Is The White House for Sale?

June 13, 2010
6 Comments

As we looked through the latest properties to hit the market this weekend, we came across a rather famous address that is apparently now for sale: 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW aka The White House.

Redfin has the executive lodging listed for $10 million. The 55,000 square-foot property has a price per square foot of $182.

Obviously this is an error. It looks like Redfin software pulled an example listing from the website Owners.com by mistake. That example listing was the White House. We have emailed Redfin for comment.

Aside from the price per square foot calculation, the thing that we like best about the listing is that it is for sale by owner.

Update: Redfin has fixed the mistake.

6 Comments

Matt Goyer - Redfin said at 12:07 am on Monday June 14, 2010:
Whoops! We’ll get that taken down .

Kristin said at 10:38 am on Monday June 14, 2010:
Well, it got my attention at least. Nice one for a Monday morning!

BH said at 10:54 am on Monday June 14, 2010:
This is a good example of why sites like Redfin, Zillow, Trulia are unreliable. I have had buyers and sellers contact me after a sale wanting to know why their property is on one of these sites with a different price and a new agent or a buyer insisting I show them a property that is on one of these sites, but which is no longer on the market or never was. I don’t know where they are getting all of their data, but it is often out of date or just blatantly incorrect.

Matt Goyer - Redfin said at 3:11 pm on Monday June 14, 2010:
Hi BH,

Unlike Zillow and Trulia we pull from MRIS every 15 minutes so our data should be accurate. In this case the listing came through one of our for sale by owner partners and we removed it as soon as we were notified about the mistake.

We blogged about how it happened here:
http://blog.redfin.com/washingtondc/2010/06/no_no_the_white_house_is_not_for_sale.html

If in the future you find a listing on Redfin that is out of date and causing confusion for your clients just let us know at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) and we’ll get it fixed.

Daniel Howard said at 5:13 pm on Monday June 14, 2010:
BH—Unlike Trulia, RedFin seem to actually care about maintaining accurate data. I have flagged properties on Trulia a few times only to hear back a few days later that since they were scraping bogus data from somewhere else there’s nothing they could do. Redfin seem to actually care about fixing errors. I’d rather have more information than less, so if Redfin is good about bringing the information in and subsequently correcting bad data I look at that as the best of both worlds.

Trulia really turned me off badly by their unconcern for bad data. Redfin sees this as an opportunity to demonstrate quick customer service. That means I’m more likely to use and subsequently purchase through Redfin.

Andrew said at 5:38 pm on Monday June 14, 2010:
Check out the city’s assessment for it: http://citizenatlas.dc.gov/atlasapps/propertyhometab.aspx?QString= type in 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW. Pretty penny!