In what has become a marketing team rite of passage, the video was produced by our new PR whiz Rachel who estimates she consumed 50 packs of gum while messing with video cameras, file formats, and recording levels. One of these days we’ll need to blog about everything we’ve learned making demo apps for iPhone, iPad and Android.
Monday we released our long-awaited app, Redfin for iPad. Today you can sign up to get a monthly email that tells you what’s going on near your home with Redfin’s Home Report or in your neighborhood, zip or city with Redfin’s Insider Report. While serious home buyers are probably already signed up for our daily emails to stay on top of new and updated homes for sale, we figured the tire-kickers, the homeowners and those casually thinking of selling would prefer an email tailored to them, sent once a month.
The email is packed full of great info straight from the MLS, the database that all real estate agents use, as well as from our agents:
Local market statistics: See at a glance what has happened with prices, sales, sale-to-list and new listings
Recent sales: Photos and prices of what your neighbor’s home sold for
Recent listing activity: The last three homes that hit the market
Featured Redfin listing: Good news for Redfin sellers; we feature one seller a month!
Redfin Agent Insights: Honest opinions from a Redfin Agent who toured a home near you
Real estate porn: Photos of the most expensive, the cheapest and most popular homes nearby
This email is just the tip of the iceberg for us. Over the coming months expect to see more and more features for home owners and sellers as we build a suite of tools to rival those that we’ve built for serious home buyers.
Here’s what my Redfin Home Report email looks like:
How to Sign Up
To sign up, just search for your home on our site. Claim your house in the My Redfin box and we’ll sign you up for a Home Report:
Or if you want to get the report for a different house, look for the ad below on any off-market property:
To sign up to receive an email about a neighborhood, search for the neighborhood, click the Stats & Trends button on the left side of the map, then look for this box on the upper right hand side:
After you’ve signed up, you can manage the homes you’re monitoring with your Favorites page in My Redfin in the upper right hand corner.
And that’s it for new site features and apps this year! Although we’re always curious about what you would like to see us add for home sellers and home owners in the future. Any suggestions?
We got lots of feedback for improvements and new features, and we listened:
Sort results: Just like on our website, you can now sort search results and favorites lists by price, address, beds, baths, city, days on market and much more – simply hit the “Sort” button in the context menu.
Search radius: We now highlight the search radius right on the map, making it easier to tell where you’re searching.
Map for each home: Every home is mapped right on its details page, so it’s easy to see where it is (we actually snuck this in last week.)
Bugs & issues: We’ve fixed a bunch of bugs and addressed common issues to make it faster, more stable, and easier to use.
Keep the feedback and reviews coming. We’re listening.
Less than a month after our last big iPhone release, we’ve got another one today! And this release isn’t just a few bug fixes; we’ve added a bunch more features.
X-out homes: Just like you can on the website, you can x-out homes you don’t like and it all syncs with your Redfin.com account.
Simpler navigation: We now take you straight to a home’s details from the map or list views.
Map for each home: Every home is mapped right on its details page, so it’s easy to see where it is (we also added this to the Android app!)
New list view: The list view has been cleaned up considerably, and does a much better job calling out important details and pending home sales.
Delete off-market favorites: By popular demand, you can now delete your off-market favorites by swiping them and hitting “delete”.
Faster and more stable: We’ve fixed a bunch of bugs and made things even faster.
We owe a big thanks to intern Seth Goldenberg for doing a bunch of the coding as well as a ton of other folks on our SF engineering team like Navtej, Andy, Dan, Ben, Jansen and Steven. It was truly a team effort getting it out the door.
If there’s anything else you’d like to see, please let us know in the comments below or by emailing us at feedback@redfin.com.
One last thing: we’re taking a little break from working on the iPhone app so that we can focus on releasing our all-new app for the iPad. We’ll keep you posted!
In the wee hours of the morning we released our latest Redfin upgrade; not only did we upgrade our site, but our service, too. Now, in addition to helping you tour short sales, Redfin agents can also help you purchase them! We also revamped our agent profiles and threw in a few other bonuses.
Short Sales from Start to Finish
Today, we’re excited to announce that Redfin agents will help you every step of the way of your short sale purchase, from your first tour, through the often-confounding maze of dealing with banks, and out the other side.
The only catch is that since short sales take longer and more legwork than a regular transaction Redfin will refund 15% of our commission instead of our usual refund.
Why the change of heart? For one short sales are increasingly popular, as banks may be less likely to foreclose. Secondly short sales are more likely to be approved as banks streamline the process. Thirdly, you’ve been persistent in asking us about em. Rather than jumping right into the icy waters, we eased our way in, quietly getting more and more short sale experience and expertise until we knew we were ready.
Now, we’re not saying that every, or even most, short sale transactions will be smooth sailing. Short sales can still be tricky and may test your patience, especially when multiple lien holders are involved.
Our number-one recommendation to someone entering the real estate world is to find an agent with recent local experience in the area where they want to buy or sell a home. Today, we’re making it really easy for you to visualize a Redfin agent’s local expertise by giving you a map that shows the location of every home she’s helped a customer buy or sell. Same goes for our partner agents.
We didn’t just slap a map on our agents’ profile pages — we completely revamped every profile:
Badges: With a single glance, you’ll be able to gauge an agent’s experience with first-time buyers, bidding wars, condos, single-family homes, and more.
Status: Find out about upcoming events where you can meet a Redfin agent, or just learn something new about your favorite local real estate expert.
Sweet spots: Get the scoop on each agent’s areas of expertise, such as median price points and short sale or foreclosure experience.
And just like before, we show you reviews from all the customers we’ve worked with.
45′ Imagery, Pendings…
We also upgraded to the latest version of Google Maps giving you access to their 45′ aerial imagery direct from our search page (where available; they don’t yet have imagery for all the cities we’re in). Just zoom in, click the “Satellite” button then “45′”. It’s a little like taking a hot-air balloon trip over your favorite neighborhood.
And we also added pending sales to search results, so you don’t miss anything. If seeing all those pendings drives you crazy, just click “More Options” beside the search box, and then change the status search option to “Active” to hide them.
Until Next Time
As usual, we also spent some time under the hood to speed up the site up a bit, and added a whole bunch of behind-the-scenes features for our agents. Now we’re hunkering down and cranking out an iPad app alongside a bunch of other goodies. Stay tuned!
Today we launched an update to our website expanding our mortgage guide to a home buying guide and improving the usability and performance of our search experience. Here are the full details on what’s new:
Closing on a home demystified
There’s a lot to know when buying a home. To help you understand it all we’ve been working on a Home Buying Guide that’s free, online and easy-to-read. It’s jam-packed with insider tips from our agents and all the partners we work with (lenders, inspectors, appraisers, etc.).
A few months ago we launched a mortgage guide as our first section. Today we’re re-launching it as the Redfin Home Buying Guide as we’ve added a huge section explaining what to expect once your offer has been accepted. This Closing the Deal section covers everything you need to know about:
For some topics, a picture really is worth a thousand words. That’s why this new section includes a hot interactive home inspection thanks to the hard work of our designer Angela Salvo, our coder Jason Brackins and our writer Bryan Howell:
Just click on the yellow hot spots to get an explanation of what to look for. Aside from the explanations, this interactive feature contains over 200 photos of common inspection issues contributed by home inspectors from all over the country. Thanks go to:
Here’s a peek at some of the photos we have explaining roofing issues:
We also know that buying a home involves some confusing paperwork. To help you sign the dotted line with confidence, we’ve created interactive forms that explain every detail. The first two forms that we’ve tackled are the GFE (Good Faith Estimate) and the HUD-1 settlement statement.
What’s next for the Home Buying Guide? We’ve got a few more interactive forms on the way, including a loan application and a sample title report, and we’re writing up full sections on how to search for a home, what to look for in an agent and the best ways to write a winning offer. If you have any feedback or suggestions for us, just send them to bryan.howell@redfin.com.
Special thanks to Redfinnians Janelle Saylor, Chad Dierickx and Lucretia Lease for their feedback on the new features.
Making it easier to search on Redfin
Today we also made it easier to search for homes by updating our search result box to give you quick access to commonly-used features like search options, email alerts for new listings and neighborhood stats & trends. We also have a stylish new loading bar and map cardinal control.
Text search
Beyond searching for homes, we now have text search to help you find our agents or quickly get to where you need to go in our Home Buying Guide. Just look for a search box like this on content pages:
Faster Favorites
For those of you with hundreds of favorites (and the few of you with thousands) we updated our favorites page to load faster. Plus we made it easier for you to delete all of your off-market favorites and x-outs.
And for Firefox users: we made some performance updates just for you.
That’s it for this week.
We have a bunch more updates coming in the next week or two, so stay tuned!
Thanks to all the Redfin folks who worked on this website upgrade, with a special thanks to all our agents, customers and partners who gave us early feedback to make it awesome. If you have any suggestions or find a bug just let us know in the comments below.
Every month, Redfin publishes two newsletters on real estate prices. One, usually published on the last Tuesday of every month, is a Redfin Roundup, which synthesizes data collected by economists, government agencies and others to provide a complete portrait of what happened in the market over the past month. The other is Redfin Insider, usually published on the 11th or 12th of each month, which analyzes our own databases to identify — well ahead of anyone else — the major trends in listing inventory and prices as well as sales activity and consumer traffic. To receive these newsletters by email, just sign up! We also post newsletters to our national and local blogs. Here is the June Roundup.
Howdy Redfinnians!
The real estate market has fallen asleep in a lawn chair, and we’re here to tell you all about it! Below is our monthly roundup of everything that moved in the market…
April’s real estate newspaper showed up on our doorstep this morning in the form of the Case-Shiller data on U.S. home prices — it takes the economists that long to sort out the data. As we predicted, April home prices increased from March almost across the board, with the lone exception being New York. The biggest increases were in San Francisco, Washington DC, Portland and Atlanta.
Metro Area
MoM Change
YoY Change
Date of Max
Change from Max
Prices Last at This
Level in…
Consec. Mos.
of Increase
Phoenix
0.5%
5.4%
Jun-06
-51.6%
Jul-01
1
LA
0.7%
7.8%
Sep-06
-37.3%
Nov-03
1
San Diego
0.7%
11.7%
Nov-05
-35.5%
Apr-03
12
Bay Area
2.2%
18.0%
May-06
-36.0%
Jun-02
2
DC
2.4%
7.3%
May-06
-28.5%
Apr-04
1
Atlanta
1.8%
0.2%
Jul-07
-22.6%
Oct-00
1
Chicago
0.6%
-1.6%
Sep-06
-28.6%
May-02
1
Boston
1.4%
4.9%
Sep-05
-15.8%
Jun-03
1
New York
-0.3%
-1.0%
Jun-06
-21.7%
Apr-04
0
Portland
1.8%
-0.4%
Jul-07
-21.6%
May-05
1
Seattle
1.0%
-2.8%
Jul-07
-24.5%
Mar-05
2
20 City
0.8%
3.8%
Jul-06
-30.0%
Aug-03
1
Why are we not surprised? Well, the federal first-time home-buyer’s tax credit required home buyers to be under contract in April, and to close by June. We expect sales volume and home prices to increase through June, and probably longer in California where there is also a state tax credit likely to last through July.
But after that, we’re almost certain the market’s going down. Outside of California, the number of people visiting our website is still high, but as we immediately noticed in May, they’re visiting less frequently. Fewer customers are touring properties, and fewer are making offers. The only increase in activity outside of California has been an uptick in customers listing homes; this has been a good development, as old inventory has been piling up that nobody wants to buy.
Now, the Problem is Weak Demand
The first confirmation that demand was off came last Tuesday, when the U.S. Department of Commerce reported that contracts being signed on new construction dropped 33%, worse than even the glummest economists expected. What this means is that we’ve stopped worrying about supply and started worrying about demand: last year, we saw plenty of buyers chasing a seemingly bottomless pit of foreclosures being sold at fire-sale prices. At the time, we said foreclosures wouldn’t peak until summer 2010.
Now, we see demand weakening even as foreclosures are being mopped up: the percentage of May home sales that were distressed was 31%, compared to 33% the previous month, and May loan-default notices declined 22% from the previous year. Anecdotally, it seems like the sellers stuck on the market for the past six months aren’t dropping their prices because they need every penny from the sale to pay off the bank. But sellers just coming onto the market are being more realistic in their pricing.
A Significant Price Recovery is 9+ Months Out
That doesn’t mean prices in most markets are going to fall off another cliff, even if demand is weak. The Phoenix market has already lost 52% of its value and homes are now selling below construction cost, so desert homes probably won’t drop another 25%. But it does mean that a significant price recovery is more than nine months out. The summer-less real estate cycle that we have been predicting monthafter month has arrived: usually sales peak in July, but not this year.
We Were Wrong About Interest Rates
We haven’t been right about everything. Take interest rates for example. Last month, we reported that “we can’t help but believe that rates this low will give summer home-buyers a real jolt.” Well, the truth is that nobody will feel a jolt until the low rates show signs of moving up – rates last week for 30-year fixed-rate mortgage were at a mind-bogglingly low 4.69%. But central banks around the world have made it clear that, despite recent skepticism, they’ll keep rates low for as long as they can, maybe until the end of the year.
We once believed that rates would have to increase by the fourth quarter, and now we’re not sure when that will happen. If rates go up a bit, it would probably just get the market moving. If rates go up a lot while unemployment is still high, we could be in for a long period of very low sales volume, and low prices.
That’s the news! Life at Redfin is good. Our customers are still insanely happy, and we’re grabbing market-share fast enough that we should be ok even if tough times are ahead. If you have any questions or quibbles, just drop me a line. I get every reply to this newsletter, and try to answer every question.
Sorry for the last minute notice but we need to cancel tomorrow’s (April 14th) brown bag with Roy Gilbert (former nuclear submarine lieutenant, currently a director at Google).
We don’t have a new date confirmed just yet but we’ll let you know here when we do.
Recently one of the blogs that frequently links to Redfin contacted us to find out if they were the top blog. To answer that we give you the first Redfin Real Estate Blogger Leaderboard!
Here’s the top ten list for January 2010:
Burbed: A blog about real estate in Northern California with the tongue-in-cheek tag line “buy now or be priced out FOREVER!” The posts that tell it like is are sure to have you laughing.
Missing from the list are a lot of our blogger friends, for instance LA Curbed and On the Block. I know they link to us a lot, so we’re digging into finding out why their blog software doesn’t notify us that they’re linking to us. If you’re also missing from the list too here’s how our trackback feature works. You can also contact me with any questions (matt.goyer@redfin.com).
Thanks to all the bloggers out there for writing about real estate and linking to Redfin. While there are a few “pros” on the list most of those blogs are a labor of love. We appreciate your hard work and hopefully have sent you some new traffic in return.
Redfin's corporate blog is the place to read what Redfin employees have to say about Redfin, the real estate industry and other topics such as life at a startup or usability and web design.
