So Long, 2008

At today’s all-hands meeting, Redfin surveyed our 2008 accomplishments alongside what we wanted to do better in 2009. It was a good exercise, both so we could put to rest our mistakes, but also see how far we’ve come. Here is what we accomplished in the past 12 months:

• Decreased the cost of bringing a new market to profits by 4x.
• Increased transactions 23% when transaction volumes in many markets were down 50%.
• Increased home tours performed 342%, mostly near the end of 2008; our pipeline is strong.
• Increased customer satisfaction 27% (is Redfin the only brokerage that measures Net Promoter Score?)
• Got 12 new 5-star reviews on Yelp, in Seattle, San Francisco and Irvine.
• Published a study showing Redfin buyers negotiate a larger discount off list price, by $3,594.
• Increased revenues 41% when prices declined in major markets by 18%.
• ­Increased total visits 4x.
• Increased the number of visitors from Google 6x.
• Increased inventory 60%:
  • New city: Chicago
  • New sources: for-sale-by-owner and bank-owned listings
  • New types of listings: townhouses, apartment buildings, undeveloped land
• Earnings above plan by 17%
• Shipped 7 major releases, which included the following features:
  • Low-latency MLS import, synchronizing with nearly every MLS every 15 minutes
  • Open-house search
  • Search by neighborhood
  • Neighborhood pages with stats and charts
  • Google StreetView
  • Google Maps
  • Subscribe to listings by RSS
  • Download listing data to Excel
  • Agent profiles, with customer reviews
  • Safari browser support
  • Tour wizard
  • MyActiveListings: monitor traffic to your listing and where it came from
  • In-line registration
  • Similar listings
  • Notes
  • Visual redesign of site
  • Removal of Boston’s registration requirement

Tomorrow, we’ll talk about the challenges Redfin faces in 2009.  We’d love to hear what you’d like to see Redfin achieve this year.

First however, we wanted to thank you for your support. Every day, we get email messages, survey responses, online reviews, forums posts, tweets, comments, blog posts and calls from folks eager to help us. Your ideas, complaints and compliments get forwarded, debated, quoted, repeated and puzzled over. It helps us win arguments, develop new ideas, work harder, think clearly, give more. It has made it much easier to build a consumer-driven company.

2008 was a hard year for startups, harder still for real estate companies. But through it all, Redfin is still becoming the company we have always wanted it to be. We are still having fun. Thanks for helping us get this far. And happy new year!