What’s the big deal? Well, for the first time, folks in North Carolina can use a top-rated website and mobile tools to see all the juicy details that a real estate agent sees about listings and recent sales, drawing directly on the local databases real estate agents use to move homes on and off the market.

More importantly, we’re giving Carolinians a different kind of real estate agent to help in the purchase or sale of their place. Unlike traditional agents, Redfin agents are paid customer satisfaction bonuses rather than commissions, so you can always feel sure we’re on your side.

For each Redfin agent, we publish a map of where we’ve succeeded and failed at selling homes, and what every single customer had to say about us. And we use technology to make the process easy at every step, which allows us to deliver better service while saving folks thousands in fees, about $7,000 when you move from one $300,000 home to another.

So what took us so long? Well, unlike other online real estate companies, we expand one market at a time, hiring our own local agents and drawing on data from the local Multiple Listing Service. This means we get about 20% more agent-listed properties than Zillow or Trulia, often a week faster. It also means we have to do a lot of local software plumbing whenever we open a new market.

And since we make a living representing buyers and sellers, all while paying agents salary and benefits at about what the top 10% percent of full-time traditional agents earn in that market, we are picky about which markets have enough mid-priced homes for Redfin to turn a profit, and where we’re likely to meet the kinds of tech-savvy folks who prefer Redfin.

In Charlotte, the price of a typical home is half the Redfin average, which also halves what we can charge our customers. But as Redfin has expanded, we’ve figured out ways each year to deliver better service at lower cost, in large part by carefully analyzing the services different customers need at different points along the way: we don’t try to get people to tour a home who really need to talk to a lender first, and we know when a neighborhood has enough website activity to support hiring another agent. As a result, we can afford to operate in Charlotte now, but couldn’t have two years ago.

This is good news because it turns out that a fast-growing, progressive city like Charlotte is loaded with the kinds of people who love Redfin, and that this is probably even more true of The Triangle. Our most successful market launch so far was last April in Austin, in a college town similar to Chapel Hill. We expect Austin and now North Carolina to join other markets Redfin recently launched that are now contributing significant revenues: Denver, which opened in 2011, grew 337% in 2012; Dallas opened in December 2010 and just grew 346%.

To run our North Carolina business, we hired two local folks with 25 years of collective real estate experience. Julie McGee Sharpe, who will manage all of North Carolina for Redfin, lives, eats and breathes real estate. She started at Coldwell Banker in 2000, then moved to Helen Adams Realty. She has spent her whole life in the Charlotte area except for a year studying piano in Winston-Salem.

Allen Wyde, who runs our Triangle business, has owned and operated two brokerages since getting his license in 2001 and he is also an active real estate investor. Both came to Redfin to put the customer first, and we’re proud to have the two of them representing Redfin in North Carolina.

Next up is Houston, the Bronx and then Delaware, all of which we expect to launch in the next few weeks. In the space of a month, we will have added more than 3 million properties to our website and mobile tools, and increased the number of active listings available on Redfin by 14%. It’s strange to think, six years in, that we’re still just starting out, with more than two thirds of the country a vast wilderness yet unknown to Redfin’s service.

A brokerage is a hard business to get going, but once you do get it going, it’s a hard business to stop.

The post Redfin Comes to North Carolina appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

Austin should be a perfect market for us, with plenty of real estate innovators, lots of progressive consumers, lots of weirdness, and plenty of technology to boot. We like Austin’s size too, as Redfin has already thrived in places like Portland and Boston, where the territory is a little easier to cover.

Redfin’s Austin business is led by superstar Cyndy Stewart, who has eight years of local experience. Cyndy is building a team of four folks to serve Austin, covering all of Travis and Williamson counties, as well as the towns of Wimberley and Dripping Springs in Hays County, south of Austin.

In all of these places, we’ll continue to give customers a choice of partner agents, too, especially where we still aren’t local or when we get too busy. For most of Hays County as well as Bastrop County, we’ll rely exclusively on partners.

For us, combining direct and partner service is the only way to build a balanced business, able to serve new customers in any neighborhood at the drop of a hat, without hiring more agents than we can support year-round, through thick and thin. That hasn’t changed.

What is new with Austin is that we waited 18 months to hire our own agents. Waiting is much better for customers than the old Redfin model. For example, when we launched Atlanta the old way in December 2009, we hired one guy to scramble around central Georgia, which is about seven times larger than Austin.

That one Atlanta guy spent his life driving and hoping for more business. Since it took time for Redfin’s traffic to grow, we didn’t have enough customers to justify a larger team. But almost nobody wanted to work with an agent trying to cover all of Atlanta, so customers were hard to come by too. It was a classic chicken-and-egg problem.

The solution we developed for Austin is the chicken then the eggs, launching a website and monitoring the traffic before deciding to hire agents in force. We’ve always been clear about this plan in Austin, yet beginning first as a website that referred customers to partners naturally raised a ruckus among real estate brokers. It’s a privilege to be a broker in Austin, and to participate in the local Multiple Listing Service used to share listing data.

At a conference in Austin just a few months ago, some of Austin’s thought leaders asked me how can we claim to make real estate better if we’re just another online middle-man, coming between the agent and his customer? Everyone in technology worries Redfin  will simply be a service business, and everyone in real estate worries we’ll simply be a web business. The truth is that we go back and forth, not because we can’t make up our mind, but because it’s the best way for us to serve our customers.

We’ll see how it works out in Austin. I bet it’ll be a smash hit. If you’d like to meet the new Redfin agents or our long-standing Austin partners, we’re having everyone from the local real estate scene over for a little party on May 2, with lots of Redfin execs flying into Austin from Seattle, and an engineer or two as well. Welcome Cyndy and howdy Austin!

The post All According to Plan: Redfin Launches Austin Service appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

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 that 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 Washington DC 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.

For now, customers in Center City and the rest of Philadelphia can work with our partner agents, but as we grow our local business, we’ll expand our direct service into Center City and eventually Philly’s New Jersey suburbs.

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 28^th. 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.

Want to get in touch with Linda and the Philadelphia team?  Send us an email at philadelphia@redfin.com or call 484-962-0034.  We look forward to working with you!

The post Philly, We Have Arrived! appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

It’s good to be in Denver. Imagining the Boulder mountain hippies who live to ski and camp, the tech pioneers who are trying to build a startup culture in a new place, I’ve always felt a deep affinity for the Denver area. I had a great night of the soul in the Denver airport because I missed the day’s last flight out while listening to a silly song at the gate. But we had to put Denver off to hunt bigger game: Washington DC, Los Angeles, Boston, San Diego, New York, Chicago.

This initial ring of megapolises took longer than we thought because we had to learn how to ramp traffic quickly for free, how to be smart about the neighborhoods where we could initially offer local service and where we had to rely on partners, how to get our costs down in markets where homes are more affordable.

We learned a lot, then, finally, we expanded a lot. That process is almost done: we’ll open a few more markets, then take a break in expansion for a year or two, to figure out the next set of optimizations needed before we launch another tier of markets.

Most of our growth in the meantime will  come from gains in market-share: in every market, every year, our market-share has grown. As we get big enough to offer more local service in more neighborhoods within each market, we hope that share in each one reaches a tipping point. We’ll also offer new services to our customers.

But if you have to stop expanding somewhere, Denver would be a good stopping place. I still remember that when a friend lost a family member,  her college roommate sang her a John Denver lullaby over the phone. And I’ve never forgotten Benjamin Kunkel’s description of Colorado, which I wrote down back when I still read literary magazines like Granta:

The first of the beautiful ordinary things I remember are the creek gabbling away in its bed and the smell of rained-on sage bringing out an unexpected sweetness from the land: thoughts of water in a dry place. But the thinness & dryness of the air on clear days — as of something brittle that would never break — was also thrilling…

Denver increases our listing database by about 4%, so now we cover about a third of the United States.

Please tell your friends about Redfin’s expansion to Denver. In the absence of any advertising, the Redfin cult is the only thing we have to start with. And thanks to the data & expansion team who carried our torch in covered wagons to a new little house on the prairie. You guys are awesome.

The post Something Brittle That Would Never Break: Redfin Opens in Denver appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

Giving regular people in Las Vegas and Austin the full monty, with direct access to all the real estate information that had previously been limited to brokers, will make consumers in those markets a lot more self-sufficient.

Are there any other sites in Las Vegas or Austin that show all the data on all the homes for sale, without registering you as a sales lead? We’re not sure. This advantage is especially acute in Austin and Las Vegas: in both towns, Redfin can show consumers all the photos of all the past sales.

How Can Redfin Survive in the Desert?
Our expansion to Las Vegas and Austin has profound implications for Redfin’s business model too. These arid climates would once have been deadly for Redfin, because our revenues vary with home prices but our costs historically haven’t.

And boy do the revenues vary. In Las Vegas, the median home price is around $130,000; in Austin it’s $230,000. In our first expansion market, San Francisco, the median price is now $460,000. We figure if we can make it in Las Vegas, we can make it almost anywhere.

To adapt to this environment, we rely more on partner agents at other brokerages and less on our own real estate agents. As the business builds, we’ll also hire more of our own agents, tying our local costs to local home prices and local average salaries.

In the meantime, we carefully interview, select and train each partner – 14 new ones in all — surveying all their clients from the last 18 months and posting the  results to our website. As with our own agents, the pay to our partners increases with customer satisfaction. And as with customers of our own agents, customers of our partners get a refund, albeit 15% of the commission instead of 50%.

Even though Redfin’s revenues are lower on each partner transaction, the profit margins are higher, and the values behind the service are the same. The tools our partners use to work with Redfin allow us to monitor customer satisfaction throughout the transaction, and the agent’s Redfin profile gives the consumer complete transparency on the agent’s performance.

The Partner Business Makes the Direct Business Better
Does this mean that Redfin’s business will become more partner-oriented as we expand? It does. But it doesn’t mean we’ll give up the direct business, which will always generate the lion’s share of Redfin’s revenue.

What makes our partner business successful is our direct business. We know what to look for in a good partner agent only because we are brokers and agents ourselves. The tools we are building for ourselves — to arrange home tours, collaborate on the escrow process, prepare comparative market analyses, promote listings and electronically sign documents – are part of what will set our partners’ service apart.

And our partners make our brokerage better, too, taking on clients we can’t profitably serve, helping us out when we’re busy and providing local service when the market’s too big for us to cover. Real estate is such an up-and-down, hyper-local business, it’s hard to make it work 100% on your own. No brokerage is an island.

Redfin will probably never launch a new market the way we used to, hiring one guy to drive all over town. And we’ll probably never go into a market where we don’t plan on offering direct and partner service. Instead, the two business models will work together.

Coverage Areas
In Austin for now, Redfin’s search site covers all of Bastrop, Hays, Travis, and Williamson counties, with agents helping people buy and sell homes in Georgetown, Round Rock, Cedar Park, Austin, Lakeway, and Dripping Springs.

In Las Vegas, Redfin’s search site covers both Clark and Nye counties. Agents are available to represent Redfin users in the North Las Vegas Valley communities of Aliante, Eldorado and Iron Mountain Ranch, as well as the Las Vegas Strip and the southern communities of  Spring Valley, Henderson and Boulder City.

Please tell your friends in Austin and Vegas all about Redfin’s arrival in town!

The post Redfin Opens Las Vegas, Austin appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

The Listing Service Now Includes an In-Home Consultation, More Online Tools
Lets talk about the listing service first since that affects every market. The big problem we’ve had listing homes before is that we didn’t have enough agents to cover the territory, making it hard to see the house before we put it on the market. Since organizing agents into local teams last November and adding partners to cover the outlying areas, that’s all changed.

We can now visit every property, to see which rooms need to be spruced up before the house hits the market, and to price the place based on first-hand experience. Every agent has a list of local, reliable stagers, gardeners and handymen to get the place sparkling from top to toe. To underscore the personal responsibility each Redfin agent is taking for selling a listing, every yard sign will have that agent’s name on it, starting next week.

There’s no up-front fee on our listings, which I always thought was baloney anyway, and our pricing has changed just to match our buy-side offering: we charge 1.5% of the home price, with a $5,500 minimum. Before we charged $5,000 or $7,000, depending on the level of service. As always, our agents’ bonus depends on customer satisfaction, so the agent’s incentive will always be to make you happy, not just to sell the property at any price.

We still include professional photography with our service, which we think makes the biggest difference in online appeal, and we list the property all over the web, even on the sites that don’t have a direct MLS feed, including Craigslist, Trulia, Zillow and Realtor.com. We also re-designed our flyers to look really spiffy, and we’re printing them for the customer rather than sending you an electronic file to print yourself. And then we’re getting the word out through our network of field agents, who work with thousands of home-buyers every month.

As you’d expect from Redfin, we offer the best online tools for tracking website traffic to your listing and comparing it to the traffic to other listings in the neighborhood. We also are deploying an email survey system for asking other agents who show the property what their clients think about the property and the price, so you can fix problems fast.

And we’re not done with listings! We’ve got plenty of online tools in the works for home-sellers, so let us know in the comments if there’s something in particular you’d like to see. Already plenty of thanks is due to Marcelo Calbucci, a Seattle entrepreneur who gave us detailed feedback on why he chose a traditional agent in lieu of Redfin to sell his home last year. Thanks Marcelo. To learn more about our service for home-sellers, visit our site.

Short-Sale Tours
And at long last, Redfin is supporting tours for short sale properties. Short sales are properties selling for less than the owner owes the bank. Because one or usually two banks has to approve the sale, a short sale may take months to close or the banks may never approve it, preferring instead just to re-possess the house after the foreclosure auction.

For a long time, Redfin didn’t help our customers with short sales at all. But as the number of short sales proliferated, and as I overheard our front desk take more and more calls from customers wanting at least to see a few short-sale properties on their neighborhood tour, we decided we had to help.

So we’ve hired more field agents to handle the load, and we’re ready to tour short sales in Seattle, Portland, the Bay Area, Sacramento, LA, Atlanta and Phoenix. In the rest of our markets, we still have to hire more field agents but that shouldn’t take more than a month or so; we’ll keep you posted.

If our customers decide to write an offer on a short-sale property, we’ll still have to refer the deal to a partner, just because our agents in most markets still need to go through a bit more training on the ins and outs of working with different banks. The refund on a short-sale offer is the same as it is for all partners, 15%, and the partners go through the same vetting, surveying, interviewing process we put all partners through.

Thanks to Adam Doppelt and other customers for getting on our case to do the right thing with short sales. One note: in Phoenix, our own agents are handling short sales directly as well as our partners. There’s too many of ‘em down there for us to ignore.

Redfin Launches in the Valley of the Sun
Which brings us to Phoenix, the  grave-yard of real estate brokers…

Yes, the market is in rough shape. Yes, competition in Phoenix is fierce. But we can take it. Redfin’s site will be, by far, the best real estate search site in Phoenix, if for no other reason than that we have data no one else does: beyond the comprehensive listing data we show about a home’s price history and days on market, Redfin is the first to display photos and details of homes that recently sold. In a market changing as fast as Phoenix, consumers will love getting near real-time updates on what’s selling and for how much, so we expect our traffic to take off there.

Hopefully, our agents can keep up. Marcus Fleming is running our local customer-service operation. Like Jeff Bale in Portland, Mark Reitman in Chicago, James Marks in Atlanta and Michael Daly in New York, Marcus combines the nitty-gritty customer-service experience of running a retail store — that will give you battle scars, believe me — with years running a real estate brokerage.

Marcus has already hired a few Redfin agents to help him cover the Valley of the Sun, but we’ve stopped trying to offer local expertise for the entire metropolitan area. Instead we rely on partners working for other brokerages to cover the areas we can’t reach ourselves. To make sure we never send a Redfin customer to a dingbat, Redfin’s Chelsea Mitchell and Shari Fox put every partner through the wringer, requiring each partner to have closed 15 transactions, and then surveying a year’s worth of past customers. As always, we publish the results of those surveys to our website.

The result: our partners include some of the best real estate agents in Phoenix, including the great Greg Swann of Bloodhound Blog, and his partner Cathleen Collins. I feel especially honored to have Greg join our program, not only because he is such a delightful blogger to follow, but because we have learned so much from him over the years. Every time I go to Phoenix, I talk to Greg, and every time I talk to Greg, I learn more about real estate.

Phew! That’s it! Another big launch is in the books. Thanks to all the Redfin folks who worked so hard to get this baby out the door.

The post Redfin Expands to Phoenix, Launches New Listing Service appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

As John Cook recently speculated, Redfin has big plan growth plans. Portland is Redfin’s 11th market overall, and its opening follows closely on the December launch of Atlanta. Jeff Bale, Portland market manager, joins a long line of starry-eyed pied pipers — he is a youth minister — who at one point deep in their past managed a restaurant or small business. What a perfect combo!

So what stopped us from getting to Oregon earlier? Oregon Revised Statute 696.290, which states:
A real estate licensee shall not offer, promise, allow, give, pay or rebate, directly or indirectly, any part or share of the licensee’s commission or compensation arising or accruing from any real estate transaction

Translation: our commission refund is illegal in Oregon, and in eight other states. If a Redfin customer pays $500,000 for a house in Vancouver, Washington, we usually get $15,000 of that as a fee for our service, and give half of that, $7,500, to our customer. A mile across the river in Portland, we can’t give the customer any money directly.

All we can do in Portland is apply the refund to closing costs, lender permitting. This is usually worth a few thousand bucks. And then we donate the rest to one of four charities chosen by the customer:

• Oregon Food Bank
• Shriners Hospitals for Children Portland
• SOLV, an Oregon environmental non-profit
• Habitat for Humanity, Portland Metro East

Because of the Oregon law, the donation has to be in our name.

The first question people ask is what plausible consumer benefit such Oregon’s anti-rebate law could have. I’d always assumed the law was an artifact of early-20th-century Tammany Hall-style politics, or maybe even 1970’s Serpico-style corruption.

But the Oregon law was amended without comment as recently as 2005. Even better, Tennessee enacted a brand-new anti-rebate law in 2007, giving a Tennessee Association of Realtors spokesperson an opportunity to provide a modern rationale: “Unfortunately, rebates, in too many cases, take the form of cash incentives that could be used to lure consumers into risky real estate transactions.”

What? The money used to “lure” a buyer into a risky transaction comes from the buyer himself. A buyer can’t lure himself into a risky transaction, and certainly not more than a commission-based agent could.

Wait! There’s more: “In some cases,” the spokesperson continues, “you could see a rebate used as part of a down payment, which could amount to mortgage fraud.” It’s also possible to kill someone with a butter knife, but nobody is outlawing flatware. Fraud would only be possible if Redfin inflated the loan amount so as to pay a buyer under the table, prior to closing. In tens of thousands of transactions, Redfin and other brokerages notify the lender of a refund, and don’t allow that money to be used as a down payment. It isn’t fraud to charge a lower price.

Some states have stopped the silliness. In Kentucky, West Virginia, South Dakota and Montana, where real estate commissions created anti-rebate rules, the Department of Justice spent the past five years suing or threatening to sue so as to overturn these rules. But in the remaining nine anti-rebate states, the legislature has given anti-rebate rules the force of law, and the DoJ is powerless.

So that means it’s up you, the Oregon voter. Already in the frozen swamps of New Jersey last January, the legislature ignored the objections of the New Jersey Association of Realtors to pass a law overturning anti-rebate restrictions, which Governor Corzine signed before leaving office.

And then in 2007, Oregon Senator Jackie Winters sponsored an amendment to the anti-rebate law; she argued that since most of the original law was focused  on preventing finder’s fees from going to out-of-state real estate agents, the language outlawing rebates to consumers should be dropped. The text of the amendment in its entirety was:

Nothing in subsection (1) of this section is intended to prevent an Oregon real estate broker or principal real estate broker from rebating or paying a share of the broker’s or principal broker’s commission resulting from a real estate transaction to a principal of the transaction.

Something so simple could never pass. The amendment died in the Business and Transportation committee, chaired by Rick Metsger. Nobody in Senator Metsger’s office is sure what happened to the amendment. To get it back on the calendar when the legislature meets again in the winter of 2011 – 2012, email your Oregon state senator with one simple message: repeal the anti-rebate law for real estate commissions.

(One final post-script: when we contacted Senator Winters office to ask why the 2007 amendment died, the staffer who answered the phone late on Tuesday night spoke with genuine warmth about Senator Metsger, even though the two senators are from different parties. It gives you hope that, even when they make mistakes, politicians can work things out.)

Credit for photo of Jackie Winters : Celine… on Flickr

The post Redfin Expands to Oregon, First of Nine States That Outlaw Our Business Model appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

From the moment James explained to us that he once ran a big customer-service team at Best Buy — and made sure every single car-radio installer set the clock — he had the job. James has been an Atlanta broker for six years. He has a gentle southern accent, a deep service ethic and the kind of humility you don’t see every day but what’s most striking about him is that he could probably destroy, seduce or charm any wild animal in a hand-to-hand encounter. He’s very resourceful and determined.

James will be offering our direct service in the Alpharetta, Buckhead, East Cobb, Intown, Perimeter, Suwanee and Woodstock areas. We’ll work with partners to serve West Cobb, Gwinnett, Peachtree City and Lake Lanier areas.

Redfin Invests in Local Teams
More important for our customers nationwide, we’re rolling out local real estate teams for every market we serve. This is a major service upgrade designed to give you the intimacy and personal service of a small team while still ensuring you always have someone to help you, seven days a week.

An agent runs each team, assisted by a coordinator for scheduling tours and handling the closing paperwork. Two or three field agents help you get into homes all over town on short notice. You work with the same folks throughout the process and one person — the agent — is responsible for your happiness. There’s technology behind the scenes to route service requests and phone calls to the right person on different days and at different times, but that’s only so it’s all simple for you.

It’s a big shift for us. The way it used to work, the agent was your main advocate, but you had to call into a Seattle call-center to schedule home tours. This allowed us to offer service every day of the week morning, noon and night. But it turns out local expertise was also really important to our customers.

So why didn’t we hire local teams before? Well, one reason is that we just didn’t have enough business. When you start out getting two or three offers per week for customers across Seattle, you don’t have enough business to hire a bunch of local teams. Getting local is easy for traditional brokers, because their agents are contractors, but Redfin hires employees.

Which brings us to the essential conundrum of an online brokerage. The online part scales very well, as you naturally want to bring the world’s greatest real estate search site to every market you can, as fast as you can. And the brokerage doesn’t scale so well, as it’s expensive to hire a team for every neighborhood, particularly when you’re finicky about quality and consistency.

But everything that works against you when you’re first starting out starts to tip the other way as you grow. Redfin serves Palo Alto or Newton or Santa Monica much better than we used to, just because our business has gotten big enough to support local teams that know those areas.

Of course, we still struggle when we open a new market, but even that’s gotten better, first of all because traffic in every new market grows faster than it did in the prior market. And second because we’ve stopped trying to take on an entire market on our own. Rather than covering all of Atlanta just with James’s team, we work with partner agents to handle the outlying areas so James can stay close to home.

We think teams is another big step toward becoming a mass-market service that blends the best of the traditional world with new technology, and a commitment to serving customers rather than chasing commissions.

What About All the Other Features?
As with every release, Redfin also included the usual grab-bag of goodies, starting with email alerts on recent past sales:

Whenever a property you’ve marked as a favorite sells, we’ll let you know by email. To get the photos, prices and other details for all the homes  that sold in your neighborhood, just click “Email Me New Listings” in the box that appears top left:

Now visit My Redfin, click on Saved Searches, then click the “Email Options” link to ask to be notified when “Listings Are Sold.”

You can make the same adjustments for any listing alert.

We also began collecting reviews on the local lenders that our agents recommend, relying on Rob McGarty to publish them to our site. Over time, we’ll automate this, but for now you can trust to publish every review, good or bad, for every deal, just as we do with all of our agents:

We also link to other lender marketplaces, so you can keep our recommended lenders honest on price. We don’t make any money from our recommended lenders because we haven’t figured out an ethical way to do this. When and if we do, we’ll let you know.

And that’s the new website! Happy holidays, and thanks to the entire team that worked so hard to deliver this release. It’s gorgeous! As always, we’re excited to hear what you think.

The post We Blew Up the Call Center (And We Launched Atlanta) appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

I used to dislike the way LA made me feel insignificant, but now it’s almost a relief. If Gertrude Stein once complained that the problem with Oakland is that “when you get there, you’re there,” she might have said about Southern California that you when you get there, you feel like you’re not there at all. What makes all the taco trucks, the Korean strip malls, the freeways, the birdbath pools and look-alike houses not only bearable but actually and suddenly quite beautiful is the ocean on the other side of it all, serene as far as the eye can see.

Now Redfin is launching in Southern California, the largest real estate market in the world. In one magnificent land-grab, we’ve more than tripled the area we have to cover: Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego and Ventura counties. To start, we’ve hired three new agents, who (if SoCal is anything like San Francisco was) will probably spend their first few months on the job waiting for action from the Web site, and e-mailing the rest of us to tell us they’re going loco.

Or maybe things will pick up a little faster: we’re closing a whopper deal in San Diego today, and we’ve already got a few others in progress. We’re supposed to show up on TV tonight in San Diego, and the LA Times published a nice spread about us today (smiling picture; intensely regretted & insanely provocative quote, which Kevin Boer has already called me out on); we got on the radio and a podcast too. Another positive development is the Southern California bloggers already are talking trash about us.

As usual, they call us discounters, when we’re not offering a discount on a traditional service, we’re offering an online service at a different price, with a different business model and 95+% customer satisfaction. Amazon.com is not a discount bookstore. Redfin.com’s goal is to be different and better too, not just cheaper.

And hey, did you notice that Redfin.com has smaller icons, and it’s running faster today? We put some serious hardware on company plastic, squashed our file sizes and got down and dirty optimizing our code. Some day, we’re going to have to write a post on the tradeoffs between Flash and AJAX, which we’ve had to learn about as we go. The big issue we’re still working on — crucifixion by comments, please — is Safari support, which we lost when we switched to Virtual Earth.

For now, please tell your Southern California friends about us, and thanks for all your support.

The post Redfin Enters the Great Southland Empire (& Runs Faster Too) appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.