Archive for the ‘Most Popular’ Category
August 22, 2007
The Wall Street Journal’s Rebecca Buckman published an article yesterday depicting Redfin as the oddball on an ad-crazed Sand Hill Road. Which is unfortunately true.
When we were meeting investors about our last round of financing, three huge deals for ad networks had just set venture capital abuzz: Microsoft bought aQuantive for $6 billion, Google bought Doubleclick for $3.1 billion, and Yahoo! bought RightMedia for $680 million.
Eager to capitalize on the trend, many potential Redfin investors seemed genuinely shocked that Redfin doesn’t run any ads whatsoever. Serving customers directly via flesh-and-blood agents, rather than simply sending them from our website to a traditional brokerage — this is a much messier business than running ads.
Yet having come to grips with this fact, investors couldn’t stop asking about “page views,” as if there were no other measure of a website’s success than how many ads it could have served. This page-view fetish is the reductio ad absurdum of the ad-driven mentality: a “page” after all is just a component of a web application, and a “view” is the most passive way to interact with that application. By measuring web applications in terms of page-views, we lose sight of what the application is supposed to accomplish, which in our case is the sale of a home. (We try to accomplish that goal with as few page views as possible.)
The circularity of the quest to generate page views perhaps explains the anomie behind many ad-driven Web 2.0 businesses. My friends at these businesses sometimes seem not merely daunted, which happens to all of us, but occasionally uninspired. Silicon Valley has gone from taking out the middleman to being a middleman, hoping to waylay users at a website before passing them on to a business that hasn’t changed at all how it serves customers. Travel sites like Kayak have become portals to other portals like Orbitz. The Web is becoming a gigantic lead-generation contraption for business-as-usual. It’s hard to get excited about that.
What’s funny is that Silicon Valley still thinks of itself as the swashbuckling foe of traditional industries, but every day it’s becoming more like Madison Avenue, minutely sensitive to traditional advertisers’ needs, and unwilling to rock the boat. The two used to be miles apart: Madison Avenue wants only to entertain you long enough to implant the urge to buy a Pepsi; Silicon Valley used to want to change the world. Now no one at an ad-driven real estate website can breathe a word about whether the real estate industry needs change.
And maybe they shouldn’t. It can seem naive or self-important to think that a business should have any purpose beyond making money. Yet many of the businesses most successful over the long haul — Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Sony, for example — have been built around a sense of purpose that motivates employees, appeals to customers and simplifies decisions. Nothing endures as well as a purpose.
And without some purpose, Silicon Valley will lose the fervor that once propelled us to build great companies. Of course Redfin is hardly great now, but we aim to be great. Our purpose is to use technology to put consumers in charge of buying or selling their home. This is the most valuable change we can offer the consumer. We hope that it can lead to our becoming the most valuable company in our industry.
If this makes companies like Redfin neither fish nor fowl, with real estate agents working alongside software engineers, then perhaps we will be the first awkward creature to stagger ashore on our own two feet, hopefully into a slightly better world.
August 20, 2007
I’ve been asked by many of my friends and family why I decided to leave my position at Microsoft, where I was appreciated and rewarded, for more work, more responsibility, and more stress. Well, the decision was mainly a result of three factors. First, someday I may start my own company, and transitioning from a startup makes that much easier. Second, I didn’t agree with many of Microsoft’s decisions and direction. Third, I wanted to build a product that would really cater to consumers and could stand on its own.
Almost all the top engineers I know talk ad nauseum about starting their own company, with the caveat of, “I’ll stay at big company XYZ for 2-3 years, then I’ll go out on my own.” Well, it never made sense to me how they thought that they could make the transition from being so removed from the business and the end to end process of creating and shipping a product. Working at a startup, you’re about as close as you can be to running your own business, and you don’t have to spend nearly all of your time and effort trying to raise money. For instance, the only financial statements I ever saw at Microsoft were quarterly reports (as a shareholder), and even those were a mystery. At Redfin, we get to see all of our financials, like pro forma cash flow statements that we might show to investors, and are encouraged to understand it and ask questions. Even raw talent can’t make up for this kind of experience.
While I was at Microsoft, many things didn’t make sense to me. I didn’t understand the massive “re-orgs”, which, if you hadn’t heard about ahead of time, it meant nothing material changed for you. I didn’t understand why we’d try to enter dominated markets with an uncompetitive offering. I didn’t understand those little table tents on the cafeteria tables or the giant banners and posters promoting intranet websites. I didn’t understand why site searches on MSDN were abysmal. I wasn’t the only one who was confused. Minimsft would try to speculate about a re-org or an acquisition. And on popular internal aliases like “litebulb”, for instance, there’d be email threads where people would ask why Vista had 6 (ok, 
SKUs, why Zune wouldn’t work with PlaysForSure, why their product had to be renamed from something cool to something like Windows Communication Framework, or why there were 2 confusing boxes on local.live.com (or so adverse to just calling it “maps.live.com” in the first place). Legitimate questions often got defensive responses. To paraphrase one developer, “Why are these responses always along the lines of, ‘We know what we’re doing’? Personally, I’d welcome the feedback, because that’s how I’ll improve. Why can’t you provide the reasons that led to your decision?” I couldn’t have agreed more.
Once I had decided I was leaving the company, I spent a lot of time trying to find the startup I’d be most passionate about. It sounds arrogant, but good software engineers can pretty much choose where they want to go. And it’s nearly frictionless to change jobs these days. You can post your resume up on Monster and get daily calls and emails. So, you do your homework and find a startup that really appeals to you. I was definitely not looking for some me-too social networking site or some company that was funded purely based on its management team’s connections. When I found Redfin, I knew it was just what I was looking for. During my home buying process a few years ago, I was convinced the real estate industry needed some serious changes. For instance, searching online required clicking in a multiple highlight box with 50 neighborhoods I’d never heard of, but I checked them anyways just in case they were somewhere near where I wanted to live. After much research, I learned that my agent would probably be getting a 3% commission when I bought a house. It wasn’t a “free” service as many led me to believe. Ten grand to drive me around and guilt me into buying a house I didn’t feel was right for me? Redfin’s scrappiness and audaciousness to battle it out with the traditional agents, brokerages, and MLSs on behalf of consumers like me was very appealing.
Startups aren’t for everyone. But for any of you on the fence and considering the startup world, here’s my advice:
- Plan for the future. Thinking about what I could accomplish in 5 years at a well established company versus a nascent one intrigued me. You’ll have much more influence over the development of an infant than you will a 30 year old, and the rewards should be commensurate.
- If you refer to your company in the third-person, or have to ‘beat’ the system to be productive, it’s a bad sign. (One rumor at Microsoft was that your group should spend exactly 100% of its budget/headcount, otherwise ‘they’ would cut next years.)
- Make sure your whole company feels like one team. Ballmer once joked at a company meeting, “Why do the different groups only clap for themselves?”
- Be as important to the company as it is to you. In a technology startup, the people ARE the startup. Our CEO reminds us, “The company’s only assets walk out the door every night.”
- Consider working where there are no sacred cows. Don’t like something? Be able change it!
- And finally, to quote Paul Glen, “Never underestimate the power of free food.”
July 25, 2007
The Naked Truth party wasn’t the three-ring circus I had hoped it would be. No one arrived by camel. The police didn’t shut the party down. There were big bouncers working security, but no velvet rope.
And yet everybody — hundreds of people — seemed to have a blast. Our goal in hosting the event was to foster direct conversations between journalists, bloggers and Seattle’s entrepreneurs and that was how it seemed to work out. It felt like things could happen between people that don’t normally happen, probably because I drank more than I should.
There was a panel then a party. I was so nervous handling the introductions that Dave Hanley asked from the back of the crowd if I was doing alright.
Just before the panel started, TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington told Wired’s Fred Vogelstein to get to the freaking point, then rolling his eyes, explained to everyone that he was quoting the Fred Vogelstein dossier that a PR agency accidentally mailed to Fred Vogelstein. Later he pulled in everyone’s else’s microphones so that they all sat in front of him and then leaned back, smiling.
Fred said that you should hire an agency, but only if they’re unlikely to work with you (the elite, selective firms). The WSJ’s Becky Buckman admitted to having a soft spot for goofy, impassioned pitches from entrepreneurs (by e-mail, so you don’t freak her out too much). The PI’s John Cook, looking healthy and quick in a Ho Chi Minh outfit, explained that he doesn’t mind talking to crazy people — our eyes met — but that follow-up clarifications (BY E-MAIL) are always appreciated.
One brave entrepreneur stood up to say how he and his agency had tried to get into Wired and TechCrunch; Michael Arrington told him you never will (”We just hate you,” Fred chimed in, jokingly. “It’s not them, it’s you,” Michael said). MC Greg Gottesman asked the Seattle Times’s Tricia Duryee how best to spin a story, and Tricia asked, “why not just tell the truth?” Then she teased John Cook about whose circulation was bigger.
On the subject of scoops, Becky Buckman explained that she likes to have a “concept exclusive,” in which she can tell a meaningful story behind events that others may have already covered. Michael Arrington said he didn’t need an exclusive scoop on a story, so long as a news embargo was taken seriously by everybody else (I think I saw him check his iPhone in the middle of the panel). John Cook was asked what his favorite kind of story was and immediately replied “AN EXCLUSIVE.”
Becky was unexpectedly moving in a comment about ethics in journalism. Michael begged people to eliminate “revolutionary” and anything else that sounds like marketing babble from their vocabularies, suggesting instead that companies pitch themselves like movies (”‘Tootsie” meets ‘The Longest Yard’” –>”MySpace for senior citizens”). He also said he couldn’t fathom the reason an entrepreneur wouldn’t blog, explaining that the network of links between blogs is the currency for exchanging information and traffic between his site and theirs — then added, but “don’t break your own news on your blog.”
As the panel wound down, a gigantic barbecue trailer backed into the parking lot. Its ghastly perfume wafted over the audience, but their attention never wavered. The panel was great — really lively — and it was good too.
And wasn’t Greg Gottesman a magnificent host? He never looked at any notes, he never sounded like the teacher in Charlie Brown, he spread the action around to all the panelists.
Then the party got underway. One partygoer asked another how his social networking site was different than others (answer: “you’re an asshole.”) iLike’s Hadi Partovi, modeling his own company t-shirt underneath a blazer, looked every inch the hip Web 2.0 entrepreneur. Amit Mital, Redfin’s first fanatical investor, demanded extra drink tickets for his years of support. An intern, Alex Loddengaard, asked my wife out to dinner (she said yes).
A kindly young woman challenged Fred Vogelstein, who flew up for the event in the middle of a deadline, to explain why Wired put a half-naked woman on its cover (answer: “I didn’t think they’d go for it either.”) Michael Arrington trampled me on the way to the bar.
Tricia Duryee wore big sunglasses. Peter Cochran looked like a model for a surfing magazine. Paul Goodrich talked up his Croatian triathlon training regimen. Our progenitor, David Eraker, suddenly stood before me, a large, happy presence.
Michael Dougherty battled back a horde of Redfin engineers from recruiting a colleague at his new startup. With his deep, knee-buckling voice, Matt Goyer asked a woman about interviewing at Redfin (”my boss is right over there,” she squeaked).
After months of harassing us about Safari support, Mike Davidson suddenly appeared in the flesh to take my chest-heaving, tearful confession. (I tried to blame Microsoft. He introduced me to his friend from Microsoft).
A man told me his name had been erased from the invitation wiki by a saboteur. John Cook overhead him, and smelling a juicy story, suggested we go back through the edit history to find the culprits.
Someone complained to me about a beer shortage. I told him Zillow drank it.
Angela Cough promised there would be a vegetarian option (the corn bread was terrible). Cynthia Pang pointed someone out and said “That girl is NOT nice!” Angela nodded violently, arms folded across her chest, menacing even when pregnant.
I wobbled out of the party while the sun was just setting behind the mountains, on one of the longest days of a very short and wonderful summer.
Many, many thanks to the journalists who took the time to come to the event, to the team at Havana Social Club for hosting a great party, to Angela Cough and Elise Hebb for putting it together, to Cynthia Pang for coming up with the name and helping out, to Madrona for helping us pay for so much of it, to iLike, Wetpaint, Jobster, Farecast and WildTangent for their support, to everyone who came. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
We all had a really good time. Please tag your Flickr photos with nakedtruth. We’ll post the video in a jiffy. Any details we forgot about, or that John Cook didn’t address in his excellent post, just add a comment.
April 1, 2007
Redfin launched the real estate consumer’s bill of rights today, which Inman News is blasting out to its hundreds of thousands of real estate subscribers some time this morning. The premise of the bill is that consumers should have all the information the agent does about a house they’re trying to buy or sell, and about how the whole process works. Nearly a dozen Redfinners worked on it, from real estate operations, engineering and marketing.
Now we’re trying to recruit other brokers and real estate bigshots to support this idea. Already, we have our first, Kevin Boer, of 3 Oceans Real Estate, and we hope plenty will follow. So consumers can get in on the act, we’ve also started a petition that we plan to send to the National Association of Realtors and to all the local MLSs to which we belong; we hope you’ll sign it.
Maybe this can become a movement. Maybe real estate really can get better. The last time I circulated a petition, it was to get my beautiful but cruel high school French teacher fired, which involved premature exposure, humiliation, a year of intricate recriminations, and a very poor participation grade. Read the rights, and let us know if you think this stands a better chance.
1. Choose the services you pay for: Laws in more than a dozen states forbid brokers from refunding commissions to you, or require brokers to provide services you may not want to pay for. These laws protect the industry, not the consumer.
2. Know how your agent makes his money: In real estate, the seller pays both his own agent and the buyer’s agent a percentage of the sale; the agent earns more when his client pays more. If a house seems difficult to sell, the seller may even offer buyers’ agents an especially high percentage. Buyers’ agents should be required to explain to their clients how they are paid.
3. Know when you are committed to an agent: Often just showing a property entitles an agent to the commission for representing you, regardless of whether you intended to work with someone else or even preferred to represent yourself. The relationship between an agent and a consumer should always be explicit, so that both parties know when they’re committed to one another.
4. Know what services your agent will provide: Much of the work of a buyer’s agent begins after the buyer has agreed to buy a house. This work includes coordinating inspections, repairs, mortgages, title reviews and escrow services. But agents today are paid only to bring a buyer to a transaction. Once that happens, it is virtually impossible to fire your agent. In most cases, this is appropriate, as the agent who puts a deal together deserves the commission. But in becoming committed to an agent, you should know what services the agent will provide as part of that commitment and what recourse you have if the agent doesn’t perform those services. An open agreement between you and the agent protects the agent from being unfairly dismissed, and ensures you get the service you expect through closing.
5. Have an agent that represents only your interests: Most states allow an agent to represent the buyer and seller in one transaction, and get both sides of a commission. As a result, some sellers’ agents are on the prowl for unrepresented buyers to bring to the seller. It’s a solicitation neither side can easily refuse because the seller wants the buyer and the buyer wants the house. But an agent can’t fairly represent the interests of two parties to the same transaction. An agent should represent only one party, and take commissions for only one party.
6. Know the commission refund you can get before you buy a house: Depending on the service provided by the buyer’s agent, some sellers vary the commission offered to buyers’ agents. This flexibility is good in theory, but in practice it’s often used to thwart commission refunds: buyers expecting a refund of $10,000 or more from their agent discover on making an offer that the amount has been radically reduced in favor of the seller’s agent. Buyers should know in advance what circumstances let the seller’s agent keep more of a commission for himself. It’s fine to change the price but not at the cash register.
7. See all the houses for sale: Many of the multiple listing services set up to share listings between brokerages forbid participating websites from displaying for-sale-by-owner houses alongside broker-listed houses. As a result, home buyers usually don’t see all the houses for sale, and home sellers have to hire brokers just to get their house on mainstream sites. MLSs should not require exclusive display of listings.
8. Have an open discussion about a house for sale: On the web, you can openly discuss almost any product for sale except a house. That’s because sellers’ agents “own the listing,” controlling where and how it’s posted for their benefit. The rules of some MLSs discourage real estate websites from publishing independent reviews and preclude owners from distributing MLS marketing materials outside MLS-sanctioned websites. Once a house is for sale, everyone in the market should be able to discuss it.
9. See all the information available about a house for sale: Many MLSs make it difficult for buyers to see recent past sales data, how long a house has been for sale, or whether its price has been reduced. Once a house is for sale, you should be able to see all the information available about it on your own, without becoming anyone’s client. The only exception to this rule is information whose publication jeopardizes the seller’s safety, such as when the presence of children precludes a showing.
10. Be sure your agent will show your house to everyone: Some sellers’ agents selectively refuse to show houses to a buyer represented by an alternative brokerage, which hurts the seller and the buyer. If, as part of his service, a seller’s agent doesn’t show houses to all buyers, the seller should know it, and the buyer should be able to contact the seller directly. When agents don’t facilitate showing a house, they should at least stand aside and let buyers see the house on their own.
OK, now you can go hogwild with the comments…
February 26, 2007
Redfin announced big news today, publishing MLS data that indicates our agents negotiate significantly better than their counterparts at traditional brokerages.
Last month at Brad Inman’s big real estate conference in New York, Realtor.com President Allan Dalton accused Redfin and other critics of a “massive level of disingenuous communication,” because we ignore the likelihood that traditional agents offset higher commissions by negotiating a better price (skip to minute 9:00):
Already our surveys had established that most of our customers get service that they believe is better or much better than what they got from a traditional real estate agent. But forget the touchy-feeley stuff: every day we heard that our customers would lose our commission refund and more at the negotiating table; it is the centerpiece of the traditional industry’s argument against Redfin.
And we agree, that the price of a home fluctuates with market conditions, increasing the importance of a real estate agent’s pricing guidance and negotiating ability.
But our problem with commissions is not simply that they’re too high; our problem is with the commission itself, because it pays the buyer’s agent more when his clients pay more. In other words, rather than being offset by better negotiations, the buyer agent’s commission actually causes worse negotiations.
This is why we decided to pay Redfin agents a salary with a customer satisfaction bonus, not a commission. Agents do what you pay them to do, we reasoned, and we believed our agents would be more likely to get the price our customers wanted.
After a year in the market, we decided to put our theory to the test, by querying the Northwest Multiple Listing Service for data on every home or condominium sold via a brokerage from February 6, 2006 (the date of Redfin Direct’s launch) through February 5, 2007. Since we didn’t offer a service for sellers or support areas outside King County until much later in the year, we limited the data to King County and we only evaluated our capacity as buyers’ agents.
But we still had the problem that Allan highlighted, namely that there is no “set base” price for a home.
So we compared what buyers’ agents negotiate for — the final price — to what the sellers’ agents ask for — the asking or listing price; some sellers’ agents may ask for too much, others for too little, but, since all our customers are all shopping in the same store, looking at the same listings, all King County brokerages are negotiating against the same set of asking prices (note that evaluating a seller’s agent is problematic, since the seller’s agent only competes against the prices she sets herself.)
The results were striking; Redfin customers paid on average under asking price, whereas customers of all other brokerages paid on average over asking price. The difference in negotiations was .9% of the home price, equivalent in King County to over $4,000, on top of a commission refund of nearly $10,000.
What makes this noteworthy is that the data did not come from Redfin, but from the MLS, from the brokers themselves who contribute to the MLS. Any brokerage can validate the data by following the instructions available in the appendix of our report.
Already, the Seattles Times reviewed the report and picked up the story in yesterday’s big Sunday spread.
Perhaps there is another way to evaluate whether traditional agents negotiate better than Redfin agents; until there is, the most likely conclusion is that Redfin agents negotiate better than their more expensive counterparts.
January 29, 2007
Steve Jobs is the Internet generation’s Robert Kennedy. Close your eyes, and the Apple CEO even sounds like a Kennedy: follow your passion, the charismatic icon tells our youth; change the world. Except Jobs is selling gadgets, not civil rights.
No one seems to have noticed. Now, oil companies gush over the environment. Insurance ads quote Thoreau. Retailers fight HIV. And it all started in Silicon Valley.
I worked there from 1995 - 2005, and saw Silicon Valley take in the world’s best and brightest. Unlike other fortune-seekers, many of us were idealists, the kind of people who in a different time might have become teachers, doctors and social workers. In 1997, just after Netscape’s public offering inaugurated the Internet era, medical school applications declined precipitously for six straight years. Over that same period, the U.S. faced the worst teacher shortage in its history. The idealists had become virtual idealists.
It’s hard afterwards to come back to genuine ideals. Two years ago, my twin brother left a law firm protecting the Internet bubble’s investment bankers, for a government job protecting the environment. Now he complains you can’t turn the lights on in his office over the weekend without calling a special number. Before that, he worked for a non-profit that represented asylum seekers, who often showed up late for meetings. “No one ever did that when I cost $390 an hour,” he said.
In a year away from high-tech, I volunteered at inner-city schools and felt the same way: my time was lightly valued because I was giving it away, and many of the tutors seemed unmotivated compared to my old colleagues.
So now I’m back in Internet software, mostly because I missed the sense of purpose and importance that being around other driven people gave me. I believe in what we’re doing. But since we’re also out to turn a profit, some have ventured to call this belief disingenuous.
And it may seem so, but not to anyone in high technology, which has so thoroughly mixed virtue with commerce that you can hardly tell the two apart. Apple launched the Mac with an ad showing a woman heaving a hammer at a televised image of Big Brother. Google is famous for its promise to not be evil, and eBay’s latest slogan is “people are good.”
What each of these companies fears most is the loss of their original idealistic zeal: for CEO Jeff Bezos, it is still “day one” at Amazon; topping 10,000 employees, Google insists that it has “a small-company feel.” With near-monopolies in online bookselling, music, search and auctions, these companies imagine themselves as Davids, not Goliaths.
The touchstone of this idealism is the Internet itself, which for many of us has the conceptual magnitude of a new America, with new possibilities of community (MySpace), self-expression (YouTube), freedom (Second Life), love (Match.com), and authenticity (blogs). We forget about the porn, the spam, the get-rich-quick schemes. Nothing could be more American than dressing up an historic money-grab into a City on the Hill.
And every entrepreneur is straining to be John Winthrop. The most coveted role in Silicon Valley is that of the visionary, the pied piper who leads the poets and the dreamers on a mission to build a better gizmo. These entrepreneurs are the kind of free spirits who could have started a movement.
Together, we’ve made our corner of capitalism a bit better: many of the rewards go to those who actually do the work, the engineers; the work itself is done in small groups, so we have a meaningful connection to what we make; our product is the purest form of creativity, built from ones and zeros rather than coal and trees; and the result is often useful and delightful to other people — occasionally it even changes the world.
It can, more rarely than we would like, also make us rich. It’s considered a bit grubby to make things that people will pay for, even when — as was the case with Google, Yahoo!, eBay (and yes, Redfin) - we make it before having any idea how people will pay. But it isn’t hard to choose between the grubbiness of making something (even if it’s just a website) and what my brother does at his non-profit job, which is essentially trying to stop people from making something. Making something might be the most basic and fulfilling compulsion humans have.
And so that’s why, for my generation, Apple is our Woodstock. Google is our Chicago Democratic Convention. The class of 1967 would not have campaigned so vociferously against Vietnam if they could have imagined themselves starting Google. And the class of 2007 might be marching against Darfur now if it could think of anything but starting another Google.
We’re still idealistic, but about e-mail spam, online privacy and net neutrality, not war, or poverty, or racism. The world around us is falling apart and we can hardly look up from our computer screens, where the Internet becomes more beautiful every day.
January 12, 2007
There’s a pretty big technology change on Redfin.com today - the integration of Microsoft Virtual Earth as our underlying map platform. Redfin pioneered the use of satellite maps to display information about for sale homes. We built an in-house mapping solution using imagery acquired from various sources (mostly the USGS.) Since then a few other major players have come on the scene in the mapping world and it caused us to reconsider how we want to move Redfin forward.
We evaluated our top options: Google Maps, Microsoft Virtual Earth, or continue to develop our own mapping technology. An “arms race” is happening in the mapping space and it was clear that we don’t want to compete with Google and Microsoft in the map platform arena. We had to exit the map technology business and switch to a web mapping platform that met our needs.
In the end the race was close as the platforms are very similar in many respects, but Microsoft Virtual Earth was the best fit for our requirements. The table below shows how they compare.
| |
Google Maps |
Microsoft Virtual Earth |
| Speed of development |
API is easy to use |
API is easy to use |
| Ability to support Redfin feature set |
—
Overall, our features were supported; parcel outlines were a potential problem. |
—
Overall, our features were supported; parcel outlines were a potential problem.
Easier to customize for a Redfin experience. |
| Map imagery (today & future)Photos are the most critical component to searching for homes online. Other than “can we make it work?”, this was the most important component for us. |
—
Consistent imagery with reliable updates, but Google’s goal is to be fast, not deep; additional imagery is outside their focus.
Example: Houses in San Jose, CA on Google Maps |
Imagery nationwide is spotty, but for Redfin-supported metros the aerials are good.
Example: Houses in San Jose, CA on Virtual Earth
Virtual Earth wins by adding “bird’s-eye” imagery for the same location. If as a home shopper, you are trying to decide on whether you liked a house well enough to tour, this view is a significant improvement over the 2-D views. (We didn’t get the Bird’s Eye view in this release, but we will soon.)
Microsoft also has some interesting future concepts for street-level imagery that could take our home searching experience even further. |
| Additional data layers and web services |
—
Support for:
- Address/location lookup
- Geocoding
- Cross-street location lookup
- Business/Yellow Page listings
- Driving directions
- Direct integration into Redfin site |
Support for:
- Address/location lookup
- Geocoding and batch geocoding
- Business/Yellow Page listings
- Driving directions
- Real-time traffic incidents/congestion
- Points of interest near a location
- Direct integration into Redfin site
- Getting a list of geographic entities for a particular geographic latitude/longitude |
| Browser support |
Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari |
—
Firefox, Internet Explorer
No support for the Safari browser on the Mac – this was a hard decision for us, as many of our San Francisco users are Safari users. [updated 1/31/08: Redfin now supports Safari 3]
Fortunately, Firefox 2 does work great on the Mac and is free, but still, not the result we wanted. |
| Cost |
(Service costs were similar.) |
(Service costs were similar.) |
FWIW, I originally had a third “Do-It-Ourselves” column, but the negatives were so obvious I dropped it. The data acquisition and integration development costs were just too high to be a sensible choice for Redfin moving forward.
Having completed the transition from our Flash-based Redfin map to Microsoft Virtual Earth, our principal engineer, Michael, had the following observations about developing for a web mapping platform:
Drawbacks developing with a web mapping platform:
— No support for clickable or hoverable polygons for our property lot outlines, an important piece of the Redfin map experience. We use the VE API to paint polygons and pushpins on the map, but there is no VE facility for making those items clickable (i.e. when a user clicks on the parcel, the property information balloon should pop up.) Adding clickability was a MAJOR pain, since VE does not expose access to the underlying drawing primitives or tag the primitives with the ID of the corresponding VE object. It doesn’t look like Google Maps has this support either; so we’d probably have been equally pained with them.
— Asynchronous pans and zooms make the programming model difficult. Redfin rolled our own pop-up balloons for property information and therefore Redfin is responsible to placing them in the correct location on the screen. VE pans and zooms asynchronously, so the map will actually sometimes move after we draw and place the balloon, but the balloon won’t move with it because VE doesn’t natively know to move it.
Pros developing with Virtual Earth:
— API is very straight-forward and well documented. Getting a demo up and running was trivial, and the object model is clear.
— Technical support exists and has been very responsive. We usually received a response within a few hours.
Cons developing with Virtual Earth:
— Interoperability with other JavaScript libraries is compromised by VEs approach to the onunload handler. VE replaces the onunload handler with its own function, so that it can do cleanup of any items it has allocated. It appears to throw away any pre-existing onunload handler and other libraries that also require cleanup will be “orphaned” (their onunload handlers will not be called.) This is poor form, and can cause massive memory leaks in Internet Explorer 6.
— It was difficult to get VE to show up in the correct location on the screen. Redfin uses absolute positioning and sizing in CSS to set the location of the VE map. Getting this to work correctly with VE took too many hours (and broke again numerous times.)
— Microsoft doesn’t offer a “debug” version of their library. The library that they deliver is compressed and somewhat obfuscated, which makes it harder to reverse engineer and debug. We understand why they did that (customers shouldn’t need to be looking under the covers), but it does make debugging a pain for our developers.
—Microsoft doesn’t support tying your app to a particular version of Virtual Earth. You can specify a major version (e.g. version 4) but you can’t specify a minor version (e.g. 4.0.2.3.) Microsoft reserves the right to swap versions out under their customers at their discretion. In general, this isn’t a problem, but it becomes a problem when you depend on the internal workings of VE. We do hack VE a little (since it doesn’t support all the features we need, as mentioned below), so we’re vulnerable to any VE changes - our site could break without notice due to a Microsoft change, which is… less than ideal, but was a necessary trade-off for the Redfin experience to continue.
Would we make the same decision to go with Virtual Earth if we were starting Redfin today knowing what we know now?
The answer is definitely “Yes.”
With Virtual Earth, Redfin is able to continue to deliver the same Redfin search experience experience with an immediate ability to double our geographic coverage and improve our road maps, quickly expand to more metropolitan areas, and add more features. You’ll see more of the features Virtual Earth provides integrated in future versions of Redfin.com and I’m sure we’ll write more as we go.
We’d love to hear how your experience developing with Microsoft Virtual Earth or Google Maps has compared to ours.
July 25, 2006
Redfin’s day in Congress was like a lot of days at Redfin: filled with swashbuckling controversy and juicy intrigue, unavoidably goofy and improvisational, tinged with a Quixotic sense of futility.
Mostly it felt like a schoolday field-trip without a chaperone. Going to Congress was fun. The whole place seemed set to a music we couldn’t hear. The halls are filled with handsome young people in impeccable suits, and the clocks are outfitted with lights and alarms to warn of impending votes.
The staffers often seemed elaborately bored by the droning testimony but eager to pounce. Everywhere, everyone seems to know everything that’s going on, tracking bills coming to vote by BlackBerry, watching hearings by Webcast, whispering in one another’s ear.
The whispering was constant and congenial, with the ranking liberal Democrat Maxine Waters and the stolidly Republican chairman Bob Ney sharing a joke while the local yokel-dokels and the legal stiffs rattled on about Grand Rapids, Michigan or obscure points of law. I felt bad for them having to listen to this stuff, day after day, and was relieved to see how well they got on, despite all the reports of increasing partisanship.
It was also hard not to feel a little awe. Most public buildings I’ve been in, usually to argue traffic tickets, are a combination of old-train-station grandeur and the run-down, cut-rate decor of a high-school classroom. I was worried the hearings would be all the latter, with card-tables and government-issue plastic chairs, and a gigantic clock on the wall.
But the hearing rooms are grand, with tiers of committee members arranged in concentric semi-circles above the testimony table. The gallery behind the witnesses was packed to capacity with realtor-pin-wearing supporters and staff attorneys toting binders of committee-member profiles. There were overflow rooms, photographers with gigantic lenses that they still managed to put right in your face, and remote-controlled TV cameras.
Two panels spoke. The first consisted of Department of Justice & FTC anti-trust attorneys and an analyst from the non-partisan General Accounting Office, who were polite but firm in their findings that realtors and listing services violate anti-trust laws designed to protect consumers. The second, which Redfin was on, consisted of six members of the industry, including the President-Elect of the National Association of Realtors.
Each witness read a prepared five-minute statement, getting the gong the second he or she went over (lights on a small display controlled by the chairman and visible only to the speaker turned yellow then red). Surprisingly, many witnesses were cut off with pages of testimony unread. A carbuncular Texas discount broker, talking a mile-a-minute, finished 1:30 early and then looked around for a second as if he couldn’t believe it.
For our statement, which you can read here, we copied the intro off the script of the Lending Tree lady next to me, because we’d forgotten to include the pro-forma niceties to “Chairman Ney, Ranking Committee-Member Waters” and all the rest.
While I spoke, I tried to look deeply into the congressmen’s eyes for effect, then lost my place and kept talking anyway. So I have no idea what I really said. After I was done, it seemed like a long way to go for a speech that was already over. Except it was far from over.
Every congressman except the powerful but soon-to-be-retired Congressman Oxley was ferociously pro-realtor. And once Oxley was gone the entire hearing became a bloodsport, with Redfin in its customary position at the center of the fray. All the congressmen directed most of their questions towards us. As each one lit into Redfin, the realtor crowd moaned with pleasure.
The Democrats of all people cited states’ rights in their refusal to act, while the Republicans seemed intent on protecting the realtors rather than free markets. Their opposition was impenetrably uniform but also outlandishly varied: do online brokers discriminate against those who lack Internet access? Since realtors are often divorced women starting second careers, aren’t we hurting those who need jobs the most? If lawyers’ fees have increased recently why shouldn’t realtors’? If your service is so great, why isn’t your business bigger? Since you’re not out of business, how could you complain?
The Grand Inquisitor was Congressman Artur (yes, that’s how it’s spelled) Davis, a brilliant former prosecutor whom other committee members gave their time to so he could sustain his attack. No one seemed remotely disturbed by the fact that consumers who buy online can be discriminated against without legal recourse, or that MLS rules limit competition.
It was all political theater, as everyone knew what we never figured out: that Congress would leave it to the DoJ to go after the realtors. An FTC lawyer told me before the hearing started that just having companies like Redfin testify was already alarming to the realtor lobby. “They did a big letter campaign,” he said (the committee members often waved letters at us from concerned realtors in their districts).
Everyone was very nice to us afterwards. Chairman Ney came by to ask if we’d ever testified before, and Cindy Chetti, the fantastic staffer who hooked us up in the first place, said that the congressmen were talking among themselves about how fun we were as a witness. A DoJ attorney gave us her card.
This would all be cause for unmitigated celebration if the fellow witnesses hadn’t been so solicitous of us afterwards: “Are you OK? Really? Really? Wow. I mean wow.” Even the intern in the committee office who was watching my luggage looked up from his Webcast when I came in and said, “Oh man.” Only then did it dawn on me we’d gotten into an argument we couldn’t win. The Lending Tree legal team of six lawyers and PR experts felt so bad when they saw I was by myself that they offered a lift to the airport by chartered van.
We drove past the Washington Monument, encircled by 50 pretty flags, and the Jefferson Memorial, lonely in its perfection, and soon we were enveloped in the dense green of FDR Drive along the upper Potomac. It was very beautiful. But we were all already so immersed in our BlackBerries that we could not see to see.
P.S. One weird, funny note. In mangling the answer to one question, we explained how we came to testify before Congress. “We didn’t make any donations, Democrat or Republican,” I said, “We just read an NYT article and called Clinton to tell him we wanted to come.”
The whole room froze, thinking I was casually referring to President Clinton rather than the urbane, knowing attorney/consigiliere for the subcommittee, Clinton Jones (whose name we found on a Web site and who seemed to find it quaint that I wanted to shake his hand before the hearings began).
Puzzled, oblivious, we all just moved on. Mr. Jones whispered into Chairman Ney’s ear, and both of them had a big laugh…
June 1, 2006
TechCrunch Seattle is in the books, and we still haven’t recovered.
For a moment there, we thought we were going to screw it up. When we got to ConWorks at five, TripHub and Farecast had their brochures stacked in neat piles and their demo looping on big monitors. It was a tragic reminder of a way we’ll never be.
Savan’s truck went up in smoke trying to haul eight elephant kegs. Rob had to snatch monitors off everyone’s desk (”I don’t care if people are still using them!”) so we could blow out the demo stations. Two Canadian bloggers grabbed a stone-age boulder to help us pile-drive real estate yard signs onto every corner, completely oblivious to their charming accent. Angela got back on on the scene at six with bags of lemons and ice and whipped everyone into shape.
And then the party got ROLLING. Some customers ganged up on us and gave us some great ideas on how to make our service even better. Brian Marsh, freshly shaved for the first time in a week, talked up some demure developers that we’ve been trying to recruit for months. Women swooned over NPR’s John Moe, because he plays in a band, and contributes to McSweeney’s, and has a nice voice too. The temperature shot up to 1,000 degrees.
I complained to Zillow’s Amy Bohutinsky that my daily Zillow alert breaks my heart, every day, and then, oddly but kindly, some Zillow developers gave me some encouragement for my speech, which no one heard. Bryan Selner told me to say we’re hiring, Sean Richter said something even better, which I forgot. David Eraker was proudly wearing his realtor pin. Ryan Erickson demonstrated a facility with tapping kegs that was disturbing for someone so young. Bahn demo’d Redfin ’til he was hoarse, and Eric told everybody about the Redfin techcrunch discount.
TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington, taller and shyer than I’d thought he’d be, but just as smart (like a big, quiet kid whom the coach couldn’t recruit for the football team), was mobbed. Somebody with headphones and a big mike was interviewing everybody. Madrona’s Greg Gottesman was working the room in a dazzling white blazer, and Peter Cochran was gathering an entrepreneur with a good idea into Vulcan’s clutches.
And then at the end, when the scavengers were picking through the pizza and soft drinks that nobody drank, and we had to take down the signs and roll out the empty kegs, our launch was over, and we had time to remember Emily Dickinson’s line that “nothing is half so sad as a battle lost except a battle won.”
If you took pictures, post them to Flickr, and tag them techcrunchseattle.
