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman. They discuss why home prices and rents are so out of whack, the discord between what liberals say they want for their community versus the policies they’ll actually support, how to account for racism in housing policy and so much more. Even though this conversation is technically from the archives, our team considers it to be one of them the best. Enjoy.

Glenn Kelman:

I’m Glenn Kelman, the CEO of Redfin, a technology powered real estate brokerage based here in Seattle.

Jessyn Farrell:

Great. We’re so happy to have you.

Glenn Kelman:

Thanks for having me. It’ll be fun.

Jessyn Farrell:

So we’d love to start by just hearing a little bit about how you see who are the winners in this market and who are the losers?

Glenn Kelman:

That’s simple. The winners are the people who already own homes. They’re the ones who have control of most political processes. And they’ve essentially formed a cartel to keep housing prices high. So nobody wants expensive bread or expensive gas. Maybe environmentalist like me want expensive gas, but it doesn’t seem that there’s the same consensus around housing. There are people who obviously advocate for affordable housing, but there are other people who worry about their property values. And they’re very good at organizing into neighborhood associations and limiting construction and preventing the government from really acting in the way that it needs to, to solve this crisis.

Jessyn Farrell:

Okay. Well, so how does the government need to act then to solve this crisis? There’s a political problem for sure, but there’s also a policy problem.

Glenn Kelman:

Well, I think it’s really simple. It’s just about creating more houses. So zoning for more construction, letting people build in really dense places. What we’re witnessing at Redfin is the migration of people from coastal cities that really aren’t pro development, to the center of the country, where you can still build lots of housing and hopefully lots of dense housing. And so that would be my solution. And when people say we need to make sure that the housing is low priced or that it’s affordable by the middle class, I would actually just be an advocate for more housing of all types. I think there’s a strong economic argument that when you create more supply, you will lower prices across the board.

Nick Hanauer:

Well, I mean, definitely if supply kept up with demand, it would be better than when it doesn’t keep up with demand. And we have this, I’m not sure what the differences are, but like 300,000 people have moved to King County over the last 10 years or something like that. And we for sure have not built 300,000 more houses or places for them to live. And so under the best of circumstances, it’s hard to see a scenario where prices wouldn’t go up a lot, just given how many more people need a place versus how many places there are. And this has all sorts of knock on effects on transportation and so on and so forth.

Glenn Kelman:

Absolutely. And my perspective on it is shaped by the fact that I spent 20 years of my life in San Francisco, where I watched the same transformation totally ruin that city. It used to be a Bohemian place. I lived in the mission, which had plenty of folks from Latin America. There were artists, there were just regular workers and now it is all tech all the time. And when I came to Seattle, I felt so relieved because you’d go to dinner and you’d meet somebody who worked at Weyerhaeuser or at Starbucks or who just had a regular job. And now it feels that you have to be at Amazon or Google or Facebook to really afford Seattle. And so for me, it’s a struggle for the city’s soul. And I think the city has handled it better than San Francisco.

Nick Hanauer:

I mean, I think it’s undeniable. I mean, I know it’s a fact that density in the city of Seattle is rising faster than any other city in the country. And just anecdotally, if you drive just around our city, on every corner, there’s a building being built that includes housing. So that’s very, very encouraging, but it has not happened fast enough or good enough.

Jessyn Farrell:

One of the things that I think is really interesting about this whole societal conversation is that we have a real focused conversation on urban form, right? Density versus not density, mixed use versus suburban style development. But one of the things that I’m really interested in is the different policies that either follow ownership or renters. We have within our debates around form, for example, like the ADU law that just changed in Seattle, right?

Glenn Kelman:

What are ADUs?

Jessyn Farrell:

ADUs are accessory dwelling units. You can sometimes notice cottages and regulars.

Glenn Kelman:

Explain it.

Jessyn Farrell:

That’s right. So you can now build a cottage on your property right on your, what used to be a single family home. And so we had [crosstalk 00:05:23] exactly-

Glenn Kelman:

[crosstalk 00:05:23] 300 square foot, one or two bedroom, little place in your backyard?

Jessyn Farrell:

[crosstalk 00:05:30] Exactly. And so the idea there is that we liberalized form, right? There are now new forms that can be built in the city, which is great. And on the supply side, that’s excellent, but we didn’t do anything around the financing side to help people be able to build those or to keep those affordable. So for example, you can go get a home equity line of credit to build one, but you probably can’t walk into your bank and get a cottage mortgage that’s fixed rate and has all the benefits of a mortgage. And so I’m curious about how financial policies should or should not interact with our urban form policies.

Glenn Kelman:

Well, I’m worried I’m going to run a foul of you, Nick, because I have this thesis about credit reform and how it’s affected American home buying capabilities. So you’ve had this wage stagnation that 10 or 15 years ago was offset by the expansion of predatory credit, subprime crisis and then-

Nick Hanauer:

That’s a it’s a nice way to put it.

Jessyn Farrell:

That’s right. And that’s another podcast.

Glenn Kelman:

But then we really limited the number of people who could access credit in America. And I meet them. They come to Redfin home buying classes, and they’re trying to figure out how they can buy a home and they can’t access the credit. And at the same time you have cash investors who view that as an arbitrage opportunity, where they buy properties and then rent them out to the people who can’t qualify for credit. And so if you’re going to eliminate this predatory lending, you have to have some facility that replaces it, where the federal government steps in and becomes a better creditor. And what that’s created is this market that Redfin and Cylo and Opendoor now compete in called the I buying market where we are a provider of liquidity of last resort. So someone who’s trying to sell one place and buy another used to be able to hold two mortgages. And now because they can’t, we buy the place that they-

Nick Hanauer:

They can’t? Is that true? I didn’t understand that. So they can’t-

Glenn Kelman:

Well, it’s much harder.

Nick Hanauer:

Almost no one can.

Glenn Kelman:

It’s much harder. You need to have cash on the barrel to buy the next place. And it’s hard to get a loan for that place when you still have the old place. My whole point is that there has long been this covenant in American society, both on the right and the left that we are going to help middle-class people buy homes and that the federal government was going to subsidize credit. And to some extent, we’ve stepped back from that by reforming credit and eliminating some of those predatory lending, but we haven’t replaced it with something else. And it’s had all these knock on effects that no one’s really talking about that have prevented people from getting into these homes.

Jessyn Farrell:

Yeah, that’s exactly right. I mean, one of the things that in this exploration that I think is really interesting is as a response to the housing crisis of the ’30s, where people were losing their homes because of the financial meltdown of 1929, 30-year fixed rate mortgages were created, invented as a policy. Somebody made that up. And so the question is what’s that next generation of access to credit to allow people to get into housing that’s more stable?

Glenn Kelman:

I would just radically expand the charter of FHA. There are these FHA loans. They’re not competitive. They’re very expensive. It’s hard to qualify for an FHA loan. Many people who are selling homes don’t want to sell it to an FHA buyer because of some of these requirements. And nobody is really paying attention to that anymore. If you are going to limit the private market’s ability to prey upon working class people and give them subprime loans, I totally support that. But then you have to have a better loan that replaces it. And instead, what you have is a set of rich people, the haves, who are able to get credit and a set of have nots who are not able to get credit. And it’s why home prices and rents are so out of whack. I can get somebody to pay my mortgage in two weeks. And the reason they’re willing to do that, the reason they’re willing to pay such a high rent is because they can’t qualify for the credit. So it has created this disjunction in the market.

Nick Hanauer:

Would you try to elaborate a little bit more on that disjunction because it seems obvious to you, but it’s probably not… It’s not obvious to me and it’s not obvious probably to our listeners. So tell us a little bit more about that.

Glenn Kelman:

Sure. Well, traditionally, when someone raises rents, eventually a builder will leaflet the apartment building and say, “Why are you paying 1,400 a month or 2,400 a month in rent? You could be paying a mortgage and owning a place for that price.” And the renters move out. And this balances the rental market with purchase prices. But right now those renters, when the rent goes up, can’t qualify for a mortgage and the landlord knows it. So as a result, if you are one of the people who can qualify for a mortgage and own a home, you can rent it out to someone who can’t qualify for a mortgage. And [crosstalk 00:10:31] they are paying your mortgage at a very high rental rate and you’re cash flowing the property in the second or third week of every month, because there’s such a premium right now on access to credit. It is hard to qualify for a mortgage. And to some extent we should say, well, it should be. Look at the subprime crisis.

Nick Hanauer:

That’s amazing.

Jessyn Farrell:

That’s a great insight.

Nick Hanauer:

That is something I definitely did not understand.

Glenn Kelman:

Can I give you one another dimension to it? I was trying to explain this I buying phenomenon because we’re in this business. I am somewhat reluctantly supportive of it. And the reason for my reluctance is this, that there is a difference in the US economy where consumer credit is somewhat tight. It is hard to qualify for a mortgage and corporate credit is ridiculously easy. You’ve got people from Saudi Arabia trying to throw hundreds of millions of dollars, hundreds of billions. Yes. Hundreds of billions of dollars at tech companies. So the world is a wash in cheap cash. Except if you’re poor.

Jessyn Farrell:

Except regular people. Or even if you’re just a regular person.

Glenn Kelman:

[crosstalk 00:11:40] I would say middle-class because we have these middle-class people who own a home and they want to move up to a slightly better home. And they can’t hold two mortgages at the same time for the old place in the new place. And so it used to be that we would reform the credit market so you could do that, but since we haven’t done that, you have these I buyers, these instant buyers who give you an offer that’s five to 10% below market. And that is the price of restrictive credit that people are willing to take a 5% or a 10% haircut on their property. And it’s because we have access to Saudi money-

Nick Hanauer:

And they don’t.

Glenn Kelman:

… that a middle-class consumer doesn’t. [crosstalk 00:12:22] And that’s because of well-meaning reforms to prevent predatory lending. But I would just submit that the government needs to step in and fill that gap. If there’s an irresponsible loan, let’s make a responsible loan.

Jessyn Farrell:

That’s right. We are with you 100%.

Glenn Kelman:

[crosstalk 00:12:36] So that would be my argument. And maybe there’s one other soap box that I want to jump on.

Jessyn Farrell:

Let’s do it.

Glenn Kelman:

If you look at a city like Irvine, it was this oligarchy or this corporate run government. Closer-

Jessyn Farrell:

In what sense? Because it was a university town or in what sense was it a corporate town?

Glenn Kelman:

Well, I don’t know the history perfectly, but I think the entire city was owned by one company that turned an orange grove, Orange County, into a bunch of tract housing. And it wasn’t very dense, but there was a perfect union between the municipal government and the developer. And now I still think that many local politicians would not be caught dead with a developer. And yet the developers are our salvation. I walked through Wallingford and I see the Black Lives Matter sign right next to the anti HALA sign. And it drives me crazy because nobody sees the contradiction that you have to build more housing and you have to partner with developers to do that. They cannot be the punchline, the villain, the bad guy, in every municipal fight. And so I just think every time a government has tried to do a deal, they’ve been branded as a sellout, especially in the coastal cities. And I just wanted to create some space for governments to create dense housing in partnership with developers on the understanding that developers should get a return.

Jessyn Farrell:

But I think that again, part of my intuition and I represented a lot of folks who had those signs and were Bernie voters and anti HALA, right? Like that odd oxymoronic, I’m a populist and I don’t want you living in my neighborhood, right? And so it’s this really strange, oxymoronic brain space where people are in. And one of the things I suspect is that we would get to a better place around the density/form argument if we were more explicit about the things that are holding people back like credit and even wages and other economic parts of the housing story. So I think if you’re focused just on supply and just on density, you’re not to get there, but when you bring those other parts of the story in, it might be a place where you can start to have people hear you in a different way.

Glenn Kelman:

Yes. I would still say there is no way to limit a rise in housing prices without massively increasing supply. I used to give more nuanced answers on this point. And now I feel like when I do that, it obscures my main point.

Jessyn Farrell:

Okay. Message received.

Glenn Kelman:

[crosstalk 00:15:21] It’s crude but it’s-

Nick Hanauer:

[crosstalk 00:15:23] I mean. I think there has to be a lot of nuance about what we build, how we build it, where we build it and by the way, who owns it because that’s another important issue, but it just cannot, but be arithmetically true that if you add 300,000 people to a place and only build 50,000 more places for them to live, there will be a problem. It will express itself in a variety of ways, including prices going up for housing. There’ll be other problems too. So I think we’re in violent agreement. And that lots and lots of cities, Seattle less, but San Francisco being the canonical example of what not to do, which is to exclude any building and just let the values rise to the benefit of the people who are already there essentially. And chase out anybody who can’t afford the new capital structures, that’s the wrong… Down that road leads to despair. We can’t do that.

Glenn Kelman:

I’ve just also experienced firsthand how hard it is to have that conversation. And this goes back to what we were talking about before the show that sometimes I don’t have the appetite to be controversial that I should. My neighbor was circulating a petition to stop a condo building a block away from our house. It would create some shade. She was worried it would bring in a different element. I wondered what that meant. And it was at this picnic where we shut down the block and everybody brings macaroni and cheese or hot dogs. And my wife said, “Just sign it. She’s gotten every single other person to sign it.” And I said I will not sign [crosstalk 00:17:15] petition, but it felt very uncomfortable.

And what I was trying to explain to her as she has a vision of Seattle as Manhattan, and I wanted to propose an alternative Seattle as Brooklyn, that it’s not quite 70 story skyscrapers, overlooking Central Park. It’s just three stories or four stories, townhouses and things like that. So I think Seattle really clings to its way of life. I was shocked when I came here that you could live 10 minutes from downtown and have a yard. And that’s what everyone loves about Capitol Hill or Queen Anne or wherever.

Nick Hanauer:

What’s not to love?

Glenn Kelman:

[crosstalk 00:17:55] Seattle. But what’s not to love is that it’s the widest place in the universe. Everybody in your neighborhood works for a tech company.

Nick Hanauer:

Yes.

Glenn Kelman:

Your kids grow up without having really seen how the rest of the world works. So I think people are waking up to that in Seattle. And I’m starting to appreciate the trade-offs of more supply, but I still think it’s worth it.

Jessyn Farrell:

Yeah, for sure. One of the things you can’t avoid in talking about housing is the deeply racial injustices that have been traded throughout the 20th century. And even up to the meltdown in 2008. And one of the questions that we have to wrestle with is how do we manage and how do we rectify racial inequity? And so in the private sector, what do you see as your role in that world? Just to give you a soft ball.

Glenn Kelman:

The currency…

Nick Hanauer:

Just to put you on the spot just a touch Glenn.

Glenn Kelman:

The currency of every brokerage is exclusivity. And people use that term aspirationally. When, if you think about what it means, and it’s excluding either poor people or Black people or someone like that. And so you just have to look not to 2008 or the 20th century, but two months ago. Newsday just published this massive study where they sent Black people and White people of similar financial profiles into Long Island, looking at neighborhoods that were either historically Black or historically White and got totally different treatment. They videotaped it. The real estate agents who delivered that service are still working at the same brokerages. It felt like 1953 listening to them. You heard the agents say, “I wouldn’t live in that neighborhood unless you want to be able to buy crack when you go to the 7/11 for diapers.” And so I read that. And the first thing I did when I saw it was just hit control F to make sure that a Redfin agent wasn’t one of those people. We employ thousands of people and there but for the grace of God go we.

And then you have an annual kickoff. And we actually brought in the Newsday people who did the study and said, God help you if you ever do this. And there’s a big debate in real estate because the whole unicorn premise behind Redfin and Zillow and Opendoor encompass all these companies that are getting billions of dollars is that it’s a winner take all market, that we’re going to create a private marketplace where the listings are only available on our website. And the industry finally said no to that because not every person knows to go to Redfin or Zillow or to Opendoor to whatever marketplace is trying to take all the inventory. And the idea that we have to share the inventory, even if it hurts our competitive interest so that we can make sure that people of all stripes see the inventory, has been a hard premise to let go of because it’s why we work so hard to get listing share is we wanted to have exclusive listings.

And I think every broker wants that-

Nick Hanauer:

Monopoly power.

Glenn Kelman:

And a monopoly might be good for one company or bad for another company. But in housing, the people it really hurts are the people who don’t belong to the club, who don’t know the secret handshake, who can’t get access to the properties because they’re going to the wrong website. So that’s the other thing that we’ve really been outspoken about is that you count pocket listings. Even if you are the share leader in a market, even if you have the number one brokerage website in America, you can’t hoard the inventory because you’re not just screwing another tech company. You’re screwing a bunch of consumers who don’t know better. And that has been a hard thing for our engineering team. Just as it’s been hard to tell our real estate agents that you can’t tell someone this is a good neighborhood or a bad neighborhood, because that’s based on your own social prejudice.

Nick Hanauer:

Oh, that’s interesting. I would not have considered. I just, I’m not a real estate agent. When you think about it of course, it makes perfect.

Jessyn Farrell:

That’s right. One of the books we’re reading is the Color of Law by Richard Rothstein. Have you read that? Have you come across that book?

Glenn Kelman:

I have read a review of it.

Jessyn Farrell:

It’s a really interesting history of race and housing in the 20th century. And one of the shocking things that I read was around the creation of the profession of appraisers, where literally in the late ’30s, people who were becoming appraisers were directed to look at the racial composition of a neighborhood and assign stability or instability based on whether it was a white dominant neighborhood or a predominantly African-American neighborhood. So the roots of this industry are really racial. And so you have to probably do a lot as a big institution to undo that.

Glenn Kelman:

Well, I think the other factor that perpetuates it is that it’s a sales job. So if you are a member of a minority, it’s hard for a Black real estate agent to get a White person to work with him because he just doesn’t know as many White people as a White real estate agent. And if you look at the statistics of who goes into this profession, it is overwhelmingly White. It is one of the most White professions there is. And it’s because you recruit customers from the country club where you belong.

Nick Hanauer:

It’s a network effect.

Glenn Kelman:

It’s basically…

Nick Hanauer:

That’s an interesting, right?

Glenn Kelman:

And it really makes a difference because this woman, Elizabeth Korver-Glenn, a professor, followed 10 real estate agents around Houston for two years. And what she found is that real estate agents actually do matter. That somebody thinks they can’t afford a property and she finds a lender who will do the deal. That a builder screws up something, and she gets the builder to come back and fix it. And so on one hand, that’s incredibly supportive of our role, but on the hand it just means you have to take it seriously. If Black customer doesn’t get seated at the right table in a restaurant, that effect may persist for a few hours that evening. But if you put someone in the wrong house, that’s generational.

And so we’ve just worked on this premise that with the internet, White people will hire Black real estate agents. Some of our highest producers are Black agents because they get a fair shot. The internet introduces them to a White customer. The White customer can see their reviews, can see where they’ve sold houses. And it’s not that people are intentionally racist. It’s just usually they hire the real estate agent they play tennis with.

Nick Hanauer:

Like somebody’s brother-in-law’s a real estate, right?

Glenn Kelman:

Yeah. So I hope the internet can mitigate some of that. But just as often, the internet has had this other effect that we talked about earlier, where in the rush to create some marketplace or monopoly, we focused on the most lucrative customers and our own interests instead of creating a really fair marketplace.

Jessyn Farrell:

But it does sound like data really matters, understanding what your real estate agents are doing. Being able to understand… I mean, what we track is what we’re able to measure. And so part of our broad, societal goal is to undo the racist paintings of this system, it really does seem like it matters to keep track of these… Let me restate it. We often think, I think, that racism in real estate has maybe changed quite a bit. But the story that you’re talking about, this is the same thing that was happening 60 years ago. So continuing to track seems to make sense. That seems to be an important tool.

Glenn Kelman:

It can work both ways. Let me give you one other dimension to it. So we’ve invested in machine learning that tries to recommend a listing that will make you come back to Redfin. You haven’t been on the site in a couple of months, and then you get a picture of a house on your phone. And there you are back on redfin.com. And because we’ve diversified our engineering team, there have been challenges recently about whether the algorithm is racist. And the person who built it said, “You don’t understand how machine learning works. We didn’t program any parameters into it. We told it to find a way to please people. And it figured that out.”

It figured out what neighborhoods they wanted to see. It figured out what listings they wanted to see. And then what blew the programmers mind behind that machine learning algorithm was that it could still be racist in trying to please someone who wants to live in an all White neighborhood but hasn’t quite said that, or doesn’t want to be surrounded by people from other classes. The algorithm could perpetuate just different stereotypes. And that’s been hard for me too, because man, if you run a website, you want to get people to come back to that website.

Nick Hanauer:

And that would be challenging. What a challenge that is as a business leader and manager to…

Glenn Kelman:

Well, let me give you one final dimension to it and you guys can edit this as you see fit. But the most recent issue has been around grade schools because we give a rating for every school and parents are dead set on perpetuating privilege. It’s another topic that we talked about before this interview. How can I deploy all of my resources to make sure that my kid grows up in a safe neighborhood and goes to a great school? And these numeric ratings don’t take into account that a school may be in a lower income neighborhood, drawing students who have historical disadvantages. It just looks at their test scores. And that information is being used at the decisive moment of neighborhood formation when a White couple or a Black couple is deciding where to live.

And so that has been a challenge where some of the folks at Redfin have said we shouldn’t be publishing those scores. And I said, “Well, what if consumers want this?” How are we going to ever talk people out of getting what they want when all the chips are on the table, when they’re about to make the biggest transaction in their lives? And that to me is the hardest thing about striving for equality is that the government is in this arms race with every rich family in America to try to figure out how can we level the playing field, even as piano lessons and [crosstalk 00:28:04] and everything else?

Nick Hanauer:

Thinking about what my family has done. It’s just, it’s so egregious and embarrassing.

Glenn Kelman:

And it’s hard for a website not to enable part of that because these educated consumers who want to use the web as a resource are trying to get all this data from us and we have it. But sometimes when we show it to them, it drives more people into one neighborhood than another, right?

Jessyn Farrell:

The consequences are-

Glenn Kelman:

Mercer Island stays Mercer Island.

Jessyn Farrell:

And really it gets to that tough debate of schools and housing and neighborhoods. And that you can’t have that conversation about school equity and the fairness of resources without talking about housing.

Nick Hanauer:

So do you think Glenn, that businesses, but particularly real estate businesses have an important role in moving the country towards a better housing future? And if so, how? What do you think?

Glenn Kelman:

I do and I don’t. I’m just skeptical about corporate philanthropy. When you look at the amount of money that we need to deploy toward housing, there’s only one entity that’s capable of that and that is the government. And so the number one thing that businesses can do is support higher taxes. I should not have a disproportionate say about housing in Seattle. It should be our duly elected officials. And the way I can support them is when they ask for more money to solve a homeless problem, I say yes.

Nick Hanauer:

Yes. And so for our listeners, I just would love to just as a sidebar note that in the horrific head tax debate, which took place in our city a year and a half, two years ago around the imposition of a very small, essentially a payroll tax on big companies to fund a housing and homelessness, Glenn and Nick, I think were the only two business leaders in Seattle to not sign this horrific letter saying that if we impose this tax all the businesses in the city would leave and collapse. And so yay Glenn.

Jessyn Farrell:

Thank you.

Glenn Kelman:

Well, I know if I deserve praise for that because the whole company felt that way. I think what’s really hard for me-

Nick Hanauer:

I am sure that the whole companies of all the people who signed those letters felt that way. It was just the CEOs who didn’t feel that way. I bet you most people-

Glenn Kelman:

[crosstalk 00:30:35] That may be true. That may be true.

Nick Hanauer:

How embarrassing is this that… Anyway, but go on.

Glenn Kelman:

But I want to speak to that challenge for a minute because the platform on which I’m standing, the reason that you’re interviewing me is because I am the CEO of Redfin and Redfin has gone public and done reasonably well, but their employees who voted for Donald Trump and employees who voted for Barack Obama. And whenever I’m asked to take a political position, it’s so fraught because I want to honor all of them. And that’s another reason that I came here to talk to you. is I think many CEOs are struggling with how to square their personal conscience with their responsibility to represent everyone at the company. And I think that came to a head in this debate over the head tax. And I felt lucky that the company was fairly unified on this position.

And just to explain our position because it is nuanced. I do not love the form of the head tax, but I felt that-

Nick Hanauer:

Definitely imperfect.

Glenn Kelman:

…we had gone through a process where we’d shot down a state income tax, we’d shot down a city income tax, that we’d cornered the city in a place where they had no other way to raise revenue. And I told the CEOs who put together that letter, many of whom are my friends, “I will sign the letter if you say I’m a post the head tax, but here’s a tax I would support.” And sometimes I just want to email them on the anniversary of that tax’s death and say, “I still haven’t seen the tax that you would support.” Because it is fine to say this isn’t the right one, but then say which one you would pay.

Nick Hanauer:

Yes. Right. Exactly.

Glenn Kelman:

I do not want to cast myself as righteous. I really believe that we are fallen, fallible creatures, that my opinion is just as likely to be right as someone else’s. And the only way I figure it out is by listening and trying to reach across and build bridges. And I think your position would be something more like you have to have conviction, you have to put it out there and then later you can compromise. But I just worry about vilifying the other CEOs in town because sooner or later we’ve got to build a great coalition with all of them.

Nick Hanauer:

Well that coalition has emerged.

Nick Hanauer:

Anyway, I think we do need to wrap up.

Jessyn Farrell:

But we’d love to ask you a question that we often ask, which is why do you do this work that you do

Glenn Kelman:

Redfin?

Jessyn Farrell:

Yeah.

Glenn Kelman:

I love Redfin. It is the best thing that has ever happened to me, except for my wife and family. I love it so much. I worked in enterprise software. I started a company called Plumtree Software. And it felt mission-driven, a band of brothers and sisters. And then I realized after it went public, that we were selling software to Frito-Lay and Pepsi and Halliburton and the military and everyone else. And that some of those were good and some of those were bad, but it didn’t matter to us. And so I just decided that I wanted to do something good. I almost went into medicine because I thought if I have these abilities, I should try to help people, but I love business. And this is a way to be mission-driven where we can make real estate better for regular folks. And I still get to work on websites and do lots of creative things. So it’s been the best thing that ever happened to me.

Jessyn Farrell:

That is so great. It is so great to have you on the show. Thank you.

Nick Hanauer:

Thank you so much.

Glenn Kelman:

Thanks.

Ashley:

On the next episode of Pitchfork Economics, everything you need to know about the expanded child tax credit with a nationally recognized expert in poverty law, University of Tennessee law, professor Wendy Bach.

Speaker 5:

Pitchfork Economics is produced by Civic Ventures. If you liked the show, make sure to subscribe, rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Find us on Twitter and Facebook at Civic Action and Nick Hanauer. Follow our writing on medium at Civic Skunk Works and peek behind the podcast scenes on Instagram at Pitchfork Economics. As always, from our team at Civic Ventures, thanks for listening. See you next week.