Redfin hasn’t spent a dime to promote our mobile apps, but 2012 traffic to our top-rated iPhone & iPad real estate app grew a whopping 156%. We’ve heard from our customers that they don’t want to wait to get home to request a tour for the home they just drove by. After all, we already send Mobile Instant Updates straight to your phone, or email you within minutes of a home appearing on the market. In a world where inventory is low, and more than 1 in 4 homes are under contract within 14 days of their debut, you’ll be able to request a tour as soon as you hear about it, wherever you are.

And of course it’s important to Redfin because traffic on mobile devices continues to grow exponentially, and up until now, there hasn’t been an easy way to get in touch with a Redfin agent via the mobile app. As a result, a business that is already growing very, very fast will grow even faster.

So how do you request a tour?

To tour any active listing, just tap the new “Add to Tour List” button. The tour list is the place you can easily keep track of the homes you want to see. You can access it anytime by tapping the tour list button, and from there, you can add more homes or just schedule the tour right then and there.

Once you’re ready to tour, simply choose the homes you want to see from your Tour List, choose a time to tour, and you’ll be on your way.

Once you’ve submitted your request, a Redfin tour coordinator will call you within a few hours to confirm your details, and help finalize the overall schedule. You’ll often be able to see a home that same day, and you don’t have to get married to a real estate agent, or fill out a long web form to make it happen.

This was a Herculean effort since it involved rewriting a lot of complex back-end code. The mobile team could be found rallying in the office, feasting on beef jerky and Twizzlers late into the night and weekends to make it happen. Hats off to the entire mobile, design and testing teams on this critical release.

If you want to be one of the first to hit the ground running on your house hunt in 2013, grab the latest version of Redfin from the iTunes App store now. We’re looking forward to what 2013 will bring, and we’d love to hear what you think of the latest release in the comments below!

The post Tour of Duty appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

We’ve had this stuff on our website for years, but not in our mobile applications. Now on iPad and iPhone you can see for yourself data about recent sales that until recently had been restricted to real estate agents, to figure out what you could sell your own home for or how much to offer on a place you want to buy. It looks particularly gorgeous on the iPad:

On the iPhone, plenty of folks will use the new data for a different purpose, to see what your dinner-party host paid for the place just before ringing her doorbell.

In the pictures here, we highlight homes we’ve sold, but of course we show every sale, regardless of who represented the buyer or the seller. The simplest way to access the data on what homes sold for is by toggling the view on the search  results, switching from “For Sale” to “Sold”:

And of course, we now send instant updates when a home closes, not just when it’s listed or first under contract, so if you’ve set up a search on Redfin to find listings in your area, your phone or tablet will start buzzing the moment those listings close too. About 1 in 5 updates is for a sale that just closed. To see the final sale price within the Redfin app, you can just click on the alert.

We added a few other goodies to the app. If you click on the tiny icon of a calculator beside the price of a listing, you’ll also see a fancy payments calculator, which looks not only at your estimated mortgage payment, but home-owner association dues, estimated taxes, utilities, and private mortgage insurance costs. This should give you a good idea of whether you can really afford a place.

Finally, for every new listing we now show the taxes paid on the property in the past year, and what the county assessor thought it was worth, a feature that was previously limited to our website.

But the main effort has been to bring records about home sales to iPhone and iPad. Is it ground-breaking? Well, other mobile applications already feature pictures of past sales, but Redfin as a broker has complete access to the local Multiple Listing Service databases used by real estate agents to record sales in the first place, so our coverage should be the most comprehensive and timely by a pretty wide margin.

Only a few mobile applications from real estate brokers have MLS data on sold homes, and none cover an area so broad as Redfin. And of course, this runs well on the new iPhone 5. Many thanks to the mobile developers, test engineers and product managers who brought this to life, and to all our customers who kept pestering us about it! We’re glad to have it out there, and can’t wait to hear what you think.

The post Pictures and Prices of Sold Homes Come to Redfin on the iPhone and iPad appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

That’s why we just updated our Redfin iPhone App and iPad App with push notifications that send new listings and price drops to your phone within 15-30 minutes of when they happen. For some buyers, this will be one of the best weapons they have in a cutthroat housing market.

We’re calling these notifications Mobile Instant Updates because they work the same way as our emailed Instant Updates, but they kick it up a notch.  Where emailed Instant Updates hit your inbox when a home goes on the market that meets your saved search criteria, or when the price drops or status changes on one of your favorite homes, Mobile Instant Updates trigger a message on your iPhone or iPad’s Notification Center as soon as that happens. Serious home buyers should think of that notification as a starter pistol going off, and start moving fast!

We launched emailed Instant Updates in March because we saw the real estate market was hitting high gear and homes were going pending within days or hours of being listed. So far, we’ve sent about four million Instant Updates by email to customers who choose to get them, and each one could give them a head start on other buyers. Receiving the same information as a notification on their iPhone or iPad can give them an even bigger head start.

To sign up to receive these instant notifications on your iPhone or iPad, simply download the latest version and we’ll guide you along once you fire it up. Or, to jumpstart the process, you can always visit “Alerts & Emails” in the app’s “My Redfin” menu to add mobile notifications to any of your favorites or saved searches.

What do you think? As always, we want your feedback on the latest and greatest features, so please leave a comment below if you have something to share with the Redfin team.

The post We’ll Push, You Steer: Instant Updates Available on iPhone & iPad appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

Now, anywhere there’s a link to a Redfin web page (in Instant Update emails and search results, for example), you can open them directly in the Redfin app. You’re one tap away from seeing all the information about the home and the huge photos in a format that’s tailored to your iPhone or iPad. You don’t need to copy/paste between applications, or use your mobile browser.

With the new version of the app, you can receive an Instant Update about a new home that just hit the market, tap on the link in the email and in a couple of seconds, you’re seeing details and big, beautiful images of a home that was just listed for sale.

Here’s what that looks like in three steps:

1. You receive the email and tap on the link to the home you want to see.

2. Choose to open the link in the Redfin app.

3. You’re among the first to see this newly listed home, and you’re seeing it in a format that’s made for your mobile device.

But wait…there’s more!

• Sync with AirPlay: When you combine the latest iPad, iPhone, Apple TV and Redfin’s iOS app, AirPlay wirelessly extends your screen to show details and a full-screen slideshow of any home, even while you’re searching the map and looking at details of the home.
• Retina-display previews: If you have one of the latest iPads, you’ll appreciate having preview images that are worthy of that beautiful screen.
• Open house sorting: Turn your iPad or iPhone into a house-hunting machine, and sort open houses by which are happening soonest.
• Improved stability: Crashes stink, so we hunted down the sources and fixed as many as we could find.

Customers have been asking for some of these improvements since we launched the first iPhone app two years ago, and we really wanted to take the time to get the experience right. We hope you’ll agree they were worth the wait.

What should the next version of our mobile apps include that they don’t already? Leave us a comment and we’ll make sure our mobile team adds it to their to-do list.

The post Redfin’s iPhone and iPad App Goes Native appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

Local Agents are Just a Tap Away: For the first time, you have direct access to local, experienced Redfin agents through your iPhone or iPad app. Tap the question bubble at the bottom of any home listing to ask a Redfin agent a question about the home or market.

Share Homes on Facebook: Home buying is personal, but sometimes you want to find out what your friends think about a place or just share some good old real estate porn. Use the one-tap Facebook sign-in and start a conversation.

Sort Homes on iPhone: The iPad app’s popular sorting feature is now available for iPhone! Sort by distance, days on Redfin, bedrooms, bathrooms and of course the “Redfin Special Blend.”

Search Nearby Homes: Tap the location arrow at the top of the screen to view all the nearby homes for sale, no matter where you are.

Edit a Saved Search on iPad: You can now edit your saved searches on the iPad app. Any changes you make will sync back to your Redfin account.

Better, Faster, Stronger
We know that every second you spend waiting for a page to load is another second you’re not finding your dream home. The upgraded app runs faster than previous versions, and we hope you’ll notice its improved performance and stability as well.

Download or update the Redfin iPad App and iPhone App and leave a comment below or send an email to feedback@redfin.com to let us know what you think. What feature would you like to see in the next round of upgrades?

The post We Took Something Great and Made it Better! appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

Here’s one of our favorite reviews:

The eye-candy, the friendly interface, the intuitive navigation, the depth of data – Redfin’s iPad app has it all. Best app ever.

Thanks to everyone who has tried out the app :). And a big hats off to everyone at Redfin for their hard work on the app!

For all of you who don’t have an iPad, we’ve produced a short demo video showing it off.

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.

The post Demo Video of Redfin's 5-Star iPad App appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

Why did we take the extra time to customize an app for the iPad when we could have simply tinkered with our top-rated real estate app for iPhone to make it work on the iPad? Taking the easy road has just never been our thing. Plus, we couldn’t contain our excitement for all of the awesome stuff that we could pull off with the iPad.

We built our iPad app from scratch to take advantage of iPad’s delightful user experience and to bring every detail we can about each home that interests you right to your fingertips. In addition, we added several exciting, new features to this release such as the option to view homes in a photo gallery or on a map, and a smart, new sort option called the “Redfin Special Blend.” The new sort option prioritizes the homes we think will be most interesting to you (i.e. Redfin has more information about them such as comments left by Redfin agents who have seen the home in person). But the thing we love most about Redfin for iPad is how fun it is to scroll through the full-screen photos and zoom in for a closer look at each home. Be careful, it’s addictive!

Here’s a quick tour through Redfin for iPad’s most exciting features:

Find homes nearby. Our app uses your iPad’s GPS so you can quickly and easily locate nearby homes for sale and open houses.

You’ll know it when you see it. We love maps but we also think you’ll agree that a photo gallery is a convenient way to quickly discover homes that catch your eye. The photo gallery feature is particularly useful once you’ve narrowed your search down to a specific neighborhood.

All the home photos and details you crave on one big screen. With just one swipe you’ll find photos and all the details about a home including property history and Redfin Agent Insights, comments left by Redfin agents who have seen the home in person. Plus, it’s all on one screen.

Have fun! Swipe through full-screen photos and then zoom in for a closer look.

Share it with a friend or friends. With one tap you can share a home you like with a friend in email or post it for your followers on Twitter, and all without leaving the app.

Stay in sync. Don’t worry, all of your old standbys are still here. When you sign in to your account, you can save searches, mark your favorites or x-out out the ones you don’t like, and even store notes and photos. Everything you do on the iPad app stays in sync so you can pick up from where you left off when you return to your computer or use a different mobile device.

Love the app? Help us out and write a review!

Found some room for improvement? Leave a comment here or drop us a line at support@redfin.com.

The post Make Room on Your Home Screen! Redfin for iPad has Arrived! appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.