Find an Agent, More Inventory, More Search Options,…

It’s been a busy few months and an all hands on deck effort as we changed not just our service (Read Glenn’s blog post on the service changes) but updated the website to match. Every page was touched, all the content was re-written, and no pixel was left un-turned (except the blog layouts which will be updated later this week ).

Here’s a walk through of everything that’s new.

New Homepage, Header and Design

Returning visitors go straight to the map so you may not have noticed our new home page.

To help folks navigate the site we released a new header with drop down menus making it easy to find an agent or more information on buying or selling. We’ve also tweaked our design in a number of spots to make it easier to read, more user friendly and ensure that you can quickly engage an agent when you have questions.

Learn About Our Agents

We’ve had agent profiles showing their recent transactions and customer ratings for a while now but with our release today they’re much more accessible and now feature an agent’s posts in our forums and their active listings. Take a look at Gina’s profile to see what we mean. With today’s changes you can now meet agents at agent office hours or our home buying class.

In addition every details page has a “Work With A Redfin Agent” button that takes you to an agent chooser to help you get started:

15% More Inventory

We now have all the MLS listed homes for sale in every market we’re in:

• Multi-family: Duplexes, triplexes and whole apartment buildings. If you want to buy a two to four unit building, Redfin can help.
• Land: If you’re up for the challenge!
• “Other”: Parking spots, moorage, house boats.

Here’s what the icons look like:

We also upgraded the Seattle and Ventura County homes for sale feeds.

More Search Options

You asked, we listened.

• Separate Out Townhouses: Our most frequent feature request in Seattle is to enable people to get rid of townhouses from their searches. Now you can!
• Parking and Garages: In San Francisco and other densely populated places folks really want to find places with parking. In suburban places they want to find garages. Now you can do both.
• Waterfront: When only the best or most expensive will do, this will help you find it.

On our neighborhood pages we also added a “Most Popular” tabs so you can see what’s hot. Here’s what’s popular in Boston.

Features for a Distressed Market

• Price reduced: Quickly find listings that have been recently reduced to jump on a new deal or ones that haven’t had one in a while in the hopes you get to them before they reduce again.
• Short sales: Exclude them from your search since they’re so hard to buy.
• Property history: Now see a home’s complete history.
• CDOM: In Seattle and Boston we now show the cumulative days on market direct from the MLS.

Take Notes

Every listing details or past sale page now has a notes box. You can now keep track of your first impressions and notes from seeing an open house or going on a tour. See all your notes on one page.

Offer and Listing Wizards

We’ve also improved our offer and listing wizards making it easier than ever to get started with Redfin.

We Hope You Like It

Thanks for all your feedback leading up to this release; we ran over two dozen focus groups and usability studies! They were at times painful to watch.

And a big thanks to our rockstar dev team and everyone else and Redfin. We hope the site is better than ever and that this release will be the one that takes Redfin mainstream.

If you have any suggestions or find any bugs let us know in the comments! In the meantime we’ll keep working on the next release of Redfin.