Archive for the ‘Redfin in the News’ Category
June 3, 2007
Redfin showed up in some unexpected places over the past week.
The most e-mailed article in The New York Times today is a farewell posting from Damon Darlin, author of the weekly column “Your Money.” Damon originally profiled Redfin in The New York Times. In his latest article, he acknowledges that his wife has scolded him for giving advice that could reduce our existence to “just one bowl of cold grass porridge after another.” But he also maintains that there are still “rules of life worth considering.” His first rule, in a greatest-hits survey of his advice over the years: “never pay a real estate agent a 6 percent commission.”
Redfin meanwhile inadvertently antagonized a new segment of the American economy last week with a guest article on Guy Kawasaki’s blog encouraging start-ups to to consider talking to the press on their own. In the comments section, which ran to over 5,000 words, publicists described the essay as “obnoxious,” “degrading” and “upset[ting.]” We have no beef with PR agencies, several of whom saw the article as evidence enough that we needed their help and sent us a business pitch. The article was posted to del.icio.us more than 200 times over the past week, sending it to the top of the charts.
And finally, there is a blog posting from Michael Palermiti, a Microsoft program manager who helped us find a performance bug by using our web form to send us feedback; the feedback arrives via an e-mail to Redfin executives and product managers. Some days, when we’re all in a tizzy to make the website faster and better, to answer the phones on the first ring, to hire great people, it’s nice to get encouragement from bloggers such as Michael: “I personally know a couple people who have sold their homes this past year with the help of Redfin and the process according to them was painless. They also raved about the customer service.”
You can see this article and everything else about Redfin in the new del.icio.us feed we use to distribute Redfin-related news from other sites to our employees.
Two bonus links: one sent to us under the title “greatest nature video ever?” The other is an amazing soccer goal.
In search of a photo for this entry, we discovered that a band exists called “Throbbing Gristle.”
May 14, 2007
Redfin and the traditional real estate industry duked it out on 60 Minutes last night.
The segment aired second, after Mitt Romney took a stand against polygamy, but was the most popular video until losing out to a wayward penguin who swam 3,000 miles to Peru (Sasha Aickin just sent an e-mail around saying “we beat the penguin,” so I guess we’re back on top).
Here in Redfin Seattle, we watched the show in a conference room with a mixture of apprehension and desire; people brought their families and we all made fajitas. Seattle PI reporter John Cook showed up and began taking video with his digital camera.
Then the segment got rolling. Our favorite moments:
–> Rob McGarty wearing a blazer for the first time in his life, Kelly Engel stealing every scene, Fadi Hafzalla rolling up his sleeves and getting down to business.
–> The strange Borat-like moment when the traditional realtor was asked if she had refunded any commissions last year (“absolutely… NOT”).
–> The traditional agent’s explanation of why real estate agents charged nearly four times per transaction what they once did: increased postage costs…
–> The terrifying loss of perspective as the camera panned back on the National Association of Realtors’ sign as if it were a Star Wars spaceship.
–> B-roll of me complaining about our $4,000 copy machine, which is just so typical, cheap and mean-spirited (I HATE that thing).
Everyone in the conference room got quiet when the CEO of a company that had once embraced a business model similar to Redfin’s told Lesley Stahl he’d lost $33 million. Then we all cheered up when someone said we don’t have to worry about that because no one will give us $33 million.
And then the phones started ringing off the hook, and all of us — developers, executives, testers — scampered back to our battle-stations to answer them.
The website groaned under the load; first from 4:40 to 5:00 p.m., after the piece aired on the East Coast, and then again from 7:35 to 7:50 after the piece aired on the West Coast. Before our routers tapped out, we had served 40 times the volume of content that we normally do. We put up an emergency home page with search disabled. But without the Google Analytics tags on our standard home page, we could not see to see: we have no idea how many people saw that page.
It was fun working the front-lines. Many folks wanted to know if we could sell their property in Aruba, Italy, Mexico and Canada (Redfin’s dedicated agents immediately volunteered to handle Aruba, Italy and Mexico). One disgruntled 60 Minutes viewer called Donald DeSantis and told him he hoped he “died a slow, excruciating death” with one delicate body-part somehow wrapped around his neck.
A man with an ecumenical-sounding “SpiritJohn” e-mail address asked if I wouldn’t mind some constructive criticism; sure, I replied. Then he called me a “sissy” who “has been defrauding the American public for decades” (I started at Redfin just over a year ago; I wasn’t able to drive two decades ago). A third called and asked for Kelly Engel, then told her off. A very nice real estate agent e-mailed me offering herself as a corporate hair-stylist. A far-right radio show host asked me to name the “government bureaucrats” who blocked real estate reform.
Robert Scoble and Greg Swann reported a huge disturbance in the force, as hundreds of “60 Minutes” viewers descended on their site in search of Redfin (Robert’s blog about Redfin is the 7th Google search result for a Redfin search; we weren’t able to find Greg’s in the result set). A blog post that challenged Redfin’s facts began by noting I was a Harvard MBA (I never went to Harvard, I do not have an MBA). Another real estate blog argued for higher commissions (“6% is squat”) and lusted after Lesley Stahl (“what I wouldn’t do to have that blond hang out with me for one day as I go prospecting”).
For all the consumer enthusiasm, thousands of real estate agents and brokers have mobilized against CBS. The President of the NAR sent an e-mail to all 1.4 million members describing herself as “disappointed and dismayed” and encouraging agents to give CBS a piece of their minds. The real estate paper Inman News describes an industry in uproar. CBS News posted the text of the piece, alongside 46 pages (and counting) of comments.
Now it remains for us to sort through all the e-mail, call everyone back, and pick up where we left off building our little business. Thanks to everyone for all your kind wishes. If you have further thoughts on the segment, please just leave a comment below.
May 11, 2007
As you may have heard by now, Redfin will be on 60 Minutes this weekend. In an online teaser, Lesley Stahl has compared the Internet to a shark in “Jaws,” set to devour the real estate industry.
The National Association of Realtors distributed to its 1.4 million members a memo about the piece with a vaguely military ring: “Operation Tip-Off Publicity Alert.” The first media talking point for members was that the segment, which no one outside of CBS has actually seen, “could have been much worse.”
The NAR boasted that it had managed to convince 60 Minutes that the Department of Justice lawsuit was too complex to explain to consumers; CBS, it said, was only able to publish a “highly abridged version” of the story it originally wanted to air.
This is one of those mind-boggling lies that brought to mind Paula Poundstone’s reaction when Hillary Clinton claimed she hadn’t thought about running for president. “It’s like one of those lies your teenage daughter tells you where you can only ask, ‘Why? Why?’”
60 Minutes is a television show whose ENTIRE PREMISE is based on the length of its segments. Its logo is A TICKING STOPWATCH. Every show runs three segments, and every segment runs 13 minutes.
Taping the show was fun.
The occasionally clueless Bahn Lee walked right up to Lesley Stahl holding a home-movie camera. The cameraman who powdered my nose said, “we never do this for the bad guys” (I later learned they do it for everybody). In awe-struck voices, members of the crew said “Lesley’s an animal” and “Lesley is hell on wheels.”
I agreed to be shot riding my bicycle into work, but still tried to look commanding in a blazer, scarf, helmet and cycling shoes. The producer got one gander of Allie Howard jabbing her finger into a table and said “that, I want that.” All the equipment blew our circuit breaker and, on one of our busiest days, the office went dark.
Then, when the lights went up, and three different cameramen called out their time-codes, and the sound guys crouched forward with their boom mikes, we froze up like idiots. Before Lesley Stahl had even climbed into the car that would take her back to the airport, we all wished that we had done much better.
Tune in Sunday night at 7 and tell us what you think!
(A bonus shark link from a friend of Redfin.)
May 9, 2007
Redfin has been showing up all over the place lately. Some Redfin customers were on a Seattle TV news magazine the other night, looking oddly proud but also a little self-conscious about uprooting a bedroom vanity with their bare hands, while Redfin super-agent Kelly Engel and her one-eyed chihuahua closed deals left and right.
A Windermere President argued that you could buy the same house from Redfin that you could from a traditional brokerage, but that it would be like a gift that came in a K-Mart box rather than a Tiffany’s box (never mind that the same stuff isn’t for sale at K-Mart and Tiffany’s, or that far more people shop at K-Mart than Tiffany’s, or that E-Trade, Amazon, Redfin and other e-commerce companies don’t look anything like K-Mart). Last we checked, the online video on King 5′s site was running a traditional brokerage’s ad that closed with a not-very-Tiffany’s-like fart joke.
And then we also made Fortune’s list of the year’s top 24 innovators. The awards ceremony consisted of taking a bus to a rented photo studio in a run-down part of San Francisco.
The photo-shoot was led by a charismatic man from Brooklyn with the luminous skin and dripping-black, shoulder-length hair of Sarah Silverman. He wore a blue t-shirt from Sammy’s Romanian Steak House in the Lower East Side, and walked around in bare feet.
He playfully spanked his assistant, and insisted we get batteries for a megaphone that Yelp’s founders had brought to the shoot, so they could yell in my ear. He showed us pictures he had taken of Terrell Owens in his pool, which was surrounded by life-sized leather sculptures of giraffes and (not in the pictures) rap-video quantities of gorgeous women.
He asked me about LA. Anxious to say something cool even though I really like LA, I mumbled William Faulkner’s observation that it was the “plastic asshole of the world.”
“So that’s just what they say in California when something’s cool? That it’s PLASTIC ASS?”
“I don’t think so. I mean, I don’t know, I’m not even from California anymore.”
“Hey man, THAT’S PLASTIC ASS.”
He followed many shots by saying “THAT’S PLASTIC ASS.” Each time he did, I thought of a friend from New York, whose kindly Jewish mother used to put her eye to the camera and say “premature ejaculation!” before snapping the picture. I think of this whenever I need to smile.
March 21, 2007
The old way: explain your real estate needs and desires to an agent, he searches for listings, wait, wait, wait until he shares the details with you.
The Redfin way: search for real estate on your own terms, whether in your PJs or work duds, get immediate information.
The old way: once you fell in love with a place the only way to find out what other nearby homes sold for nearby was to call an agent and ask for a comparative market analysis, or CMA.
The Redfin way: DIY! Redfin let’s you figure it all out yourself!
Let’s say you’re looking at moving to Pioneer Square in Seattle because you just accepted a job offer at Redfin. After a few minutes searching on Redfin.com, I found 97 S. Jackson St. #402.
But is this a good deal?
Redfin.com will tell you everything you need to know to make that determination. First, I would look at the details page for the listing (click on “Full Details” in the listing pop-up box).
Does it have a Zestimate? This one has a Zestimate of $618,021.
Does it have any past sales information? Yes, it sold for $387,000 in 1999.
Next, I would go back to the search page and look for similar listings on the market. I search for 1,000 to 1,500-square-foot listings and find 12.
At the bottom of the list below the map, we can see that similar units have a median price of $521,975, average square footage is 1,189 and average $/sq ft is $535.
This gives you a good sense of similar units on the market, but what have other similar units sold for? Click on ‘Show more options’ and select a timeframe under ‘Show Past Sales’ such as ‘Last 1 year’ or ‘Last 6 months.’
Now we can see a list of the units we are interested in along with two previously sold units in the same building.
Clicking on these similar past sales, we can get a good sense of what other listings have sold for in the neighborhood and compare the listing we are interested in.
Happy CMA’ing :).
January 12, 2007
We want to thank everyone for sending us feedback today on the new site! We were on pins and needles watching our feedback folders, hitting refresh on Google Blog Search, Technorati and following the comments posted on our favorite blogs.
Overall, feedback received was positive. But some of your feedback made us reconsider a decision about the transparency of parcels. Apparently making the parcels opaque was a huge mistake. Fortunately amending the design of our parcels is relatively easy and we will release a new version of the site later tonight.
This is how the change looks on the road view:
This is how the change looks on the hybrid view:
Now you can see the property below, but we are worried that it is too hard to tell the viewed from the not yet viewed listings and that the parcels blend in with the other colors on the road map. Clearly we need to think about this more and we will (suggestions are welcome too!).
Other input feedback received included: the size of the icons, what zoom level we turn the parcels on at, and our lack of Safari support. Unfortunately our hands are tied about Safari support because Microsoft’s Virtual Earth does not support Safari, but we will see what we can do. We are considering additional fixes in upcoming releases.
If you have any other feedback, please feel free to contact us at feedback *at * redfin.com. However, a few of us on the technology side will be taking the weekend off :).
January 12, 2007
We finally made it! Redin now covers twice the ground we used to in the Seattle and Bay Areas, we’re on Virtual Earth and you can IM us using Meebo.
Here are a few of us in the Seattle office last night launching the new Redfin site.
Twice the ground
It wasn’t until I started writing this blog post that I realized just what Greater Seattle and Greater San Francisco Bay Area actually means; we are adding seven more counties, 140 more cities and double the number of listings! Here are some of the larger cities we now cover:
In Washington: Arlington, Bainbridge Island, Bonney Lake, Bothell, Bremerton, Edmonds, Everett, Gig Harbor, Graham, Lake Stevens, Lakewood, Lynnwood, Marysville, Mill Creek, Monroe, Mukilteo, Orting, Port Orchard, Poulsbo, Puyallup, Snohomish, Spanaway, Stanwood, Tacoma, University Place and more.
In California: Aptos, Benicia, Fairfeld, Napa, Petaluma, Rohnert Park Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, Sonoma, Suisun City, Watsonville, Windsor, Vacaville, Vallejo and more.
Where to expand to next?
Virtual Earth
Today we also are excited to announce that we have retired our proprietary Flash-based map solution and traded up to Microsoft’s Virtual Earth. While we are proud to have launched the Flash-based map in 2004, well ahead of the Google Maps and Virtual Earth APIs, the time has come to make the switch to a platform that can support our expected growth and enable us to innovate.
Fortunately we also get some immediate improvements to our customer experience…
Road view: Some of you love our aerial imagery, others hate it and want a road view. We now support both. Which will you choose?
Icons: On the old site when I was zoomed out I found it really hard to click on listings; the parcels made for a very small target for my mouse cursor. Now we display icons when you are zoomed far out to make the listings easy to see and click. However, when you zoom in we still have our signature parcels (and for listings that we do not have property outlines or parcel data we display an icon):
| Old Map |
New Map |
Zoomed In |
 |
 |
 |
URLs: You can now copy and paste your search URL and share it with friends. Or bookmark it. Or blog it. Or e-mail it. Here’s an example: Capitol Hill Condos.
Back button: The number one usability complaint we heard about the old site is that the back button did not behave as expected. Even some employee’s spouses did not use our site because of our blatant disregard for some web conventions. Now while our implementation is not yet perfect because of those wacky tabs, it’s a huge leap forward for us.
Color change: We went through at least five color palette iterations for the icons and parcels. After contentious internal debates we settled on dark green for listings, light green for previously viewed listings and blue for sold properties. While I did promise the team that we would never have to change the colors again, if you tell me we got them wrong, we will (sorry, Jane.)
Faster Map: Say goodbye to our ‘we’re busy loading map tiles’ indicator, lovingly nicknamed ‘Knight Rider.’ Anecdotal studies of the new map show that while it’s not yet blazingly fast, it certainly is a lot faster than our old map.
Double click to zoom: All the navigation functions that you love from other map sites now work at Redfin. Double click to zoom in or use your mouse scroll wheel to zoom in or out. Try out the keyboard navigation too.
IM with an agent
A lot of us are not just real estate junkies but e-commerce junkies too; the sites we frequent all have ‘Chat Now’ widgets. We don’t know if this is the right interface, but we wanted to give it a shot. Fortunately Meebo makes it really easy to add a Chat Now widget so we added them to our Offer Wizard, Listing Wizard and Ask a Question pages. We staff this from 9 a.m. ’til 6 p.m. during the week and noon to 6 p.m. on weekends. Just today we got a question asking if we had a Microsoft Prime discount, and we do!
Bugs
We tried hard but this release is not perfect. As it turns out each browser has a mind of its own and I am sure we struggled with every browser oddity trying to get the site to look the same on all of them (we didn’t.) We are also sad that we can no longer support Safari because it is not supported by Virtual Earth. We do recommend upgrading to Firefox 2.0 or Internet Explorer 7 depending on your operating system.
Now if you find a bug or have a suggestion please leave us a comment below, we’ll fix it as soon as our developers get some sleep.
In closing
With this release we are making what some people will consider to be minor changes to our customer experience, and they’re right about that. Since the real change is that we now have a map platform so we can innovate faster. And it was that which was an epic effort requiring months of planning and work with many obstacles along the way. Fortunately the teams rallied, we worked weekends, we stayed up all night and we proved we could both overcome the obstacles and deliver on time. 2007 is a big year for us and we’re all very excited because it’s still just the middle January.
Okay, enough celebrating: we have to start on the next release :).
January 5, 2007
We’ve kicked off our New Year in product development with an update to Redfin.com last night. We’ve updated two areas of the product as a result of direct feedback we’ve received from customers. We’ve heard clearly that more listing information, more photos and more help when making an offer are important and we’re working hard to deliver.
More Listing Details
* We’ve upgraded our listings to include as much detail from each MLS as we have. If we have the information in our current MLS feed and are allowed to show it, we now show it. For example, the top Ask an Agent questions we’ve had is: “How much are homeowner’s dues?” Those dues are now shown with the full details for the listing along with many other facts about the home.
* We now display Open House information from the SFAR MLS (mainly for sale listings in San Francisco and San Mateo counties). We’re working on getting more Open House dates integrated in future releases for our other MLSs.
* Virtual tours are displayed when the listing agent provides one. Often this shows a better feel for specific rooms in the house than just the listing photos.
There’s more to come
We know there’s more you’d like to see from Redfin, so leave a comment or drop us an email ( “feedback at redfin dot com”) and let us know what your wish list is. Rest assured; we’ve got more improvements coming soon.
December 31, 2006
Did you know that on Redfin you can sign up to receive e-mails about what is happening with listings in the neighborhood you are house hunting in?
What I find this feature most useful for is tracking price reductions. But you can also use it to find out when new listings come on the market as well as when properties are sold. So how do you take advantage of this?
- Go to Redfin and log in
- Either search for your neighborhood or position the map over the area you are interested in
- Click ‘Save this search’
- Type in a name for your search and set your e-mail notification to something other than ‘Never’
- Wait for the e-mails
Now every day or week you will receive an e-mail from Redfin and the e-mail will let you know when the status or price of a listing changes. This is helpful to track price reductions, price increases, when listings get sold by seeing when their status changes to ‘subject to inspection’, when listings that were in ‘subject to inspection’ come back on the market, etc.
If there are other things you would like to track via e-mail please let us know in the comments and we will consider them in an upcoming release.
December 1, 2006
I’ve read a lot of articles this week about people giving back: from funding technology to find a cure for ALS, educating people about AIDS/HIV with today’s World AIDS Day , how to join the ranks of WarrBill (my “clever” Brangelina mash-up for Buffett and Gates).
There even was a story in The Wall Street Journal today about hitting up party guests for donations to your favorite charity. People say they are “fed up with the excesses of the season and would rather wind up with money for a good cause than 20 bottles of wine at the end of the night.”
Since about 80 percent of charity donations come during the end-of-year holiday season, I wanted to point out a new option for Redfin homebuyers. Now you can have as little or as much of your refund sent to the charity of your choice. We’ll even drop the check in the mail for you.
It’s easy to do, just make sure you select “Apply all or part of the refund to the charity of my choice” when making an offer and a Redfin agent will help you with the rest.
Instead of using the old adage, “I gave at the office,” just tell ‘em you gave part of your home.
Happy Holidays!
