Fortune Favors the Bold: Redfin Expands to Chicago
Here in the wee hours of Thursday morning, Redfin is opening for business in Chicago. It’s our eighth market, but the first new one in nearly a year. And our fourth major release in the last five months.
I hadn’t realized until this week how much we’d all missed expanding. Over the winter, we got a little chicken about opening new markets. But the requests for us to come to Chicago kept piling up (more than 1,200!). And, as nearly all of our markets slid back into the black, our expansion mojo has come back too.
Mark Reitman, who helped beat back an Illinois anti-rebate bill this winter, is running Redfin Chicago. Redfin veteran Rachelle King is coming out from Seattle to get us off to a flying start.
Redfin Search Available Across Most of the States We Serve
And we aren’t stopping there! In fact, the new website increases by nearly 40% the number of homes you can search from Redfin.com, in far-flung parts of Washington, Virginia, Maryland, Massachusetts and Illinois, over 100 new counties in all. We’ll probably never have agents in any of these areas, and so we have no way to make money directly from this traffic today. But we hope that a more national presence will drive more people to our brokerage in the urban centers, too.
And in any event, opening up Redfin Search is a big deal for consumers, a sort of rural electrification project but with real estate data. Because we aren’t just talking about any old YAREW (Yet Another Real Estate Website) coming to Peoria. We’re Redfin dang it! And that means the real-deal MLS listings, with price history, tax records, past sales, days on market and all sorts of other information that far-flung consumers sometimes struggle to get on their own.
Google Street View and Microsoft Bird’s Eye, All In One Site
Meanwhile, we keep striving to make Redfin Search better. The Chicago-version of the site features Google Street View alongside Microsoft Bird’s Eye imagery, so you can zoom aro
und most listings from different perspectives, for a complete portrait of a neighborhood or a property. I think we’re the first ones to do that.
We’ve also fixed up how we search for bank-owned properties. Sue McAllister of the San Jose Mercury News had previously complained that we allowed her to search separately for those bank-owned properties not yet listed in the MLS, but that we didn’t also highight the bank-owned listings that already are in the MLS. Good bust Sue! We fixed that this time around. You can ask for bank-owned listings in the MLS or straight from the bank.
What else? You’ll notice the site now works with Firefox 3.0, a compatibility gap that this whole last week had been embarrassing us. And the details we bring up for each listing should be a lot zippier, too.
Check out the new site, play with the new imagery, see what $1,000,000 buys you along Lakeshore Drive, and by all means tell us what you think!
First photo credit: Today is a Good Day, Flickr
Real Estate Radio USA Episode 146 | Real Estate Radio USA said:
[...] CEO, Glenn Kelman. We always enjoy having Glenn on the program and spoke with him today about his expansion into Chicago today, his recent media celebrity, the prospective expansion of the Redfin business model, and what his [...]
June 26, 2008 3:30 PM
What’s new on Redfin? | Redfin Seattle Sweet Digs said:
[...] Glenn Kelman’s post on the recent release for more on the new site [...]
June 26, 2008 7:09 PM
Sarah Pappalardo said:
Amen to Firefox 3.0 compatibility! I’m excited to be crankin’ out some North Shore bloggery.
June 27, 2008 10:20 AM
reese said:
glad to hear that you’re coming to chicago. Good luck in the Chi!
June 27, 2008 10:04 PM
Pete said:
Glenn and his team is very responsive. I posted a question yesterday regarding Chicago area and he emailed back within hours. My personal view is under the pressure from players like Redfin, the old houses could be forced to open up their databse and let the customers do similar searches. The key, as always then, is customer service.
June 28, 2008 7:54 AM
justin nelson said:
so people buying real estate in chicago will be assisted by someone from seattle? have they had a chance to be briefed by local experts about which buildings have frequent special assessments, etc?
June 30, 2008 1:20 PM
Glenn Kelman said:
Mark Reitman runs our Chicago business out of Schaumburg; Mark actually responded to Pete.
June 30, 2008 1:35 PM
Matt Goyer’s Real Estate Blog » Blog Archive » FF3, Zoom In, New Details Layout, Chicago said:
[...] Last week we released a new version of Redfin.com. [...]
July 1, 2008 12:58 PM
BONNIEB said:
I’M AN IL AGENT AND I LOVE YOU GUYS!
WHAT A GREAT SITE, TOPS FOR RESEARCH,
OPEN TO ALL AS IT SHOULD BE!!
BEATS THE HELL OUT OF ANY MLS SITE ( overpriced-
racket-buyin- exclusive- old-outdated )
WELCOME TO CHICAGO REDFIN
THANKS FOR COMING HERE
July 9, 2008 6:08 PM
Home-Brews & Data Prove Popular in Chicago | Redfin Chicago Sweet Digs said:
[...] can get more info and RSVP here. I’m Mark Reitman, Redfin’s intrepid Market Manager in newly opened Chicago, and I’ll be there in August [...]
July 17, 2008 1:50 PM
New Website, New Boston MLS Rules: Unleash The Hounds! | Redfin Corporate Blog said:
[...] green line, which after a year of toodling along, just got passed by Chicago (orange line) in its second month of operations. [...]
October 1, 2008 8:32 AM
Our Kind of Town… | Redfin Corporate Blog said:
[...] through months of falling real estate prices, Redfin was a little nervous when we opened Chicago, our first major new market in a year. We couldn’t quite get it launched until mid-summer, and we worried that by late fall it [...]
October 30, 2008 4:02 PM
Redfin Creates a Marketplace for Agents | Redfin Corporate Blog said:
[...] Bring Redfin to New Areas Already, our partners are helping us cover areas consumers can already search on Redfin — Southern California’s Inland Empire, Santa Cruz, Sonoma and parts of [...]
February 11, 2009 7:34 AM
We’re No Sell-Outs | Redfin Corporate Blog said:
[...] current program has been under construction for nearly a year. The expansion of search to outlying areas in June 2008, the initial release of simple agent profiles in August 2008 and the [...]
February 13, 2009 9:20 AM
cheap checks said:
I agree with your idea but, there are different school of thoughts producing different ideas that has to brought into consideration.
February 28, 2009 2:37 AM
3d displays said:
Magnetic is the industry-leader in auto-stereoscopic 3D LCD displays, 3D content creation, 3D digital signage solutions and 3D software. See 3D without the glasses with Magnetic’s Enabl3d 3D displays.
April 15, 2009 3:15 AM
Start Spreading the News… | Redfin Corporate Blog said:
[...] don’t share data with newcomers. Sacramento and Long Island are our first new markets since we opened Chicago last June, and our 10th overall. We’ve got at least three more left in us by year [...]
April 23, 2009 5:42 PM