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!

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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.

Go get it now! It’s got all this great stuff:

• 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!

The post Redfin's iPhone App Keeps Getting Better appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

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!

The post Redfin Goes Deep With iPhone App Upgrade appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

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 Redfin jobs page? 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.

The post Saved Searches Come to the iPhone! appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

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.

Oh, and for those Android users out there, we’re hard at work on a little something for you. We’ll keep you posted…

The post Drag-and-Search Comes to our iPhone App! appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

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:

1. you need to use the mobile device’s camera, accelerometer or notifications,
2. you need the app to actually, you know, look and feel really cool
3. you need to make money from the app, especially by charging for it
4. 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!

The post HTML 5 vs. Native Applications appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.