At Last! Redfin Releases Its iPhone App!

At long last, Redfin has an iPhone application. And it is gorgeous and fast and free and freakishly powerful. Apple took ten days to approve it for the app store:

Download it now for free!

Why is a Redfin app such a big deal when there are already three or four real estate apps for iPhone on the market? Well, because this one has all the data from the MLS, as well as for-sale-by-owner and bank-owned homes not yet listed in the MLS. It shows all the photos, and all the amenities too, as well as how long the property has been on market and what it last sold for. And the whole search experience is driven by Google Maps.

But that isn’t the really sweet part. The sweet part is the photo upload, which allows customers on tour to take pictures and notes that automatically upload to their account on Redfin.com, so all that stuff is waiting on their computer when they get back to their desk. We automatically associate each note or pic with the right house on the site.

And data goes both ways, with the website sending to the  iPhone app a list of homes you’ve bookmarked as favorites, and which ones you want to tour via Redfin too — so you can easily get directions from place to place.

Here’s a quick tour of some of the main features…

Quickly zoom high above the city then drill down into a cluster of listings:

Click the List button to flash to the listing photos:

When you’re touring a house you like, take your own photos:

Take the photo and add a nice little caption:

The iPhone app lets you see all the homes you’ve annotated or photographed:

When you get done with your tour and return to the website, Redfin alerts you that your photos and notes are online:

On the website, you can click on My Redfin to see all your photos and notes:

The photos and notes also show up alongside the listing on our website.

We focused on tours for a reason.  Redfin’s  iPhone app isn’t just a search application, it’s one component of a larger home-buying service, where the other components are the website and —  most important by far– the team of agents serving clients.  And they all have to work together. If you’re touring with Redfin and don’t have your own iPhone, your Redfin agent will often be able to take pictures for you using her own iPhone.

We want to take the same coordinated approach to improve the process of pricing an offer, finding a lender and getting through escrow. We call this strategy Freakish Depth, because our goal is to take users beyond the initial home search to fundamentally improve every step of the home-buying process.

You may well ask what took you so long? Well, we re-built almost the whole search experience to work on the iPhone, so it would run fast and look good on that little thing. We clustered search results, to make it easier to move around the map and zoom in for more detail. We let you run sophisticated searches. The standard for any Redfin experience is that it can’t just be a nice little distraction, it has to be a full-blown addiction, one you can count on and come back to again and again. We hope we cleared that bar.

All told, three person years of R&D went into the app, so hats off to Sasha, Navtej, Jim (who just got married Saturday!), Jen, Jane, Brent, Llewellyn, Thomas, Jamie, Jason, Dan, Chris and the many others who built Redfin for iPhone. And a big thanks to the Urbanspoon guys and Tyler Stone at Apple for giving us encouragement and advice along the way.

We hope you check it out, that you leave a comment or review letting the world know what you think. Any feature suggestions — or thoughts on whether the uploaded photos should remain private, even after the sale — just leave a comment below.

What Would Apple Do? Don’t Ask

For years, it has been fashionable for business-people to approach any problem — choking baby, lonely Friday, cold soup, global warming — by asking Jeff Jarvis’s question: “What would Google do?” But the most admired technology company in the world isn’t Google. It’s Apple. And when it comes to the most admired technology executive, Steve Jobs is firmly enshrined as the Valley’s Jesus with Eric Schmidt as a capable but boring prophet. When a major American industry collapses, no one imagines Eric Schmidt as the savior; all eyes turn to Steve Jobs.

So why isn’t Steve Jobs our savior? Why isn’t anyone asking “What would Apple do?” Perhaps it’s because the answer to that question flies in the face of everything we’ve learned to hold sacred over the last five years. Compare for a moment the basic tenets of Apple’s success with the way most people think about building a startup today…

Make Hardware and Software
Apple’s insistence on controlling both the hardware and the operating system was once seen as a liability in its battle against the PC: Apple was proprietary and precious and Windows was open and huge. But even though Apple’s products are now seen as more elegant and reliable because all the components work together, few have followed suit.

In fact, you can count such products on one hand: Microsoft  Xbox, Nintendo Wii, Flip Mino, arguably the Tivo, now perhaps the CrunchPad. All commercial successes. Why aren’t there more? Mostly because it never occurs to folks to build hardware and software. Entrepreneurs today are largely building media sites, not fundamentally new technologies, using low-cost platforms built years ago by other people. This is a lot cheaper, and so money is easier to get for these ideas: there’s more venture capital than ever before, but most VCs would rather invest $1M in 20 startups rather than the $20M one startup would need to build and market a consumer device.

But the problem is deeper than that. Even my generation’s Steve Jobs, Marc Andreessen, who has the stature and the capital to invent an entirely new device, never seems to have given it a thought. This is probably because most computer science programs never bother to teach computer scientists how to build devices; at Berkeley in the ’90’s, you could always identify the computer science students by the pizza boxes filled with computer parts that they lugged around everywhere.

Now the people who understand hardware aren’t in the same classes as those who write software; increasingly the two aren’t even in the same country. Steve Jobs may be technology’s last Renaissance man.

Be Secretive
Apple sets up multiple security checks within its buildings, hoods prototypes under development and provides its own employees with misinformation. Amazon can be the same way: a former Jeff Bezos lieutenant complimented Redfin by saying our openness made him rethink Bezos’s advice never to write your competitors’ business plan. (Since I admire Bezos, this in turn made me wonder if our “well-why-not?” approach to blogging has been naïve.)

The truth is that these days, most entrepreneurs can’t keep a secret and many aren’t even interested in trying; entrepreneurs are by nature impresarios and exhibitionists first, and inventors second. It seems like Apple’s preference for secrecy is just as instinctive. Sure, its secrecy is calculated to give product launches the most pop, but Apple’s stealthiness is so complete on topics so far beyond new products — did you know that you can only photograph Steve Jobs from one side? — that the behavior must be reflexive.

I often wonder whether Apple gains more in mystique from its secrecy than it loses by being insular? I wonder how they work out their ideas with customers when they can’t talk about their ideas to anyone? Apple might be the only company in the world smart enough to get away with that.

Give Nothing Away
Steve Jobs clearly hasn’t read Chris Anderson’s Web 2.0 Bible, Free. I’m not even sure Jobs would agree with Michael Arrington’s argument that free services have the most potential to change the world. Jobs hates free.

Even with digital services like MobileMe, Apple has never given anything away. First of all, because Apple can’t afford to. Anderson talks about the falling cost of servers and storage as driving the economics of free, but Jobs understands what’s really expensive about making something beautiful isn’t the tools but the artists who use them:  beautiful will always be a time-consuming proposition involving costly, talented people.

And Jobs probably understands too that consumers value what they pay for. Now, a whole generation of software entrepreneurs is learning the discipline of charging for software because of the iPhone’s App Store. As you would expect, the iPhone applications that people buy are deleted less often, reviewed more carefully, and used more often than the ones you can download for free. But most startups will make money by giving their apps away and developing a business based on the free application.

No Wine Until it’s Time
Redfin lately has been trying to move faster, guided by Reid Hoffman’s principle that if a debut product is perfect, it should have shipped six months earlier. We talk to other entrepreneurs, who mainly rely on their users to find their bugs, and wonder if we shouldn’t be the same way. We’re still scarred by the last major re-design of our website, which took place three years ago, driving several people to tears and one of our best people out of design at the company entirely.

But Apple iterates on every product over and over again, with half a dozen designers or more developing ten different mock-ups for every single feature. An interviewee once told me that an iPhoto print feature was delayed a year so that the binding for the first page of a photo album could be stitched rather than glued, even though every book glues the first page. Basically Jobs reinvented how books are bound so that Apple’s photo albums would meet his standards.

And this attention to seemingly trivial details is true of other Steve Jobs’s endeavors too: as my friend Noam Lovinsky has observed, one reason the scripts for Pixar movies are so flawless is because each frame is already so labored. Pixar has never increased its rate of production, and never failed to make a #1 movie either. Of course it’s easier to update a website than it is a device or a movie, but it seems like Jobs chooses problems whose solution require his level of perfection, not the other way around. It makes me wonder if Silicon Valley’s cult of making mistakes quickly is itself a big mistake.

That question is impossible to answer in the abstract, but every time I think about accelerating the pace of our development, I wonder if Jobs would actually speed it up by slowing it down and making fewer mistakes.

Offline Experiences Matter
Silicon Valley’s latest bloodsport is to predict the demise of Microsoft Office, the best, most widely used software in the world. I tend to agree that for most casual users, Mint will replace Quicken, and Picnik will replace Photoshop. But no one ever attacks Apple for making desktop applications for photo editing or music playing. In fact, what’s remarkable about Apple is how little it has invested in online services; it has no MSN or EC2.

When the company thinks about distribution, it does so in physical dimensions, reimagining retail stores. When it makes a mobile device, it encourages developers to re-code their web experiences to fit within the smaller screen of an iPhone, a move which might have drawn ridicule if it had come from another company. If the desktop is dead, why is one of the best technology companies in the world working to reinvent it?

And if everyone is arguing that Microsoft is wrong to build powerful, native applications, why isn’t Apple wrong about that too?

Anyway, these are the questions I wonder about when trying to decide what kind of company Redfin should look like as it grows up… What lessons do you draw from Apple, and which do you reject?

Photo credit: Joi, Macevangelist on Flickr

iPhones are Good. Jobs’s Deposition Was Bad.

Forbes this week got its hands on Steve Jobs’s deposition about back-dated stock options and the blogosphere is now citing his testimony as evidence of Jobs’s being undone by his loyalty to his team. In an essay titled “Steve Jobs on the Value of Stock Options,” TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld frames Jobs’s account as a disquisition on why talent should be paid in stock. It now sits at the top of Techmeme.

Erick does a fantastic job as usual picking out the juicy bits of the story and putting them in context. We all agree that options are the best way to pay executives, and it’s hard to imagine what grant Steve Jobs doesn’t deserve given Apple’s performance. But no matter how much we revere Jobs as an innovator, I suspect that the deposition will in time get The Full TechCrunch Treatment of acid-washed skepticism.

What first raised one of my gigantic, hairy eyebrows was Jobs’s  claim that his initial motivation was only to get grants for the people he had worked with in the past. But Jobs’s pay would soon also be on the line. It’s common for a manager to “fight for his team” knowing that it sets a precedent for him or her to get an even larger grant.

In the deposition, Jobs presents himself as never suspecting he would be in that position, because he never thought he’d become Apple’s CEO again. No one has commented on this account, even though Jobs had once famously described the hiring of an Apple CEO beside himself as one of the greatest mistakes of his life.

When it came to his own pay as the CEO, Jobs describes the Apple board as a group of “peers” from whom he deserves “recognition.” This seems off-key. Yes the CEO is a board member, but he reports to the larger board as a subordinate not as a peer. For an unrivaled god such as Steve Jobs, thinking of the board as peer may seem like a generous act of collegiality, but it also opens Apple to cronyism. Even Jobs is accountable to someone.

Invoking “recognition” also is surprising to hear from the CEO of any investor-owned company. The board owes a CEO only what is in the best interests of shareholders. So far as Apple shareholders are concerned, Jobs undoubtedly deserves a gigantic grant.  But when Jobs talks about recognition rather than compensation, it seems egotistical and almost petulant rather than market-driven.

I still don’t know why Steve Jobs got mixed up in a $20 million compensation dispute when his stake alone would later be worth much more than that. I’m sure pride had something to do with it, and rightly so.

For me this isn’t about Steve Jobs. My whole professional career, I have revered Jobs more than anyone, and still do. The money doesn’t matter to Jobs now, and we all wish him well during his leave. But what happened in this instance was wrong and what Jobs said about it is the same old baloney used to justify high pay and special rules for CEOs everywhere.

Let’s call a spade a spade: iPhones are good. Steve Jobs is a god. But this deposition was bad.