When we launched the big upgrade to our home-buying service, with unlimited home tours, agent choice and a higher price, we figured offer volumes would initially fall through the floor, only to build back up after people had worked their way through a longer (but better!) process.

What the Data Tells Us
What really happened was much better. The table below compares Redfin’s performance before and after the big upgrade, comparing two 18-day periods that started on a Friday and ended on a Monday.

Each row counts the number of clients who engage only in tours or only in offers, with the second-to-last row tallying up the folks who got a combo (tour and then offer, engage an agent and then request a tour). The bottom line shows that the total number of clients engaged with Redfin increased by 66 or 6.2%. Comparing those same two periods, website visits were up only 2.55%, so the new program definitely converts better.

We were delighted to see that offer volumes hardly dropped at all, particularly since all our agents are saying the launch has significantly increased offer quality (it will take a few weeks to measure how many offers shake out but prior to the big upgrade a lot of people sent us born-to-lose offers, just as a way to be able to talk to someone and see what we were like). We have no idea why tour requests would drop, except perhaps because of the holidays; we still expect the number of clients touring with us to increase significantly.

But the small decreases in tours and offers were more than offset by 122 people using our website to engage a Redfin agent to guide them through the rest of the process. In the past 18 days, another 59 clients engaged us and have also already gone on a tour or made an offer.

What Our Agents Are Saying
Reports from the field have also been good. Marshall Park reported that a couple he met face to face spent “thirty minutes shooting the breeze on offers, the  economy and the northern Virginia market” only to make an offer the next day. Out in LA, Joyti Goundar said pretty much the same thing: “people love the fact that they can send me an email to check status on a property and do some comps so we are prepared before we dive in.”

In Chicago, the ever-thoughtful Mark Reitman reported that “It seems, from the customer perspective, everyone loves the upgrade, without any hesitation about the new pricing structure.”

Of course no one is counting any chickens before they hatch. We can’t judge the upgrade a total success until some folks come out the other end. But we’re tentatively happy at how things have turned out so far.

Any folks who have actually used the new service,  please let us know what you think! And Happy Thanksgiving!

So when I spied Evan scurrying across a rainy SOMA street last month, it was almost a relief. “Look at Evan,” I said to another roommate. “What’s he doing out in the rain?”

“Going to another open house,” the roommate replied. “Didn’t you hear? Evan’s a die-hard Redfin fanatic.” Then the next sentence made my heart stop. “He’s always trying to get into listings.”

That Evan might have to worry about how to tour a house he wanted to buy worried me. We knew already that our customers needed broader property access, and had thought out loud about different approaches to the problem (which also includes one of my favorite exchanges between commenters, about the difference between proctology and colo-rectal surgery), but seeing someone struggling in the wild was a fresh outrage all the same.

Now, at last, after several improvements to tours already, the outrage is over. Thanks to the crusading efforts of Michael Young (especially), Scott Nagel, Marcella Branniff, Ellie Wilkinson, Bryan Selner, Marni Buchanan, Josh Sanders and many others, Redfin is now offering a premium home-buying service, which lets our clients tour homes to their heart’s content. The name of the service is Redfin Select.

With Select, we take you on tour twice a week, every week, until you find a home. When you do, we give you a 50% commission refund, which is usually worth $7,500 on a $500,000 home.

The commission refund is a tad smaller than the 67% we offer the clients of our original online home-buying service, Redfin Direct. But 50% tax-free is by any measure a whopping check at closing, and scotching the anxiety about how you get into a property is , for many clients, priceless. Now you have no excuse not to buy through Redfin…

Clients can enroll in Select by signing up for a home tour and getting the forms from the field agent; you can also get the forms by emailing select (at) redfin (dot) com. The forms don’t obligate you to work with Redfin, but they do help us remember who gets 50% and who gets 67% back at closing. And since Redfin Direct itself offers two free tours (and the ability to buy more at $250 a pop) there’s no need to decide between Select or Direct until after the first two tours.

As you may have surmised already, this isn’t an official launch. We haven’t rented any camels or biplanes or aging rock stars to launch Redfin Select, because we’re only taking 20 clients at first, so we can be sure to have enough tours to go around for everybody, even on short notice. The trial period will last a month or more, albeit with more and more clients.

This means that Redfin Select will only be available in a limited area — Seattle, Bellevue, Mercer Island, Redmond, Kirkland — at first, but we hope to expand the service over the summer to other markets. To do that, we need to build a better application for scheduling home tours, for us and for our field agents, which we’ll bundle with lots of improvements to how Redfin handles your favorite listings.

For now, let us know what you think of the service, and thanks for all the ideas so far. To learn more about Select, read on…

(Camel photo credit: Iqbal on Flickr)

Bonus link: live tape of 20 centimeter worm found in woman’s gut, not for faint of heart.