Director of Online MarketingMy Twitter | Redfin: Twitter, Blog | matt.goyer@redfin.com | 206-859-2843 You can also find my writings on the Seattle condo blog Urbnlivn.
All the ways you’d normally communicate with us are now back online. This includes agent emails, agent office phone numbers and fax numbers.
We’re very sorry about the rocky move we had today!
Today we’re moving our HQ in Seattle and while we anticipated a temporary disruption for some of our systems the move has affected our email and office phone system more then we anticipated. We estimate having email and phone back up in 30 to 60 minutes and will keep you updated here. In the meantime if you need to get in touch with your agent please contact them on their cellphone.
Update @ 11:25 am: Email is coming back online now and should be online for all our agents by noon. We are still working on restoring phone services.
Update @ noon: Email should be fully back online. We are still working on phones. Thanks for your patience.
Update @ 7:30pm: Phones are back online. Everything is now back online.
With Google as our mapping partner, we’re able to give you overhead views and street views for all the homes for sale on our site (and for sold homes too). Today, Google announced that it’s also making a new type of imagery available called perspective imagery, starting with San Jose and San Diego. Perspective imagery is “angled” overhead imagery giving you a view of not just the roof of a house but the sides as well.
We know there’s nothing more important than the photos of a house, so thanks to our engineers Jen, Navtej, Dan and Sasha for working with Google to add this to our details pages so quickly. You can now find this new imagery on all the homes in San Jose and San Diego in the Views section under Angled.
Here’s an example from a home we sold in San Diego:
As Google adds more imagery it will become available on Redfin.
Lastly, we’d like to send a big thank you to the folks at Google (specifically Mike, Manish, Mano, and Mickey) for letting us participate in this launch and helping us get it up and running. We hope you’ll enjoy it as much as we do.
This morning we did a massive update to our website increasing the amount of photos and data we store 340%.
Unfortunately, our website was offline from about 6:40 AM PST until 9 AM PST and then intermittently until 2:20 PM PST because of the increase in the amount of data coupled with the load from the excitement of a new release.
We are deeply sorry about the inconvenience this outage has caused for the visitors of our website and our customers. We are also sorry for not communicating more clearly about the status of the outage and how it was impacting you.
While the website is now back up we are still working to resolve the root causes of the issue. Once we know what all went wrong we’ll update you by posting here on the blog.
Update: Friday, 9:00 AM PST As a result of yesterday’s outage we aren’t retrieving photos for new listings. We hope to start pulling listing photos later today. We’ll update this post when we do.
Update: Friday, 12:00 PM PST You may have noticed that the site, a few times today, has been unresponsive. We’re aware of the brownouts and are actively monitoring the situation and trying as quick as we can to get back to situation normal.
Update: Friday, 8:51 PM PST Good news! The site should be back to its old self and is running on full power, fast and stable. By tomorrow morning, we should have photos for all the new listings.
Update: Monday, November 16th Our CTO, Mike, has posted about lessons learned, One Week After The Outage.
Since launching our iPhone app two months ago we’ve been glued to the App Store compulsively checking our app’s rating and reading the reviews, and for good reason, our iPhone app is 10% of site traffic on weekends. Overwhelmingly the feedback has been positive; folks love the app. However, there were some folks bummed out that the app didn’t have all the search features that our website does.
Today we have a new version available that lets you search by address and MLS ID and adds the most requested search filters:
We also made the app much faster. Our super star developer Navtej came up with a new way to group the house icons on the map, improving the maps load time performance seven fold.
Go download the latest version of the app and let us know what we should add next!
Bonus video: Our search engineering manager, Sasha, recently sat down with Meredith from Google to talk about our iPhone app and mobile analytics.
We can’t believe it, after only being out six weeks, iPhone traffic is 10% of our site traffic on the weekends. Do that many people really have iPhones? 
Digging into the numbers, for the first four weekends after we launched it, iPhone traffic was a little under 5% of our website traffic. Our app was then featured on the App Store’s New and Noteworthy section and mentioned in the NY Times. This temporarily bumped up our downloads almost ten fold. With many more people downloading the app, traffic on the iPhone has soared to be 8-10% of our website traffic for the last two weekends.
Don’t have an iPhone and wondering what the fuss is about? We have a few screencasts up on YouTube.
And congrats to Redfin data engineer, Arthur Patterson who got up on stage last night at the 5th Avenue Theatre and proposed to his girlfriend!
It’s not too late to head down to the Naked Truth at Olympic Sculpture Park here in Seattle! With the sun out we tore up the RSVP list and are opening the doors to everyone (bring a blanket!). We’ll be here until they boot us out at 10 but I’m sure there will be more than one after party.
The panel discussion on how to generate revenue will start promptly at 6:15. For the panel we assembled a rockstar crew who flew in from all over: Damon Darlin (NYT), Michael Arrington (TechCrunch), Fred Wilson (AVC), Jonathan Sposato (Picnik), Ethan Lowry (Urbanspoon) and Brad Jefferson (Animoto) will all be there.
Of course if you’re stuck at work or couldn’t make it to Seattle you can watch a live stream of the Naked Truth event courtesy of our friends at Seattle 2.0 TV.
Update: We’ve removed the live stream now that the event is over and replaced it with the recordings from the folks at Seattle 2.0 TV.
You can also follow the action and join the discussion on Twitter; folks are using the #nakedtruth hashtag.
Lastly, here’s the slides we handed out to attendees with all the gory details on Redfin’s, Urbanspoon’s, picnik’s and animoto’s revenue metrics:
Thanks to our sponsors, Madrona, Fenwick & Square 1 Bank for making this a free event for the attendees, Seattle 2.0 TV for bringing it to the web and Angela for pulling everything together.
Enjoy! And look for our wrap up of the event later tonight.
In February (has three months already gone by?) we launched our partner agent program giving home buyers and sellers the opportunity to see and make offers on homes in areas where Redfin agents don’t serve. Home buyers use our site to search for homes and connect with an agent from another brokerage who shares our enthusiasm for great service, transparency and no sales pressure.
When we launched the program, in the dead of a grey Seattle winter, we expected a slow ramp up into the spring buying season. However, we were surprised to see the program take off from the start; likely due to the combination of low interest rates, a first-time home buyer tax credit, and a slow down in price declines in areas like the Inland Empire.
Let’s take a look at how the last three months have gone.
Home Buyers Are Looking For Agents
The busiest partner region, by far, is the Inland Empire where over 900 home buyers have requested to work with a Redfin partner agent on homes selling for, on average, $360,000.
Wanting to See a Home is the First Point of Contact
Most homes buyers on our site connect with our partner agents by requesting to see a home:
We Let Our Agents’ Local Expertise Shine
Soon after launching the partner program, we made some changes in response to home buyer and agent feedback:
Home Buyers are Happy With Our Partners
We survey everyone who works with one of our partner agents, whether they close on a home with a partner agent or not and publish all the results – the good and the bad, so that you can make an informed choice about an agent. Most of the reviews are overwhelmingly positive. Check out what a first-time home buyer in Port Orchard, WA had to say about their experience buying a home with Beth:
As first time buyers, we had no idea what all the procedures were in buying a home. Beth made sure that we knew everything going on in the background process which was extremely helpful. She was always available by phone or responded quickly to emails and SMS. I would recommend Beth to any fist time home buyer.
Our Partners Are Happy With Our Clients
Our top partner agent in Northern California, David in Santa Cruz, says that our home buyers are, “knowledgeable, sophisticated and an absolute pleasure to work with.”
In three months a few of our partner agents have done quite well, connecting with 10 home buyers a month in the Inland Empire, San Francisco and Chicago.
Here are the top three agents based on gross commissions:
| Agent | Area | Pending | Closed | Total $ | Gross Commission |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Julie |
Inland Empire | 4 | 1 | $1,694,500 | $49,147 |
 Karen |
Inland Empire | 5 | 2 | $1,531,000 | $44,617 |
 Derek |
Inland Empire | 3 | 2 | $1,305,500 | $43,055 |
Recruiting is Tougher Than We Thought
We have stringent requirements for our partner agents to ensure that they are of the same caliber as Redfin agents; we ensure the agent has done at least 15 deals, we check at least three customer references, we interview them in person and we survey all their clients. Read J Philip’s first hand experience joining us as a partner agent.
These requirements and a busy spring home buying season has made recruiting tough. So even though we now have over 60 partner agents we need more!
We’ve tried recruiting via craigslist (which unfortunately doesn’t allow advertising of referral programs and blocks our job postings in some markets), Google ads and scouring Google in targeted areas for the top agents. We’ve partnered with some great agents, but we still haven’t hit on the best way to reach out to progressive agents who put clients first. If you know any agents who shared Redfin’s passion for the customer, transparency and no sales pressure here’s our pitch to them. Or if you have ideas on how to reach them let us know.
Up Next: Online Tools & More Cities
Over the next few months we’ll be working on tools that allow our agents as well as partner agents to work together with customers online. We’ll also be looking at bringing Redfin to a few new cities.
Thanks to our charter partners, the home buyers who have reached out to them and everyone at Redfin who helped bring the partner program to life!
“Stronger than any referral I’ve ever received, from an ad or anything else” is what Redfin partner agent Nancy (who has over 20 years of experience!) excitedly called to tell our Seattle broker Kevin today about the tour requests she received so far.
After a Wednesday launch we’re already off to a roaring start with 38 customers choosing to work with one of 35 new Redfin partner agents; exceeding our expectations. Like Nancy, a number of partner agents have received multiple requests to either meet or see homes. At this rate we’ll soon be adding more partner agents to the program to handle demand. Fortunately 45 agents have applied to join the program! But we don’t add everyone who applies; we need to interview them and survey their customers from the last year to ensure they live up to our expectation of fanatical customer service.
Digging into the 35 requests we see that they’re spread across a lot of different agents and regions. Wanting to go see a home in person is what prompts many to pick an agent. We’ve also found that agents are very quick to respond to requests, often in just a few minutes. Mona is one of our fastest responders letting us know:
I called him 4 minutes after he sent the request [to see a house]… he said “OMG, that was quick!”
In related news, Redfin agent Angela Creech, was the first to have a review automatically published to her profile page with our brand spanking new survey system. It’s a bummer the buyer declined to leave a comment but they did give Angela 4.5 stars for handling their offer.
Look for an update next week on the brokerage business focusing on how we’re taking lots of clients out to see houses. Have a great long weekend!
Glenn covered the big news this morning about our new agent profiles and expanded coverage with partner agents. What his blog post doesn’t include is a look at the other features we released.
But why write about the site when we can show you? Check out this seven minute video where we walk through the changes:
Picking which homes you want to see in person with a Redfin field agent is still as easy as clicking the Go See It Button. What we improved with this release is that registration and sign-in is lighter weight and more importantly we have consolidated the two different home tour pages into one page which shows both the homes you want to see, your next scheduled tour and all the tours you’ve gone on. You can also add and remove homes from the list of homes you want to see even if you’ve sent your list to Redfin. Learn more about seeing homes with Redfin.
Everyone says homes are selling for less than asking, but nobody ever says by how much. Now we do! You can see the average sale to list for homes sold in the last 90 days on almost all our neighborhood pages. We also show those stats in the details page of every home along with other neighborhood stats. Here’s what it looks like on a home details page:
Note that for some regions we don’t show it because we don’t have enough sale to list data pairs in the last 90 days.
With this release of the website out the door we’re now arguing about what we should do next. Any suggestions?
