Home Tour Tips from the Field: A Redfin Agent’s Guide

Redfin field agents take our customers on home tours, host open houses and attend inspections. As our mobile force on the ground, each sees on average 50 – 60 homes a week. Across all our markets, field agents toured a total of 5,795 homes in April. Exposure to that many properties gives them a great eye for evaluating what’s for sale and watching how their local market changes week to week.

Seattle field agent Kathi Kelly-Billings recently posted some great suggestions in our forums on how customers can get the most out of home tours. We’d like to share her tips:

Find Your Target Area Before You Tour

• Drive the area: closest freeway entrance? Nearest grocery store? Traffic patterns? Attend open houses to get a feel for prices/neighborhoods. Try all of this on a Sunday when there are a lot of open houses.
• Check the commute time: try the drive on a weekday, ask in our forums, or friends in the area.
• Research schools: Schooldigger and GreatSchools are great websites. Even if you don’t have kids, buying in a good district with good schools will help when you decide to sell.

Know What You Want & Don’t Want Before You Tour

• Make a list of all your needs, wants and no-ways: the list will expand as you get further into the process and then you won’t need one—you’ll just know. But it’s still a good starting point. Must have a large level lot? “Light and bright” very important? Would like a bonus room but not a necessity? Need a 4th bedroom for when granny comes to visit? Need space for a dog run?
• Are fixers worth your time? Many fixers are foreclosures and can come with a lot of problems. The price may seem like a bargain; but in the end, is it worth it? Here’s what we often see:
  o The roof needs replacing before the bank will consider financing.
  o Furnaces and appliances are often non-existent or broken.
  o Carpeting/flooring soiled past livability.
  o Mold, siding, plumbing, electrical and structural issues.
  o Most of these homes need at least $20-30K just be livable—not even considering aesthetic enhancements.

Also, dealing with banks and the tightening of FHA rules makes these processes difficult. Take some time to decide if repairs will fit in to your financial budget, time constraints and patience level.

• Newer/New Construction lots are often smaller: everything is new and shiny–appliances, plumbing/electrical systems, carpeting. The living spaces are bigger/more open than older homes. They probably won’t need a lot of upkeep in the next few years. But if you are looking for a backyard to throw a baseball or plant a large garden or perhaps, practice with your band, these places probably won’t have enough room.
• Older homes often have larger lots: but they may have older systems that need updating. Just think about what’s most important to you.

How to Visualize the Lot Size

Paying attention to lot sizes is a very easy way to whittle down your list before you tour, depending on your needs. So many times, I set foot in the door of a house with a touring customer and they say, “oh, this lot is too small–we need room for ____.”

If lot size is important to you, here are a few guidelines. Use the pictures to get a sense of the backyard’s size. (Unfortunately, wide-angle lenses can distort the pictures). Excuse the “baseball” comparisons…

• Under 4,000 Sq.Ft.: will probably be just 5 feet (on sides) and 15 feet in front and back, or smaller, depending on where the house is situated on the lot. If it has a picture with a good sized front yard and is under 4000 sf, this means the backyard will be very small. Great for non-gardeners or workaholics. Rule these out if you want to put in a swing set or have large BBQ parties.
• Under 6,000 Sq.Ft.: will have some yard but you probably can’t toss a baseball very hard. A small garden area is possible with small outside entertainment area.
• Under 8,000 Sq.Ft.: you could toss a baseball, but not if you are playing anything above Little League. Enjoying a nice sized garden is possible along with a large outside dining area.
• Over 12,000 Sq.Ft.: you could throw a baseball hard and hit a grand slam as well. Great tree-fort material, too.

Get In Touch With a Redfin Lead Agent Before You Tour

Experienced, top producers in their markets, Redfin lead agents handle on average 4 – 5 deals a month. Directly responsible for your success, they answer all of your questions, negotiate hard to get you the best deal and guide you through the whole process.

We’ve found that our first-time home buyers really benefit from connecting with a lead agent sooner rather than later in the process. Since over 50% of our customers are first-timers, more handholding is welcome and of course, expected.

The more you know what you want going into the process, the easier it becomes. And the better chance of getting the home you have always wanted.

Good luck in your search!

Kathi Kelly-Billings
Redfin Field Agent

Our Shot at the Mass Market

Redfin started life as a cult for what my mom still likes to call “your little web friends.” But our goal has always been to become a religion, appealing to grandmas and truck-drivers and everyone in between too.

Unlimited Tours, Agent Choice
To hit the mass market, we’re upgrading today our home-buying service to offer free unlimited tours, and a choice of agent, and support from that agent all along the way. We’re changing our home-selling service to offer in-home consultation, open houses, a big marketing blitz and tours for any interested buyers.

50% Commission Refund
And we’re raising prices. Tours are now free — we used to charge $250 per tour –  but we’re changing the commission refund for buyers from 66% to 50% (existing customers relax, you pay the old price).  The average refund should drop from $10,000+ to nearly $8,000. If people use Redfin to sell one house and buy another, the total savings will still in most cases be about $20,000.

These are big changes, which we first tested in April, researched in June, and discussed as recently as September.  You can get all the details from our press release, or check out the new search features.

Having made these changes, we can’t imagine why anyone would choose a traditional agent over Redfin. We now offer just about every personal service offered by a traditional agent with the possible exception that we won’t preview homes on our own.

More Personal Service, More Online Service
But our goal still isn’t to be just like a traditional agent. It’s to be much better. We’re offering more personal service, but we’re also offering more online service too. The whole website changed to let you evaluate an agent, choose an agent, request home tours, ask questions. Hopefully this combines the personal & the online into one seamless offering.

Still Different from Other Brokerages, at a Molecular Level
And hopefully, this means we can change the game not just for a handful of digerati, but for everybody. Because more than ever that’s what we are here to do, to give consumers the information and tools to be a partner in the process, not a sales target.

This change makes us more like a traditional broker in a good way — we’re narrowing a competitive gap — but it doesn’t mean we’re becoming like everybody else. The difference between Redfin and traditional brokers is obvious and simple and huge and it has nothing to do with offering more tours:

• Free the data: we publish data other brokers won’t. This makes our customers smarter and more powerful. Our site traffic has grown more than 300% year-over-year.
• Ditch the sales-force: our customers come to us via the Web. We don’t have a sales-force. This is how we afford a commission refund of 50%.
• Back off: we have always been a customer-service organization — a fanatical customer-service organization — not a sales machine. We pay agents on customer satisfaction, not commissions, so customers won’t feel pressured into a high price range. Our customers get the time & space to make their own decisions, and advice they can trust. Our customer satisfaction rate is 97%; the industry average is 85%.
• Get results not relationships: our agents’ job isn’t to buy you dinner. It’s to get our customers the best deal. We measure our agents’ performance — obsessively — and our agents perform better in negotiations. For two straight years in every market we’ve measured, we’ve negotiated a bigger discount off list price, by about $3,500.

There’s nothing in our DNA about refusing to help people see a home they want to buy, or telling them to hold their questions until they’ve submitted an offer. But even though these limitations are obvious and stupid, we clung to them for a long time.

What Took Us So Long?
I’ve sometimes thought the most conservative organization in the world is a startup, which spends so much energy nurturing its delicate sense of self against naysayers and self-doubt that it can hardly admit mistakes.

We thought that changing a consumer service designed mostly on the back of a napkin in 2006 meant having to admit we were wrong (it does). And I thought for a long time that offering personal service meant we weren’t an online service (it doesn’t).

So in focus group after focus group, customers said they wanted more tours, they wanted to be able to call their agent, that the difference between a 50% or 66% refund didn’t matter much to them. But we continued to make identity-based decisions about what we could and could not do. Many meetings ended by my saying, “that’s not who we are.”

Change is Good
Then, Fred Wilson talked about how startups are a “process of going down lots of dark alleys only to find that they are dead ends… and trying another and another until you find the one paved with gold.”

CEO Tony Hsieh said that Zappos isn’t an e-commerce company or a shoe company but “a customer-service company that happens to sell shoes.”

Redfin Director Marc Singer said that consumer companies have to change constantly, because they’re listening to consumers constantly.

We were never at a dead-end — revenues grew more than 40%, even this year — and we’ve always been customer-service fanatics, but we have resisted thinking these changes through to their logical conclusion.

A Software Company Becomes a Consumer Company
The conclusion I’ve come to is this: that more than just upgrading our service, Redfin grew up today. We’re still using technology to change the game, but technology is just a means to an end, not an end in itself. This means we’re not a technology company, or a real estate company, but a consumer company.

We know this is a good change for our customers. We believe it’s a good change for us too. We’ve got another big change coming in the spring. But for now, let’s see what you think of what we’ve done so far.

Thanks to all our supporters, and all the folks at Redfin past and present who helped to launch the new service.

(And tune in later today for a visual walk-through of all the new website features.)

At Last, The Outrage is Over (Introducing Redfin Select)

Evan, one of several old roommates who still put me up on visits to San Francisco, is perhaps the most dignified person I know. He has the deep, resonant voice of a Jewish Darth Vader, and the oddly punctuated speech of Christopher Walken. He rarely blinks and when he does, it seems like an important decision. His smile is friendly but also somehow knowing.

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.