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!
Big news! If a little red number just popped up beside your iPhone’s App Store icon, it’s because Redfin just upgraded its top-rated iPhone app!
The new app is like chocolate ice cream — deeper and richer! — especially for the real-estate aficionados who log-in as Redfin customers. The local Multiple Listing Services we rely on for most of our listing data require the log-in, but for a long time we just assumed that mobile users were casual browsers, who couldn’t be bothered to register for better information.
Wrong.
When we shipped Redfin for Android last month, we offered juicy details about a home to registered users, and registrations shot through the roof. Android users visited more often than iPhone users, and registered at about triple the rate.
So we scrambled to upgrade the iPhone app, calling on intern Seth Goldenberg to make it beautiful. First, Seth delivered a complete history of a property’s pricing, so that iPhone users can see when a listing’s price has risen or fallen, and also when the listing has been taken off market and then re-listed so as to seem new:
Good stuff.
Registered users can now also see Agent Insights, the notes our own agents take about a home when touring it in person. In core Redfin areas, we’ve toured as many as 30% of active listings, and our notes from the tour can tell you when to race over to a listing and when it isn’t worth the trip:
Very good stuff. We just also made the whole app a little prettier, with simple buttons for the most popular actions people want to take while touring the property in person, including taking photos and notes that they can upload to the Redfin website:
It’s a proud day for Redfin, for Seth, and for the whole team who helped to design and test the app! Here’s Seth celebrating the release with a well-deserved cold one:
I love the way he took a swig right as he hit the button. That’s the way to do it!
Ahoy Redfinnians! We just got word from Apple that an update to our iPhone app will hit the store in the next hour or so. The big new feature is the ability to run saved searches from Redfin.com on your iPhone:
You can also save searches run on your iPhone, for later use from either the iPhone or a web browser:
Our goal is to build a home-search application that easily moves from your computer to your mobile device and back again. Since we first released an iPhone app, we’ve shared users’ list of favorite properties between the iPhone app and our website, and allowed an iPhone user to photograph a listing and upload the picture to our site. Saved searches is the next step.
We also want to make it easy for people to move from the virtual experience Redfin offers to actual service from our real estate agents. Some day, the iPhone app will let people schedule tours or contact a Redfin agent about a property.
Even we have been surprised at how important the iPhone app has become to our business. Last Saturday, when we assembled a dozen Redfin users to hear what they had to say about us, one attendee was shocked to learn we even had a website. Her entire Redfin experience had been limited to our iPhone app.
This just puts an exclamation point on Fred Wilson’s thesis that companies should build for mobile first, and the web second. There are few activities more mobile than a real estate search, and few that engage users so deeply. Next up for us are Android and iPad apps.
We’ve been promising to support other devices for a long time, but when each device is a side-project, we end up putting it off. So now we’re building a dedicated mobile team. Before anyone asks when we’re supporting Android or the iPad, can I direct you to the jobs page of our website? If you know a pioneering engineer in San Francisco, have her send me a resume: glenn (at) redfin (com). It’s a very, very sweet gig.
Our software engineers have been hard at work on an upgraded version of our iPhone app, which is now available for download from the App Store! Here’s what you can expect:
Enhancements:
Drag-and-Search: You asked and we listened! Dragging the map to a new location re-queries Redfin for the homes in that area.
High-Res Retina Display Graphics: The app’s graphics and home photos now look great on the iPhone 4′s “resolutionary” high-definition Retina Display.
Bug Fixes:
Location support: We’ve made it easier to let your iPhone share location information with the Redfin app.
Multi-line amenities: Driving directions, instructions on how to access homes, and other information are now fully displayed, even if it doesn’t fit on one line…
Performance: It’s, y’know, faster!
If you have any feedback on our latest update, please drop us a line at feedback (at) redfin (dot) com, or you can just leave a review in the iTunes store.
Here’s a picture of Redfin intern Kenter Wu launching the app upgrade, which was largely his handiwork.
Sasha notes that Kenter used Dan Fabulich’s Android phone to do this, but I bet Sasha took the photo with an iPhone.
Oh, and for those Android users out there, we’re hard at work on a little something for you. We’ll keep you posted…
Every month or so, as part of a series of talks called Engineer-2-Engineer (E2E), one of the gods of software engineering descends into the San Francisco offices of Redfin or Digg to give a technical talk on a practical subject. We’ve had architects from Twitter, Facebook and Pandora talk about Scala, mobile and Hadoop.
Now Redfin’s very own Sasha Aickin just published the slides for a discussion he led last month, about whether to use a web standard like HTML5 for building mobile apps in lieu of building separate proprietary apps for the iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and other devices.
Like everything Sasha writes, it’s funny and thoughtful. The basic argument is that you should use HTML5 unless you:
you need to use the mobile device’s camera, accelerometer or notifications,
you need the app to actually, you know, look and feel really cool
you need to make money from the app, especially by charging for it
you’re worried that no one will be able to find your app outside of an app store like iTunes
Up next are talks about Node.JS, Cassandra, Clusto and scaling an engineering organization. You’re all invited!
More than a few of you have written us to complain that the Redfin app for iPhone and iPod crashes on new versions of Apple’s mobile operating system, iOS 4. The new operating system comes standard with the new iPhone 4, but you can also download it through iTunes to an iPhone 3 or iPhone 3GS; the main features are multi-tasking, a unified inbox, and folders for organizing apps.
The problem with Redfin arises when you search for an area like Capitol Hill, then try to zoom in or pan the map. At that point, the Redfin app crashes. Before iOS 4 came out, we tested the Redfin app against a simulator without finding this problem. Once iOS 4 was available to download to an iPhone, we found the bug straight away. Last night we sent off a new version of the Redfin app to Apple for approval.
The updated Redfin app isn’t available via iTunes yet, but it shouldn’t be too long now; most updates sail right through. We’ll let you know when we hear from Apple. For now, thanks to everyone who has emailed us, and keep your fingers crossed that the fix is in!
The Ravens just beat the Browns 16 – 0, but those of you without a Tivo may have noticed something else about the Monday Night Football telecast: a new Apple iPhone ad featuring Redfin’s very own iPhone app. On seeing it, Redfin’s Scott Nagel, hardly one given to over-the-top displays of emotion, got high fives all around from his football-crazed children.
We knew the ad was coming, but Sasha put the fear of Apple in us and for once we kept a secret. To Conan Reidy and all the other people who say I can’t keep clam because of a few minor middle-school indiscretions, this is but one of many examples of really, really juicy stuff I’ve kept to myself…
Many thanks to the folks at Apple for hooking us up, and to Redfin’s iPhone team for building such a sweet app.
Since launching our iPhone app two months ago we’ve been glued to the App Store compulsively checking our app’s rating and reading the reviews, and for good reason, our iPhone app is 10% of site traffic on weekends. Overwhelmingly the feedback has been positive; folks love the app. However, there were some folks bummed out that the app didn’t have all the search features that our website does.
Today we have a new version available that lets you search by address and MLS ID and adds the most requested search filters:
Year built
Lot size
Days on Redfin
Short sales
Under contract
We also made the app much faster. Our super star developer Navtej came up with a new way to group the house icons on the map, improving the maps load time performance seven fold.
We can’t believe it, after only being out six weeks, iPhone traffic is 10% of our site traffic on the weekends. Do that many people really have iPhones? :)
Digging into the numbers, for the first four weekends after we launched it, iPhone traffic was a little under 5% of our website traffic. Our app was then featured on the App Store’s New and Noteworthy section and mentioned in the NY Times. This temporarily bumped up our downloads almost ten fold. With many more people downloading the app, traffic on the iPhone has soared to be 8-10% of our website traffic for the last two weekends.
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:
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.
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.
