Sometime in the wee hours of the night last night, Redfin upgraded our website to show photos, prices, and all the gory details on every property sold for the past two years, in almost every area we serve. So far, we’ve loaded up 9 million photos of 1.4 million recently sold properties, quadrupling the amount of real estate information we store.

And since we turned on our data slurpers full blast for new past-sales records, the data will keep piling up: within 15 minutes of an agent’s taking a property off the market, you can expect to see the pictures and the price on Redfin’s site. This investment in near-real-time sales history continues Redfin’s multi-year journey into Freakish Depth, which is our strategy for taking property data to ridiculous extremes of accuracy, freshness and depth. We meet our customers exclusively via our website, and if the site isn’t trustworthy, why would anyone expect the service to be?

Yes, OK, You Do Have to Register…
The only hitch is that outside of the Seattle and Washington DC areas you need to register before going deep. OK, so requiring registration is not normally our style — we’re not looking to spam you or call you out of the blue — but there’s a reason for it. The Multiple Listing Services that share this data with us first want to make sure we’re not posting it everywhere willy-nilly, limiting it instead to the folks who are serious.

But It’s Worth It
Once you’re registered, you can do all sorts of fun stuff, like checking out all the $1M+ homes that sold last week in Los Angeles, San Francisco or Boston. Or do your own search on recent past sales: visit our search page and look underneath the Search Listings button for a More Options link.

Clicking that link opens a big search dialog where the options for searching past-sales records appear bottom left:

After you run a query on past sales, the map fills up with pretty baby-blue icons representing homes that recently sold. Just as with listings, pictures and basic details pop up to the right:

If you click through the thumbnail picture for more details, you get a staggering amount of detail on the property that just sold, usually all the information the seller’s agent provided when listing the house in the first place — which we then pair with parcel outlines, tax record, automated appraisals and all sorts of other goodies too numerous to include in the screenshot.

Before the upgrade, we only showed public records of recent sales: the most basic facts about the property’s bedrooms and bathrooms, the price, no pictures, all after waiting two to twelve weeks for the records first to get recorded by the county, then aggregated by a data-collection service and then syndicated out to sites like ours. What we have up today is a big improvement.

The Killer Application
But now that we’ve published a near-real-time feed of pictures and details of virtually every recent sale, there’s still the question of what you as a consumer can do with that data. And the first, most obvious application is a Comparative Market Analysis, or CMA. If you’re trying to price a property, you can usually establish a reasonable range by putting together a list of similar properties that sold in the area over the past month or two — use the photos to exclude all the dumps, unless you’re buying or selling a dump — with the same square footage plus or minus 10% — and usually the same number of bedrooms and bathrooms plus or minus one. Then take what each of the comparable properties cost per square foot and multiply it by the square footage of the property in question, sorting the resulting prices from high to low. This is the starting point for any real estate professional to think about a property’s price range.

Now you can take this on yourself, using the same data that agents have, even if later on you still want an agent’s help corroborating which comparables you picked and analyzing the results — Redfin agents put together CMAs every day, and don’t expect to stop any time soon. But even if you get a little help, it’s nice to be able to see for yourself what the agent can see, and to go as far as you like on your own.

The Other Big Feature… Trackbacks
The other big new feature in this release is blog trackbacks. Any time a blogger links to a listing on our site, we now link back to the blogger, so consumers can easily see what everybody on the Internet is saying about a house. If a blogger reviews a condo in a new development, any link to that listing on Redfin will generate a reciprocal link from the listing on Redfin back to the reviewer’s site, along with a snippet of text from the review.

Tying together everything that’s being said about a property can, we hope, socialize the lonely, scary process of buying a home, and it will almost certainly boost the quality and quantity of online discussion. The same trackback technology that almost overnight created the blogosphere’s ecosystem of criss-crossing links  can now nurture the growing number of real estate bloggers — many of them agents — who use Redfin and other brokerage sites as a reference for their real estate discussions.

For the industry, both of these features are a little bit daring. Real estate agents don’t like the idea of some crazy blogger trashing their listings, and most everywhere they have preserved the option for sellers to opt out of any type of blog integration or online commentary. We think opting out is a very bad move, just because social media drives traffic like nothing else to a listing — but we can’t argue with giving the sellers a choice.

Really, it’s impressive that we got this data at all. A long time ago and with plenty of the evidence to the contrary, we made a bet that the industry would become more open, that we could challenge the status quo as a broker without being squashed, that complying with local MLS rules would be worth the extra hassle so we could get information directly from other brokers. This turned out to be a very lucky bet.

You can argue that this version of Redfin would never have happened without last year’s Department of Justice settlement with the National Association of Realtors, which gave online brokers the right to share any data with our customers that an agent can divulge to a customer face to face. Both trackbacks and the newly available past-sales data would not have seen the light of day if not for this settlement. But the hole in that argument is that MLSs not even governed by the settlement nonetheless have agreed to many of the same terms.

We still have plenty of gripes, but the industry is changing for the better. So in addition to the thanks we owe to all the Redfin folks who worked on this gargantuan effort — hats off to the whole team —  we also wanted to thank the other brokers for agreeing to a more open data-sharing policy. We’re excited to see what consumers think of the new policy and the new site.

Update from Matt: When we first released the site this morning we experienced a lengthy site outage. We’re very sorry for the inconvenience.

The post There's Going to Be a Whole Lot of Rubber-Necking Going On… appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

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. The Redfin 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.

The post At Last! Redfin Releases Its iPhone App! appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

As Arthur Patterson explains on our devblog, the new version of Redfin.com that we began rolling out last week is another milestone in our Freakish Depth strategy – to provide more and better data about every home for sale in the markets we serve, and to build an online application that takes consumers deeper into the home-buying process. We set out on this strategy January 2008 after we realized real estate consumers’ appetite for data is very high, and their tolerance for quality glitches is low.

Since then, our quest to show every home for sale, in exactly the right location, has taken us to some obscure places. For example, over the past two weeks, we’ve been re-analyzing the position of each of 17,643,511 properties on Redfin’s map, getting a second and sometimes a third opinion on the location of each. In about 80% of cases, we adjusted a property’s location on our map a little or a lot, so that each property would be placed dead-center on the parcel of land defined by its deed.

Mapping 95%+ of Properties In Our Markets
As a result, a new version of Redfin has now improved the percentage of properties we can map from 94.4% to 95.4%, decreasing unmapped properties by 17%. More important, we’ve increased the percentage of for-sale listings we can map to an exact point from 55.4% last week to 70.2% now. (And this is just listings; considering all properties on Redfin, which includes both listings and properties that have sold in the past 20 – 30 years, we can point-map well more than 80%.) In some places, like San Francisco, one of our partners expects to get significantly better point data over the next few months.

We now map only 17.4% of listings by interpolation, using the address just to guess where the listing is on a block (an example of an interpolation would be “about two-thirds down, on the left-hand side”). We also use location data provided by assessors’ offices and broker databases (Multiple Listing Services, or MLSs) to locate another 6.1% of listings on a map.

Of the remaining 6.3% of listings that are totally unmapped, nearly 6% are unmapped because the real estate agent chose to withhold its address or entered a nonsensical address such as “0 Main Street.” We are thus near the theoretical maximum of listings that we can map. If you include properties that aren’t for sale, only 5.4% of the total are unmapped, also near its theoretical maximum.

Getting a Second Opinion for Every Unmapped Property
How did we increase our precision to these new heights? Well, for starters, we shelled out for two different geo-coders. A geo-coder is a service run by different Redfin partners for locating addresses on a map. I like to think – and it is probably true – that a geo-coder is a descendant of the Cold-War technology the U.S. once developed to drop a nuclear bomb directly on the bathroom of the Moscow apartment AND the country dacha of every member of the Politburo.

Using two geo-coders allows us to pump every address through both to see which one can come up with a match. And on top of that, we run listings through our special human-powered PITA geo-coder; whenever a home-owner emails us to complain about the location of a property on our map, we move it by hand, and add a note to our database so we remember the correct spot.

Yikes. Does this scale? No. Was I initially opposed to moving properties by hand? Yes. But it is hard to tell employees to care less about quality, particularly when you start from the premise that your website is the beginning of a trusting relationship between Redfin and the consumer. Here’s the full breakdown of how we map listings by order of priority:

Was running each location through a 6-point check worth it? Only you can be the judge. For the Freak in Freakish Depth is none other than you, the gentle reader, who is typically about to plunk down $700,000 for a house. All our professional lives, software people dreamed in vain of finding people like you, who care as much as we do about data quality, and who will take as much data as we can publish.

The Freak Behind The Freak
And the Freak behind the Freak is Arthur Patterson and his colleagues, who developed this new algorithm for precisely locating properties.

For every place and time in history there is a man or woman uniquely suited to what the age demands: Winston Churchill had been rattling sabers since Gallipoli but finally found an adversary worth fighting in Nazi Germany. Joe Montana had his arm-strength questioned since high school, but fit right into an offense that prized finesse over fifty-yard bombs.

Arthur and his colleagues bring the same enthusiasm to the vast, untamed wilderness of unmapped listings, fat-fingered addresses and freshly bulldozed cul-de-sacs. It’s a problem so daunting that most real estate websites have ignored it, instead publishing the good alongside the bad.

But we have decided to invest in data quality because it is an area where we really can be different: unlike other online real estate companies, Redfin as a broker has access to the broker databases, so we have much better data. But unlike the other brokers, we as Internet software folks are more willing and able to publish all of the data available to us.

If you find a property on Redfin that isn’t mapped right – annoyingly, there are still thousands – email us at support (at) Redfin (dot) com. We may not get every property every time, but we’ll try. And, at least where property location is concerned, we’ll never make the same mistake twice.

Finally, if there are other areas where you’d like to see Redfin improve its data quality or gather new data, let us know in the comments below. We’re always eager to hear your ideas.

The post Redfin Gets Better in Almost 14 Million Different Places appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.