Bust out the cheese-steaks—Redfin has arrived in Philly! The Philadelphia real estate market is our 19th market overall and our first in more than a year. But it’s a big one: today, the number of listings on our site grew by 8.5%. We hired an 18-year real estate veteran, Linda Wolbers, to build and manage our team of local Philadelphia Real Estate Agents.
What took us so long? It’s hard to figure out how to deliver great service and still pay agents good money in a place like Philly, where the average home sells for $182,000. In our first expansion market, San Francisco, the average is now $894,000. We’ve learned how to stay busy from summer to winter, how to focus on a handful of neighborhoods rather than the whole town, and how long to wait to make any money.
Even people who don’t work with our agents will probably go nuts just for the online tools. Redfin is the first brokerage website in Philly to give consumers the whole enchilada: complete pricing history, eyewitness comments from agents who have toured the home, as well as pictures and prices of past sales.
This means that Philly real estate ‘phanatics’ now have direct access to the same MLS data used by local agents, with details no other Philadelphia broker has ever displayed. It also means the top-rated mobile applications for real estate are now available in Philly, so all that information is at your fingertips as you walk through a house.
With such a big data advantage, we expect our online traffic from Philly to take off like a shot. Even though our newer markets tend to be smaller, they mostly grow faster and faster as Redfin becomes known nationwide. It now takes us about four months to reach 100,000 website visits in a new market, whereas a few years ago it took eight.
This is especially true when we open a market like Philly, in close proximity to places where we’re already well known, like the Washington DC real estate market and parts of New York.
Starting today, customers can work directly with Redfin agents in the Chestnut Hill, Mount Airy and Manayunk neighborhoods of Philadelphia, as well as the Main Line townships, the northern suburbs in Bucks and Montgomery Counties, and Chester and Delaware counties to the West.
We’re so excited to enter the City of Brotherly Love that we’ll be holding our first-ever community launch party in Philly on March 28th. Everyone is invited! Whether you’re a customer or an agent, inspector or lender, or you just want to know what we’re all about, please join us to eat, drink and mingle with the Philly team and Redfin execs as we celebrate this huge milestone.
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