Archive for November, 2007
November 27, 2007
Just before Thanksgiving, ace Redfin product manager & superblogger Matt Goyer asked for your advice on how we could make it easier for our search site visitors to add filters on stuff like price, bedrooms and bathrooms to their queries. We offered a $250 prize for the best suggestion. One intrepid designer suggested displaying the filter on bedrooms and bathrooms alongside the search box; a second design was modeled after Craigslist, and a third simply showed a “More Options” link alongside the search box. One person called to ask, “Where’s my $250?” Many people suggested focusing on the most popular filters. Which begged the question, what are the most popular filters?
Enter Michael Smedberg, our tower of analytical power, who parsed our logs on November 15, 2007 to find out what people were asking for in hundreds of thousands of queries:
- Sex, drugs and money were not filter options and so were excluded from this analysis.
- 36% of queries exclude condos, 3% exclude houses, while everyone else accepts the default, which shows both houses and condos.
- 48% set a maximum price, while 25% set a minimum price.
- 31% filter on the number of bedrooms, while 20% filter on the number of bathrooms.
- 15% filter on interior square footage, while only 5% filter on lot size.
We won’t take away any search options, having made that mistake once already. But we will probably pop to the top the most popular options, price and the number of bedrooms. Of course I could hardly be bothered with Michael’s analysis because I spent all day in my office watching this beautiful claymation video of New York, which like our most intense emotions or favorite songs, moves at different speeds and in startling directions (qualifying it as today’s bonus link):
November 21, 2007
While one wing of the Redfin office wrestles about changes to the home tours program the other wing of the office is up in arms over how we surface search options on the map page.
When we re-designed our website in April one of the changes we made was hiding the search options. The reasoning behind this controversial design was that since users spend most of their time navigating the map and only occasionally change the number of beds or square footage that they’re looking for, we should make the map as large as possible and move the search options to an overlay. The overlay then only appears when you give focus to the search input box or click a widget.
Initially to display the search overlay pictured above users would need to click the link ‘Filter Search’:
However, we heard occasional stories of users not knowing they could search on number of beds or price. So our next design was to include a drop down widget besides the search button. This is reminiscent of what many Windows applications do or what Facebook does.
But still we heard stories of users not knowing they could change their search options. With our next release we’re looking at combining both the link and drop down widget approachs by moving the drop down widget and changing the name on the link to hint at what it enables you to change:
Unfortunately a number of co-workers stormed into my office yesterday, criticized the design and called me names. If I were to pass you the Redfin Search Product Manager baton how would you solve this discoverability problem? Feedback welcome but Photoshop submissions preferred :). To sweeten the pot we’re offering $250 if we use your submission. However, if you have a winning submission the real question is, why haven’t you applied for our interaction designer position yet?
And with that I’m off to Whistler. Happy Thanksgiving!
November 21, 2007
As an agent with a traditional brokerage I was continually surprised at how much of my job was selling myself instead of selling real estate. Suddenly everyone became a potential and desperately needed paycheck (a great way to alienate friends by the way). Since clients come to Redfin, we don’t have to beg for business and I get to do what I’m best at: selling real estate, advising buyers and sellers, negotiating contracts, and closing deals. I no longer need to waste time, money, or paper sending out mailings that just get thrown away. As a traditional commission-based agent I needed the full commission in order to cover my astronomical marketing expenses and to make up for the many, many hours of driving around buyers that sometimes ended up going elsewhere to buy (ouch!).
The traditional brokerage office atmosphere was dominated by competition and secrecy. Now I’m part of an office where all the agents work cooperatively, pooling resources to better serve clients instead of one where agents work by themselves, for themselves.
One of the greatest benefits of working as a Redfin agent is the security of having a regular paycheck and fantastic medical benefits. Not having to deal with the stress of wondering when my next commission check will come in (or IF it will come in) is priceless. I get a competitive salary with bonuses based on customer satisfaction. Granted, the system isn’t perfect because it can be difficult to gauge accurately customer satisfaction and how it relates to my performance. I have had the painful and seemingly unfair experience of losing bonus money after working with all my heart and soul.
I know, I know, you’re wondering if a Redfin agent makes more or less than a traditional agent. Well…it depends on how successful of a commission-based agent you are. If you are in or near the top one percent, you will likely take a pay cut. However, for most agents, you are very likely to make more at Redfin. As a Redfin agent, I no longer stress about when the next check will come in, how much of it will go to cover broker fees, marketing expenses, and individual medical insurance premiums (ahhhhh). Having said that, many agents here have taken a pay cut because they really believe in the mission and success of this company, plus many of us have stock options.
The biggest dilemma for me in making the leap was if I was willing to give up total control of my schedule. It was hard to move over to a corporate environment and let someone else tell me what hours to work. Because the industry doesn’t traditionally follow a 9-6pm Monday through Friday schedule, I sometimes find myself working a solid 8 or 9 hour day and then going home to continued evening and weekend negotiations.
In the end the deal-sealer was the internal company motto: “Do the right thing.” It is really refreshing and exciting to work for someone who puts doing the right thing above making money. I am not suggesting that all traditional agents are unscrupulous money hungry fiends, in fact I know many who are some of the most genuine and ethical people I know; but sometimes when your livelihood is on the line, doing what pays the bills comes before doing the right thing and I will never have to do that as long as I work at Redfin. Having been here and seen how this business can be so different, I could never go back. How ‘bout you? Have I converted anyone?
November 19, 2007
Changes at Redfin have made all sorts of headlines this year, but the only change our customers really want from us is more home tours. Historically, the first four-hour home tour has been free, and the rest cost $250 up front.
One isn’t enough. We’ve never had a focus group where customers didn’t bay for more tours, while the interns heedlessly wolfed the catered sushi.
So in yet another mutation from the dainty little web company we originally imagined ourselves to be, we’ve now got a new proposal to run by you: quadrupling the number of home tours customers can get from us before paying any money.
Of course there’s a catch. In fact there’re three:
- You have to be pre-approved to buy the places we’re touring: it’s ok to look, but let’s at least make sure we’re in the right ballpark.
- The home tours last two hours, not four: most people want to see three or four homes in one go, not eight or ten.
- For home tours #3 and #4, we take $250 per tour out of your refund: for someone who took all four tours, this would reduce the average refund from around $10,000 to $9,500, and only if you end up buying through Redfin.
After tour #4, you could still pay $250 up-front for additional tours.
We’re hoping this won’t screw up our per-transaction costs, mostly because the tours will be shorter, and asking for pre-approval letters from a lender will make sure customers getting a free tour meet us halfway.
We were thinking of giving this policy a try at least for the rest of the year, starting after Thanksgiving, but since the topic has been so controversial with customers, we thought we’d see if anyone had any refinements to propose first. Thoughts?
November 14, 2007
Michael Arrington just posted onTechCrunch a Redfin essay arguing that venture capitalists put too much stock in an entrepreneur’s experience. Brimming with emotion, we saw that within seconds of publication, someone had already left a comment! What a thrill! We breathlessly opened the page to see what our first reader had to say:
“Stop with the guest posts. We only come here to hear from Mike and Duncan.”
Somewhere in Seattle, a small office became very quiet. Moments later, Michael put the hammer down with his special green font: “do you guys practice at being assholes or does it come naturally?”
Later, Guy Kawasaki posted his own version of the essay, prompting my second-favorite comment: “after 20 years of unfocused attention to my various start ups, I am now relatively broke. I mean the house is paid for, the kids are in private school, but we now fly commercial and sit in the back unless there’s a cheap upgrade.” It was written at 3 a.m.
(The National: Fake Empire.)
November 14, 2007
Draper Fisher Jurvetson hosted a CEO Conference Monday in Half Moon Bay. Just about all the CEOs in the DFJ portfolio were there, mostly to talk among ourselves about how best to stave off the usual fate, which is to lose a lot of money and then get fired.
And yet we all went into it with the unfounded optimism peculiar to California: as if we might find a new best friend, or start a religion, or get swept up in an apocalypse (fires, earthquakes, Internet bubbles) that no one could previously have been convinced to take seriously.
I went curious to see what CEOs as a group would be like, as if to see what I might become: I imagined a convocation of X-Men, each with her own freakish flaws and special powers, or of business-casual, bloodlessly suave Agent Smiths.
And there were plenty of both, more than can be described here in any organized way. An Israeli entrepreneur working on a top-secret project with Eastern European X-Box hackers complained that investors in his first business wouldn’t let him use the service he built to run porn. “But this time,” he promised, “lots of porn.”
In his keynote speech, Tim Draper made a plausible case for colonizing Mars, showed a photo that may have been of himself standing astride a slaughtered elephant, and asked the crowd to sing along to a song that he composed and performed. (When I later asked a DFJ partner about the song, he said, “Oh, I’m the drummer in Tim’s band.”) It made me wonder if every titan of venture capital is really just a camp counselor on steroids, nudging his little charges along on their projects.
I felt bad for the follow-up acts. A Chinese entrepreneur took the stage to boast that his countrymen were “the Jews of Asia.” A banker dusted off “Internet growth” charts from 1999. But then a CEO in a pastel tie and matching pocket square explained how he evaluated job seekers in terms of the way they made people feel, a leap of empathy and insight that it had never occurred to me to consider.
The folks running ad-driven sites clucked that big advertisers still don’t get it. And we all agreed that the real problem was that nobody can beat Google in direct response ads, while for the zillion-dollar branding campaigns, TV and radio still pack a bigger emotional wallop.
We competed to say how little money we spent and how few people we employed, which climaxed when a San Francisco entrepreneur said he rented industrial space in Potrero Hill for $2 a square foot — ten times less than Redfin pays for its truly vile south-of-Market office. On the phone later that night, Redfin’s HR swami talked me out of cutting everyone’s pay.
Things went downhill from there. Over drinks, a games entrepreneur boasted of receiving letters from men who lost their wives because they couldn’t stop playing his game, MechWarrior. “You have to believe they might be happier alone,” he said. I misheard a young lady complain about the person who “did her nails” and told her “I’d love to have that nose.”
A guy from Los Angeles in a Thriller-style leather coat told me his creative partner was Ashton Kutcher. An Internet media mogul said he moved to LA so he could feel like part of the entertainment industry but discovered that “down there, the bassist in a third-rate bar-band has more street cred than we do.”
Everyone nodded. We knew all about being nobodies. But then we all went to bed that night in a real hotel — not on some friend’s twingey mattress – kings of ridiculously small, ragtag empires that seemed for the moment as unprecarious and boundless as the sea.
(Thanks to DFJ for hosting the conference).
November 8, 2007
We are voices without faces. We are emoticons. We are Redfin Direct Agents.
On Tuesday, November 13th, all of that changes. Redfin is opening our Seattle headquarters to current clients, past clients, and those on the fence. You will be treated to the finest pizza and beer that $300 can buy and demo unreleased website features on a floor to ceiling screen. You can even chat with Redfin’s engineers about your likes and dislikes. We call this event The Red Carpet.
While no metaphor suffices, an image of Gene Wilder comes to mind. If Glenn is Gene, I guess that makes me an Oompa-Loompa and makes you Charlie.
Come one, come all. The standard issue Redfin uniform is jeans and a cotton sweater. I think I’ll wear a collared shirt on Tuesday. You can wear whatever you like.
The Details
Date and Time: Tuesday, November 13th, from 5:30pm to 7:30pm.
Location: Dexter Horton Building at 710 2nd Ave Suite 600 in Downtown Seattle.
Parking: There are many nearby garages. Street parking is also available.
Our humble headquarters does have limited space. Please RSVP to donald -dot- desantis -at- redfin -dot- com. We will confirm you on our list and make sure that there is enough food for everyone.
November 5, 2007
Redfin has been futzing around with videos for years. We all thought a video was the best way to explain how to buy a house online, but nobody wanted to be in one. We experimented with Angela interviewing me at double-speed so that our voices sounded funny; we recorded a screen-capture of a new release of our website set to “I’m Too Sexy,” a song I am listening to right now.
We got interviewed by Robert Scoble, who was so goofy and high-spirited that we all forgot to be nervous, or we leapt into public food-fights with members of the real estate industry or gave a speech on camera talking about this blog. But we never really explained on tape how Redfin works.
Then our fearless engineering leader, Michael Young, saw a Common Craft video, which explains abstruse concepts by animating drawings using paper and string. The style fit us perfectly: low-budget, simple and fun. It was new, but kind of old too.
Next, we’re going to make one of those pop-up stories, where you can pull an arrow to move elements of the drawing around.The two-person team behind the video, Lee and Sachi, cranked this baby out in a couple of weeks. When Lee and Sachi get back from Mexico, we have to give them feedback on the video. Let us know if you have any suggestions on how to make the video better. We hope to get it up on our site in a week or so.
Bonus link: check out our devblog post on why we switched from MySQL to Postgres.
