The site also looks a little different because we now ask everybody to upload a photo when you register for listing alerts, save favorites or create an account for any other reason. If you’ve already got a Redfin account, click on your user name at the top right of any Redfin.com page, and choose My Account from the drop-down menu to add a photo.

The photo gives us a nice way to welcome you back to the site. It also helps us to attach a name to a face when you sign up for a tour, ask us about a website feature, or invite a Redfin agent to visit your house for a listing consultation.

And it lends more credibility to the reviews you leave when working with one of our agents. Since our first deal in February 2006, we’ve surveyed every customer for a review, deal or no deal. We published that review, and every review since, good, bad or ugly.

Even now, every time we get a survey response, executives at Redfin get an email, and everyone’s heart skips a beat. After all these years, the agent’s bonus for a transaction still depends completely on that review: if the customer isn’t happy, the agent and his team gets no bonus whatsoever.

It’s an imperfect system, as a customer doesn’t always recognize when she has gotten good or bad service. But we couldn’t imagine running a brokerage at scale without it. It helps our agents get better, and we think it helps our customers make better decisions about whom to work with, too.

Our first cut at publishing these reviews in an agent’s online profile was very Rain-Man, dominated by numbers and text:

Now the reviews include a picture of the house you bought or sold and, with your permission, your picture too. The agent’s profile now looks much better. As Dave McClure colorfully observes, building social software is all about the faces:

So we hope that you’ll take a few minutes and upload a photo to your Redfin.com account or, even better, log-in via your Facebook account, so we can just use whatever profile photo you use there.

This is only the beginning. Your Redfin profile will get richer over the next few months as we get smarter about recommending the homes you want to see and the next steps that you want to take; with this website upgrade we’ve also completed our home-buying guide, which we’ll slice and dice into sashimi-sized chunks, educating Redfin.com users in a personalized way at each step of their search.

Unveiling Our Secret Weapon
Of course, there’s more to this website upgrade than most Redfin.com users can see. Over the years, about half the engineers at Redfin have shifted their focus to build software for our brokerage customers and our real estate agents, fundamentally making the process of buying and selling a home more transparent, delightful and efficient; folks just using Redfin.com for home search never see how good Redfin really is. The most recent example of this work was Deal Room, which guides home-buyers through the escrow process.

Now we’ve developed a similar platform for representing home-sellers, as part of a huge strategic effort to build the listing business. We’ll work out the kinks using it with our own agents, then we’ll begin to expose it to our customers, so they can always see what’s going on with their listing.

The other big win for Redfin’s brokerage customers in this release is a new tool we call the agent scouting report. It grew out of a hackathon project conceived of by Llewellyn Botelho, Dane Brandon, Jamie DeMichele and Jane Nemenman, who in turn had developed the idea after talking with our San Francisco agents how we approach a negotiation.

The rest of the engineering team took this idea and ran with it, building a new tool just for Redfin agents that helps our customers get a better deal. When negotiating with an agent at any brokerage, a Redfin agent can now quickly see when and where that agent has sold homes. More important, the Redfin agent can see whether the other agent has a history of over-pricing listings to create some room for negotiation, or under-pricing to create a bidding war.

Finally, the Redfin agent can see who else at Redfin has worked with the agent, and review any notes the Redfin agent left about how best to approach her. This is powerful stuff, similar to what a baseball pitcher gets when facing a great batter. Unlike media sites, we have full access to the database of agent activity for every market we serve, and we have our own direct experience of working with those agents. Here is a typical report available to a Redfin agent, providing the entire performance history for another agent with whom we’re negotiating a deal; for this blog we redacted the agent’s contact details:

And that’s it! Up next is a big new mobile upgrade. For now, let us know if you have any ideas on what you’d like to see next!

The post Hey Beautiful, Upload Your Photo! appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

It will take months to sort this out, as contracts signed on May 1 and beyond won’t close until June, and may not reach the national data services until July. But we can already see a sharp drop in the earliest leading indicator, traffic to Redfin.com.

Generally in the past few months, Redfin’s traffic has enjoyed double-digit percentage-point gains in traffic. But if you compare traffic on Monday, April 26, before the credit expired, to Monday, May 3, after the credit expired, the difference is stark and uniform: an 8% drop in one week. Here’s a table that provides details on which markets dropped the most:

We have measured the drop across several different time frames, comparing this past weekend to the weekend prior, and the data are the same. It confirms the prediction we made before the credit expired that summer demand would not grow as much as it usually does from April – July.

Sasha Aickin, the leader of our search engineering team, first noticed this change, and further observed that California’s decline was less drastic than other markets, probably because California has a state tax credit that began on May 1. As you would expect, the decline in California markets was more moderate (-6.6%) than all the other markets (-11.0%).

And there are, of course, complicating factors. On one hand, our Seattle traffic may have declined in anticipation of a May 4 – May 6 suspension in listing updates from one of our data providers, the Seattle-area MLS. And our agents report being very busy, in all markets. On the other hand, agent activity often lags traffic changes by a few weeks. And the markets (Phoenix, Portland, New York) where we recently opened the site for business have had such strong traffic growth until last week that any decline is noteworthy.

Of course, it is still early yet, and the fundamental forces driving the market are prices and interest rates, not government programs. Moreover, Redfin is only one of many real estate-related websites that consumers visit. We’ve heard from at least one other leader of a major real estate site that traffic is down this week, but we’re interested to learn if this trend is consistent across all real estate websites. Leave a comment and let us know what you’re seeing or, if you’re a home-buyer, how you’re feeling…

(Photo courtesy of Warner Brothers Pictures)

The post The Hangover appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

After a Wednesday launch we’re already off to a roaring start with 38 customers choosing to work with one of 35 new Redfin partner agents; exceeding our expectations. Like Nancy, a number of partner agents have received multiple requests to either meet or see homes. At this rate we’ll soon be adding more partner agents to the program to handle demand. Fortunately 45 agents have applied to join the program! But we don’t add everyone who applies; we need to interview them and survey their customers from the last year to ensure they live up to our expectation of fanatical customer service.

Digging into the 35 requests we see that they’re spread across a lot of different agents and regions. Wanting to go see a home in person is what prompts many to pick an agent. We’ve also found that agents are very quick to respond to requests, often in just a few minutes. Mona is one of our fastest responders letting us know:

I called him 4 minutes after he sent the request [to see a house]… he said “OMG, that was quick!”

In related news, Redfin agent Angela Creech, was the first to have a review automatically published to her profile page with our brand spanking new survey system. It’s a bummer the buyer declined to leave a comment but they did give Angela 4.5 stars for handling their offer.

Look for an update next week on the brokerage business focusing on how we’re taking lots of clients out to see houses. Have a great long weekend!

The post "Stronger Than Any Referral I've Ever Received" appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

So I just checked Google Analytics, which we use to track pageviews. For the first time in a long-time, traffic increased from Monday to Tuesday — usually it’s the other way around, with a lot of our visitors kicking off the work week by browsing homes for half an hour — by about 1.35%. Over the past month, Tuesday has had 6.2% less traffic than Monday. So I guess you could say we got 7.6% more pageviews on the news.

Which isn’t a big deal, but we were curious, and thought you might be too…

The post What $800 Billion Buys You: 7.6% More Pageviews appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

I remember running down a hallway and bursting through the double doors of a closed conference room to tell all the Redfin bigshots the big news. Our dignified compliance manager, Mary Black, flushed with an unholy glow, had somehow gotten there ahead of me.

And now, hardly a week later, Redfin has shipped a new version of its site that lets Boston consumers use Redfin the way everyone else does: without having to register your name or email address. This means consumers can get all the information about Boston-area homes for sale without wondering when a real estate agent will call, or getting buried in spam.

Why Registration Is a Big Deal
Why is registration such a big deal? Well, imagine if you had to register with Google before you ran a search. And imagine if Google was in an industry notorious for using that information to strap you into a gigantic drip-marketing system?

You would say what most Boston-area consumers have said to our website: no thanks. The graph below, taken from yesterday’s presentation to Redfin’s board, shows the results. Boston traffic is the green line, which after a year of toodling along, just got passed by Chicago (orange line) in its second month of operations. Pathetic!

But that’s all going to change. Now that we’re the first site to offer complete registration-free access to all the MLS homes for sale, we hope that our Boston traffic will shoot through the roof, and that our business there will too. We’re gearing up a big marketing campaign next week.

Many thanks to Kathy Condon, John Breault and the entire MLS Property Information Network Board for taking such a huge step forward.

What Does This Mean? The Big Picture
A long time ago, Redfin made a big bet that we could work within the system as a broker, showing all the homes for sale even as we changed how consumers worked with a Realtor and what they had to pay. For years that was a crazy bet. Maybe it still is.

But we’re seeing MLSs across the country negotiate a truce between brokers of all stripes so consumers can get more information about listings. That’s good for consumers, good for Redfin and, at a time when people have wondered whether MLSs and brokers would change with the times, good for the industry too.

Redfin Boston supporters, spread the word!!! And gentle Redfin blog readers, what do you think? Is the Boston-area MLS decision part of a bigger trend? We’ll keep you posted on what happens to Boston traffic.

The post New Website, New Boston MLS Rules: Unleash The Hounds! appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.