July 9, 2008

And The Leading Bookmarking Service Is…

In our last release we added a “Share on Facebook” link to our details pages that when hovered over brings up a menu from AddThis letting you bookmark the home to your favorite social bookmarking service.

Before launching the feature we debated what the top service would be. Glenn, voted for Delicious, I voted for Facebook. In fact I thought Facebook would win by a long shot which is why we used the text “Share on Facebook” instead of something more generic like “Share on…”

Curious who won the bet we used the AddThis analytics feature to settle up. Here’s a breakdown of how many times the various services have been used:

Of course, maybe the fact that the link specifically calls out Facebook is the reason it is the leading bookmarking service :).

Here’s a breakdown by day.

In our next release we’ll add a Facebook icon in front of the link to increase its discoverability.

Big thanks to Dan, for pushing us to use AddThis.com, instead of adding only a Share on Facebook link.

November 21, 2007

Redfin has search options!?

While one wing of the Redfin office wrestles about changes to the home tours program the other wing of the office is up in arms over how we surface search options on the map page.

When we re-designed our website in April one of the changes we made was hiding the search options. The reasoning behind this controversial design was that since users spend most of their time navigating the map and only occasionally change the number of beds or square footage that they’re looking for, we should make the map as large as possible and move the search options to an overlay. The overlay then only appears when you give focus to the search input box or click a widget.

Initially to display the search overlay pictured above users would need to click the link ‘Filter Search’:

However, we heard occasional stories of users not knowing they could search on number of beds or price. So our next design was to include a drop down widget besides the search button. This is reminiscent of what many Windows applications do or what Facebook does.

But still we heard stories of users not knowing they could change their search options. With our next release we’re looking at combining both the link and drop down widget approachs by moving the drop down widget and changing the name on the link to hint at what it enables you to change:

Unfortunately a number of co-workers stormed into my office yesterday, criticized the design and called me names. If I were to pass you the Redfin Search Product Manager baton how would you solve this discoverability problem? Feedback welcome but Photoshop submissions preferred :). To sweeten the pot we’re offering $250 if we use your submission. However, if you have a winning submission the real question is, why haven’t you applied for our interaction designer position yet?

And with that I’m off to Whistler. Happy Thanksgiving!

March 21, 2007

DIY Comparative Market Analysis

The old way: explain your real estate needs and desires to an agent, he searches for listings, wait, wait, wait until he shares the details with you.
The Redfin way: search for real estate on your own terms, whether in your PJs or work duds, get immediate information.

The old way: once you fell in love with a place the only way to find out what other nearby homes sold for nearby was to call an agent and ask for a comparative market analysis, or CMA.
The Redfin way: DIY! Redfin let’s you figure it all out yourself!

Let’s say you’re looking at moving to Pioneer Square in Seattle because you just accepted a job offer at Redfin. After a few minutes searching on Redfin.com, I found 97 S. Jackson St. #402.

But is this a good deal?

Redfin.com will tell you everything you need to know to make that determination. First, I would look at the details page for the listing (click on “Full Details” in the listing pop-up box).

Does it have a Zestimate? This one has a Zestimate of $618,021.

Does it have any past sales information? Yes, it sold for $387,000 in 1999.

Next, I would go back to the search page and look for similar listings on the market. I search for 1,000 to 1,500-square-foot listings and find 12.

At the bottom of the list below the map, we can see that similar units have a median price of $521,975, average square footage is 1,189 and average $/sq ft is $535.

This gives you a good sense of similar units on the market, but what have other similar units sold for? Click on ‘Show more options’ and select a timeframe under ‘Show Past Sales’ such as ‘Last 1 year’ or ‘Last 6 months.’

Now we can see a list of the units we are interested in along with two previously sold units in the same building.

Clicking on these similar past sales, we can get a good sense of what other listings have sold for in the neighborhood and compare the listing we are interested in.

Happy CMA’ing :).

January 24, 2007

Preview: Smaller Icons!

Thanks, again, for all your feedback on our last big release. Overall, it sounds like you appreciated most of the changes, but it turns out we got some things wrong. We wanted to let you know we heard you and have been working ferverishly on fixes. To make sure the changes we’re making are the right ones, we would like to run them by you for feedback.

Here’s what we’re considering changing:
1. Parcels: we received a lot of feedback asking to put back the parcels, however, we did not remove them. Many of you thought we removed the parcels and replaced them with icons. What we did was show the parcels only at the two most zoomed-in levels. We did this because we thought the parcels were too small to see any further out. Based on your feedback, we will show parcels for the three closest zoom levels (except on Internet Explorer 6 because of performance problems).

2. Icon size: Yes, we agree, they are way too big! Now we have to admit that we did not give a lot of consideration to the icon size when designing them; we were focused on solving what we thought were other more important problems. It turns out you are very passionate about not having the map obscured or cluttered by large icons!

To evaluate your feedback, we started with an icon study:

As you can see, our icons are not only above average in size, but they are about the largest out there. What we are proposing is a much smaller icon roughly 60 percent the size of the last one. This is what it would look like at a high zoom level:

This is what it would look like at a lower zoom level:

And, finally, this is what it would look like when you are zoomed in all the way. You may notice the icon is a little larger here. Typically, this is the zoom level where you would see a parcel, but we have parcels for only 50 percent of the properties (we get this data from each state and it is not always complete), we wanted to show a larger icon to differentiate when there is no parcel available:

Instead of assuming what you are asking for, making changes and waiting for your feedback, we would like to hear from you first! Do you think this is the right icon size? Should we go smaller? Or should we go larger? Should the icons be transparent when you are zoomed in really close? Should we scrap the idea of icons altogether and just use circles? Please let us know your thoughts by leaving a comment or you can reach me by e-mail at matt.goyer *at* redfin dot com. We likely will make a decision on this by Thursday evening so please let me know before then, but, as always, feedback is welcome anytime.

January 12, 2007

We Hear Ya

We want to thank everyone for sending us feedback today on the new site! We were on pins and needles watching our feedback folders, hitting refresh on Google Blog Search, Technorati and following the comments posted on our favorite blogs.

Overall, feedback received was positive. But some of your feedback made us reconsider a decision about the transparency of parcels. Apparently making the parcels opaque was a huge mistake. Fortunately amending the design of our parcels is relatively easy and we will release a new version of the site later tonight.

This is how the change looks on the road view:

This is how the change looks on the hybrid view:

Now you can see the property below, but we are worried that it is too hard to tell the viewed from the not yet viewed listings and that the parcels blend in with the other colors on the road map. Clearly we need to think about this more and we will (suggestions are welcome too!).

Other input feedback received included: the size of the icons, what zoom level we turn the parcels on at, and our lack of Safari support. Unfortunately our hands are tied about Safari support because Microsoft’s Virtual Earth does not support Safari, but we will see what we can do. We are considering additional fixes in upcoming releases.

If you have any other feedback, please feel free to contact us at feedback *at * redfin.com. However, a few of us on the technology side will be taking the weekend off :).

January 12, 2007

Twice the Size, Virtual Earth and Meebo

We finally made it! Redin now covers twice the ground we used to in the Seattle and Bay Areas, we’re on Virtual Earth and you can IM us using Meebo.

Here are a few of us in the Seattle office last night launching the new Redfin site.

Twice the ground

It wasn’t until I started writing this blog post that I realized just what Greater Seattle and Greater San Francisco Bay Area actually means; we are adding seven more counties, 140 more cities and double the number of listings! Here are some of the larger cities we now cover:

In Washington: Arlington, Bainbridge Island, Bonney Lake, Bothell, Bremerton, Edmonds, Everett, Gig Harbor, Graham, Lake Stevens, Lakewood, Lynnwood, Marysville, Mill Creek, Monroe, Mukilteo, Orting, Port Orchard, Poulsbo, Puyallup, Snohomish, Spanaway, Stanwood, Tacoma, University Place and more.

In California: Aptos, Benicia, Fairfeld, Napa, Petaluma, Rohnert Park Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, Sonoma, Suisun City, Watsonville, Windsor, Vacaville, Vallejo and more.

Where to expand to next?

Virtual Earth

Today we also are excited to announce that we have retired our proprietary Flash-based map solution and traded up to Microsoft’s Virtual Earth. While we are proud to have launched the Flash-based map in 2004, well ahead of the Google Maps and Virtual Earth APIs, the time has come to make the switch to a platform that can support our expected growth and enable us to innovate.

Fortunately we also get some immediate improvements to our customer experience…

Road view: Some of you love our aerial imagery, others hate it and want a road view. We now support both. Which will you choose?

Road	Hybrid	Aerial

Icons: On the old site when I was zoomed out I found it really hard to click on listings; the parcels made for a very small target for my mouse cursor. Now we display icons when you are zoomed far out to make the listings easy to see and click. However, when you zoom in we still have our signature parcels (and for listings that we do not have property outlines or parcel data we display an icon):

Old Map	New Map	Zoomed In

URLs: You can now copy and paste your search URL and share it with friends. Or bookmark it. Or blog it. Or e-mail it. Here’s an example: Capitol Hill Condos.

Back button: The number one usability complaint we heard about the old site is that the back button did not behave as expected. Even some employee’s spouses did not use our site because of our blatant disregard for some web conventions. Now while our implementation is not yet perfect because of those wacky tabs, it’s a huge leap forward for us.

Color change: We went through at least five color palette iterations for the icons and parcels. After contentious internal debates we settled on dark green for listings, light green for previously viewed listings and blue for sold properties. While I did promise the team that we would never have to change the colors again, if you tell me we got them wrong, we will (sorry, Jane.)

Faster Map: Say goodbye to our ‘we’re busy loading map tiles’ indicator, lovingly nicknamed ‘Knight Rider.’ Anecdotal studies of the new map show that while it’s not yet blazingly fast, it certainly is a lot faster than our old map.

Double click to zoom: All the navigation functions that you love from other map sites now work at Redfin. Double click to zoom in or use your mouse scroll wheel to zoom in or out. Try out the keyboard navigation too.

IM with an agent

A lot of us are not just real estate junkies but e-commerce junkies too; the sites we frequent all have ‘Chat Now’ widgets. We don’t know if this is the right interface, but we wanted to give it a shot. Fortunately Meebo makes it really easy to add a Chat Now widget so we added them to our Offer Wizard, Listing Wizard and Ask a Question pages. We staff this from 9 a.m. ’til 6 p.m. during the week and noon to 6 p.m. on weekends. Just today we got a question asking if we had a Microsoft Prime discount, and we do!

Bugs

We tried hard but this release is not perfect. As it turns out each browser has a mind of its own and I am sure we struggled with every browser oddity trying to get the site to look the same on all of them (we didn’t.) We are also sad that we can no longer support Safari because it is not supported by Virtual Earth. We do recommend upgrading to Firefox 2.0 or Internet Explorer 7 depending on your operating system.

Now if you find a bug or have a suggestion please leave us a comment below, we’ll fix it as soon as our developers get some sleep.

In closing

With this release we are making what some people will consider to be minor changes to our customer experience, and they’re right about that. Since the real change is that we now have a map platform so we can innovate faster. And it was that which was an epic effort requiring months of planning and work with many obstacles along the way. Fortunately the teams rallied, we worked weekends, we stayed up all night and we proved we could both overcome the obstacles and deliver on time. 2007 is a big year for us and we’re all very excited because it’s still just the middle January.

Okay, enough celebrating: we have to start on the next release :).

December 31, 2006

Finding Price Reductions on Redfin

Did you know that on Redfin you can sign up to receive e-mails about what is happening with listings in the neighborhood you are house hunting in?

What I find this feature most useful for is tracking price reductions. But you can also use it to find out when new listings come on the market as well as when properties are sold. So how do you take advantage of this?

1. Go to Redfin and log in
2. Either search for your neighborhood or position the map over the area you are interested in
   

   

3. Click ‘Save this search’
   

   

4. Type in a name for your search and set your e-mail notification to something other than ‘Never’
   

   

5. Wait for the e-mails
   

   

Now every day or week you will receive an e-mail from Redfin and the e-mail will let you know when the status or price of a listing changes. This is helpful to track price reductions, price increases, when listings get sold by seeing when their status changes to ’subject to inspection’, when listings that were in ’subject to inspection’ come back on the market, etc.

If there are other things you would like to track via e-mail please let us know in the comments and we will consider them in an upcoming release.

October 16, 2006

New Features: Fixer-uppers and Zillow Integration

The Redfin engineers have been hard at work this past month and I’m sure we all took advantage of this weekend’s rain to spend a few days indoors catching up on some much-needed sleep.

Now what were we so busy working on?

Helping you find bargains

With the real estate market slowing down and the number of listings increasing we have heard from a bunch of users that they’d like to be able to quickly find bargains. To help users do this we have added two new searches:

Unsold in 90+ days: Selecting this checkbox in our search box will find listings that have remained unsold on the market for more than the average time for that particular market (Seattle is 45 days, San Francisco is 90 days). If you decide to make an offer, consider an aggressive one!

Fixer-Uppers: Selecting this will find listings that match our proprietary super confidential fixer upper algorithm. These listings more than likely require that you know how to use a hammer or have enough money to tear the house down and start over again. There are currently ~100 of these in Seattle and ~400 in the Bay Area.

Now even if you don’t explicitly search for unsold properties or fixer-uppers you might still see their icons on a listing balloon or a details page letting you know to either make an aggressive offer or to bring the toolbox.

We also took some time to respond to your feedback that the ‘Time on Market’ search feature wasn’t as useful as it could be. Now you can search for properties that have been on the market either less than 7,14 or 30 days, or more than 7, 14, 30, 45, 60, 90 or 180 days.

Bringing you Zillow integration

Every time we run a survey or hold a sushi fueled usability study we hear that users want to see Zillow information, like the Zestimate, alongside Redfin’s information on the listing. As of today, thanks to Zillow’s easy to use API, the days of finding a listing on Redfin and then firing up another browser and tracking it down on Zillow are over. We now display Zillow’s Zestimate, Zestimate Ranking and a Zestimate Value Change chart for every listing alongside the photos, marketing remarks, amenities, past sales and historical tax information.

We hope this also puts an end to the questions we often get about how Redfin and Zillow compete. We always answer that we don’t, but now we can point to not just how complementary our two Seattle based companies are, but to our actual integration together on the Redfin site (I hope that last sentence isn’t too marketing-y ).

What will you find?

We’re a little worried that by adding these new features we will cause you to spend even more time surfing for that next perfect real estate project instead of enjoying your current place. But hopefully you resist the urge to browse while at work. Now, it’s expected that I spend a part of my day hunting and here’s one I found in just a few minutes when I searched for fixer-uppers that have been on the market for more than 45 days in Seattle: 221 1st Ave in the Central Area.

This is what the agent has to say:

FIXER. . Great investment opportunity!!! Restore for Victorian living, renovate for rentals, or tear down and build for cash. Interior of house has already been gutted and is ready to be remodeled. Lumber on site. Plans and permits already obtained. Potential to add on another unit in the back w/ 3 bedrooms, 2.5 baths (floor plans completed). Access to the back would be on the right side of the house with front fenced is removed.

At $360,000 it’s $45,000 less than Zillow’s $405,098 Zestimate. And I’m sure Zillow isn’t taking into account the lumber on site or the permits already obtained. So with a Zillow estimate range starting at $348,384 its tempting to make an offer at $345,000, but I’m a condo guy so this place is all yours.

See the features in action

Last week, Bahn our videographer spent some time with Bryan, our Director of Product Management, to put together a quick videocast of the new features in action:

That’s all, happy house hunting, and be sure to let us know what other tools you need to find the home of your dreams!