Archive for the ‘Website Upgrades’ Category
June 26, 2008
Here in the wee hours of Thursday morning, Redfin is opening for business in Chicago. It’s our eighth market, but the first new one in nearly a year. And our fourth major release in the last five months.
I hadn’t realized until this week how much we’d all missed expanding. Over the winter, we got a little chicken about opening new markets. But the requests for us to come to Chicago kept piling up (more than 1,200!). And, as nearly all of our markets slid back into the black, our expansion mojo has come back too.
Mark Reitman, who helped beat back an Illinois anti-rebate bill this winter, is running Redfin Chicago. Redfin veteran Rachelle King is coming out from Seattle to get us off to a flying start.
Redfin Search Available Across Most of the States We Serve
And we aren’t stopping there! In fact, the new website increases by nearly 40% the number of homes you can search from Redfin.com, in far-flung parts of Washington, Virginia, Maryland, Massachusetts and Illinois, over 100 new counties in all. We’ll probably never have agents in any of these areas, and so we have no way to make money directly from this traffic today. But we hope that a more national presence will drive more people to our brokerage in the urban centers, too.
And in any event, opening up Redfin Search is a big deal for consumers, a sort of rural electrification project but with real estate data. Because we aren’t just talking about any old YAREW (Yet Another Real Estate Website) coming to Peoria. We’re Redfin dang it! And that means the real-deal MLS listings, with price history, tax records, past sales, days on market and all sorts of other information that far-flung consumers sometimes struggle to get on their own.
Google Street View and Microsoft Bird’s Eye, All In One Site
Meanwhile, we keep striving to make Redfin Search better. The Chicago-version of the site features Google Street View alongside Microsoft Bird’s Eye imagery, so you can zoom aro
und most listings from different perspectives, for a complete portrait of a neighborhood or a property. I think we’re the first ones to do that.
We’ve also fixed up how we search for bank-owned properties. Sue McAllister of the San Jose Mercury News had previously complained that we allowed her to search separately for those bank-owned properties not yet listed in the MLS, but that we didn’t also highight the bank-owned listings that already are in the MLS. Good bust Sue! We fixed that this time around. You can ask for bank-owned listings in the MLS or straight from the bank.
What else? You’ll notice the site now works with Firefox 3.0, a compatibility gap that this whole last week had been embarrassing us. And the details we bring up for each listing should be a lot zippier, too.
Check out the new site, play with the new imagery, see what $1,000,000 buys you along Lakeshore Drive, and by all means tell us what you think!
First photo credit: Today is a Good Day, Flickr
April 30, 2008
One Sunday morning last fall, my great friend Conan, a debonair former nose-tackle who often advises me to get in touch with my feminine side, called to ask about using our site. It took half an hour to convince someone who knows I would never lie to him in a million years to run a search on Redfin. And almost all that time was spent on one simple question: “do you have all the homes for sale?”
“Great question,” I said as real estate inventory has somehow become one of my favorite subjects, second only to “how popular I was in high school,” gossip, my many grudges, and what different drugs are like. “We have all the broker-listed homes for sale.”
“And that’s ALL the homes for sale?”
“Well, technically there’s always a few sold by the owner, without a broker. It’s called FSBO.”
“Yeah?” Conan said. “You don’t have those?”
“No.”
“Is that it?”
“And there’s also stuff in foreclosure, that’s been repo’d by the bank, before the bank has hired a broker to put it in the MLS.”
“Yeah?” Conan said. “Is THAT it?”
“And there’s always the possibility that you could sell your place to your cousin, without ever putting it on the market. We wouldn’t have that either.”
“So basically you’re saying you kind of suck,” Conan said. We had now come to very familiar ground in our 20-year friendship.
“Yeah,” I said. “But everyone else sucks too. Many suck worse.”
In the background, I could hear Conan typing in his first search.
A few minutes after our call ended, the U.S. real estate market collapsed, putting more inventory in a gray market of foreclosures. And we soon began working with I-don’t-have-an-office-number-just-a-cell-phone middle-men, data-scrapers and offshore aggregators to get our hands on every home for sale we could find, minus outdated garbage, copyrighted information, stuff that wasn’t really for sale, and teasers where consumers would have have to pay someone else for the address.
This culmination of this effort is the latest version of our site, live since 6 a.m. this morning, which has bank-owned foreclosures and for-sale-by-owner listings alongside all the listings from the Multiple Listing Service (MLS). It’s a little controversial, and lots of fun to play around with and of course we think it’s beautiful too.
Not that even now the new version of Redfin has all the homes for sale – we only had enough money to get data on foreclosures once the bank owns them, but not before, when they’re up for auction. For the markets we serve, we should have more real estate listings than anyone else. And the foreclosure data we do have is unique, because we give the foreclosures’ actual addresses and bank contact information, which other sites require you to pay for. Redfin is the only site we know of that aggregates bank-owned properties for free.
We’ve hit up more than 50 for-sale-by-owner sites for their inventory, with only two major gaps: Zillow and craigslist. Zillow is, we hope, coming soon. Someone offered us a craigslist feed, no questions asked. But when we emailed craigslist about it, Internet god Craig Newmark confirmed this was a violation of the terms of service. What was incredible about his reply was that it took exactly three minutes and it came from The Man Himself (Craig Newmark rocks).
On other fronts, we’ve fixed up our URLs for Google, and juiced up our MLS integration again, in both Boston and Southern California, so that we can get comprehensive inventory updates every 15 minutes (our only laggard MLS integration is now in Ventura County). While we were at it, we grabbed more open-house data, let people search for open houses, and upgraded our email notifications to tell people when their favorite listings change prices or sell. Next up, the data team is hoping to get photos of very-recent past sales.
But for now we’ve also made it more obvious how to search for data on past sales, a sweet feature that Redfin has always had but which no one ever knew about because it used to be hard to find. No longer! For the markets we serve, you can easily see what any home sold for between last week and 20 years ago (the lag is often more than a week, depending on how long it takes the transaction to record).
What does this all add up to? As our press release explains, the new version takes us deeper and deeper into Freakish Depth, which is our strategy to build the best real estate site by getting the best data. Because we’re a broker in the thick of doing deals, we have access to data as it’s being recorded. And unlike lead-generation sites, we want people to use Redfin to go all the way, getting everything they need to buy the home without having to talk to anyone or pay anything.
The strategy started in January with super-low-latency-MLS integration, bird’s-eye views, two new estimates, Excel integration, neighborhood boundaries and comparable listings. Then we got deeper with listing statistics, which analyzes where the traffic for a listing is coming from, and how inventory levels in the neighborhood have changed.
A gratifying subplot of all this is that the MLSs with whom we have sometimes jousted worked with us on this release. One MLS guided us on how we could show different types of inventory without violating the rules. And another provided the square footage data we’d been asking for. It’s still a delicate balance, sharing data among competitors, and working within a common set of rules to protect the different brokers’ clients.
Which makes us all the more careful not to screw things up. For years, we’ve wanted to add inventory to Redfin’s site, but have hesitated out of respect for the brokers who share their listing data with Redfin, many of whom have legitimate concerns about properties for sale directly from banks or owners. In the end what swayed us was:
a. the consumers who want above all else to see all the homes for sale,
b. the market, where in places like San Diego 40% of the sales have been foreclosure-related,
c. guidance from some of the MLSs we work with.
Hopefully, we’ve found a way to show consumers more information without causing any harm to other MLS members. We’re going to roll out flat-fee services in the next few weeks to work with buyers on for-sale-by-owner and foreclosure properties, but we won’t help anyone go around a listing broker if one has been hired.
Many thanks to all the engineers, product managers and customers – a San Francisco focus group talked us into buying the addresses for foreclosures — who came together to create this site. We worked awfully hard on it, some of us through occasionally daunting circumstances, and are anxious to see how you like it. We hope there aren’t too many bugs. And please, spread the word!
*PS: we may add auction properties in the future but in that case we would have to require users to pay an extra fee to see the address.
March 4, 2008
Like a hideously tortured beast finally broken free of its chains, Redfin’s engineering team has been on the rampage this winter, releasing the second major upgrade to our site in just the past 45 days.
This one features Listing Metrics, a dashboard for Redfin customers selling their house to see whether their listing is getting more traffic than other properties in the neighborhood, and where that traffic is coming from. The dashboard also shows neighborhood inventory levels, and whether average days on market is increasing or decreasing for the area.
Ever since it got harder to sell homes last fall, we’ve tried to dig up more data on what works, first with the Real Estate Scientist report, and now with these dynamic metrics. Customers can check the graphs to see which marketing efforts generate web traffic, and to understand supply and demand in their neighborhood. We’ve also included prices for homes that recently sold in the neighborhood, and links and photos for comparable properties currently on the market.
It’s good stuff. Greg Swann at Bloodhound Blog has already asked why we wouldn’t share this page with everyone, and I did too when I first saw the prototype. But we first conceived the feature-set within the commerce group, which is responsible for supporting customers involved in a transaction, so we didn’t have enough time to work out how to show Listing Metrics in Redfin’s search experience.
Hopefully we will soon. The whole idea behind our strategy of Freakish Depth is that doing deals can give us market insights to share with everyone. As Redfin CTO Michael Young explains in today’s press release, “our website makes our business model possible by automating key tasks, but our business model is also what gives us the deep data access we need to build a better site.” We think it’s hard to build a good search site if you aren’t up to your knees in deals.
Which brings us to what we did with search in this release. Probably most important for our home-buyers is that you can now see open-house information on our map, and subscribe to listings just as you subscribe to this blog. Making it easy to find open houses is important because, notwithstanding Redfin’s new tours policy, so many of our customers see properties that way.
Adding RSS was also a big emotional win, since we’d been pushing it into “the next release” for two years. Finally Michael Smedberg and Matt Goyer couldn’t take it anymore, and rallied to cram it in. We encourage all you bloggers to grab a feed, and widgetize it.
Or you can just embed listing results in your favorite feed-reader:
Finally, we added to the site estimates from Cyberhomes, owned by title insurance giant Fidelity National Financial. It’s sort of fun to compare Cyberhomes’ numbers to those of Zillow and eppraisal.com: Zillow is almost always the lowest, and eppraisal.com is usually the highest.
And so where does that leave us? Exhausted, Matt Goyer says. But also happier than this team has ever been with our site. Redfin is the only national player to crack Joel Burslem’s list of “kick ass real estate search sites.” And while we’re still small potatoes compared to the truly national sites, traffic has increased 88% since December. We’ve got plenty of other challenges, but they’re easier to solve when there’s lots of people using Redfin.com. Enjoy! And let us know what you think…
Bonus link: in our devblog, the Great Smedberg writes on how to search Redfin from Internet Explorer or Firefox. Next up on the devblog, we’ll explain how we went about choosing a content management system, also live in this release…
January 31, 2008
A gorgeous new version of Redfin.com just went online. The premise of the release is Freakish Depth: to update our website with up-to-the-minute data on every new listing and to provide more information about each listing and its neighborhood than any other website. We still have a long ways to go.
But look how far we’ve come! Some of the big changes aren’t easy to see. The first order of business in this release was to increase the frequency with which we draw data from ten Multiple Listing Services (MLSs) in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Orange County and San Diego (we have always had high-frequency updates in markets like Washington DC and Seattle), so that we now check as often as every fifteen minutes for new listings. It took us months to sort through all the feeds.
Just as importantly, we increased the amount of information we display about each listing. Beyond all the MLS-provided details and photos of the property, the county tax records and the Zestimate, we now add:
–> a set of similar listings and recently sold properties,
–> a complete history of any price changes since the listing became active,
–> a second market value estimate from eppraisal.com,
–> local Redfin blog and message board conversations,
–> a detailed overhead image of the lot outline, and
–> photographic bird’s-eye views of the property.
And our favorite feature may be the neighborhood outlines that now set the boundaries of map-based searches. This allows you to analyze the median price, square footage and days on market for your neighborhood, and now too you can download that data to Excel, where you can really go hogwild with formulas and charts. This is an idea we took from one of our user groups.
There are a bunch of little things too, like showing condo icons, and favorites on the map, and unit numbers, and actually making address search work. And because we finished swapping out MySQL in favor of Postgres, which features geospatial indexing, the whole site is screaming fast. What all this means for the true real estate freak is one of the deepest, fastest, most addictive highs on the Internet.
AND DID I MENTION THAT, AT LONG LAST, WE SUPPORT THE SAFARI BROWSER! Or, as a matter of interest, that Safari 3.0 is by a wide margin the browser that renders our site most quickly?
Hats off to Shahaf, Jamie, Arthur, Sasha, Matt, Jane, Dan, Navtej, Michael, Leo, Jeff, Llewellyn, Mose, Bryan, Mike and the rest of the Redfin team for all their awesome work, and to all the customers who helped us too! And even though we complain a lot, we’re grateful too to the Microsoft Virtual Earth team that worked with us on Safari support.
If you have any thoughts on the new site, or suggestions for what we should do next, please just leave a comment!
See the TechCrunch post on Redfin’s new release.
October 2, 2007
Some things are universal, such as when you click on a link you want an instant reaction. Redfin’s response time hasn’t been as fast as we’d like, so we’ve released a new version that improves performance significantly. It’s on the site today. You’ll see much faster search, especially for past sales search. John Battelle’s blog on what web users value was influential in our decision to prioritize performance.
We ran many different tests against our old user interface and the new one. The chart below shows the performance gains across three browsers. In the case of Internet Explorer 6, we display listings on our map almost four times faster with the new version of our site. The performance gains are smaller but still significant for IE7 (download it) and Firefox (download it), both of which have better overall performance than IE6.
And we’ve added a cool visual effect: during the (now shorter) search, you’ll see a progress bar and houses will progressively pop up on the map. For the techies among you, we’ll be talking in more depth about the specific things we did to improve performance, including a good bit of data and commentary on our database switch, in an upcoming post on the Redfin Developers’ Blog.
Talking about speed of information, we’ve also sped up the MLS integration (MLS systems are used by brokers to track all the open listings in an area). In many cases we load new listings faster than the real estate sites used by the brokers, so our customers are the first to see newly listed properties. In Southern California, we’ve had issues with MLS data getting onto our site too slowly and we think we’ve fixed those latency issues in San Diego, Orange County, and most parts of Los Angeles. Our goal is to have all new listings in Southern California on Redfin within minutes, which is the type of performance we have in other markets.
In this release, we’ve also added lot outlines (see below) in Boston, Baltimore, and DC and updated the outlines in Seattle and California. Finally, we’ve added new map icons and links to driving directions on the property detail pages.
Other things aren’t as universal. When I moved away from San Francisco, I wondered why it was so difficult to get a burrito the way I wanted it. In San Francisco, you tell them what to put in your burrito; everywhere else, you start with a standard burrito and add and remove ingredients. Invariably something goes wrong.
Food is local, and so is real estate. While we’re only in a few markets now, we try to go deep in those markets. We write about local real estate in Redfin’s Sweet Digs blogs, provide an online customer forum in each market, and of course hire experienced, local agents. As part of that effort, we’re rolling out local sites for San Francisco Bay Area real estate, Washington DC and Baltimore real estate, Seattle real estate, Boston real estate, San Diego real estate, Los Angeles real estate, and Orange County real estate.
People come to Redfin for direct access to MLS listings, so we’ve left the search bar front and center on these pages. But we’ve added information that’s useful for someone searching for a new home, such as schools, census data, and local news and blogs. For example, interested in new construction in the Westchester area of LA? You can find out about it in Sweet Digs on the Redfin LA page.
We like these pages, but we also realize they’re just a start. If you’ve got any suggestions on good local links to include or other feedback on the pages, please send them. And let us know whether you like the lot outlines and new map icons, and if there’s anything else you’d like to see on the map.
February 8, 2007
A friend descending into Southern California once looked down on the vast grid of tinkling lights and said it was as terrifying to see as the mind of God.
I used to dislike the way LA made me feel insignificant, but now it’s almost a relief. If Gertrude Stein once complained that the problem with Oakland is that “when you get there, you’re there,” she might have said about Southern California that you when you get there, you feel like you’re not there at all. What makes all the taco trucks, the Korean strip malls, the freeways, the birdbath pools and look-alike houses not only bearable but actually and suddenly quite beautiful is the ocean on the other side of it all, serene as far as the eye can see.
Now Redfin is launching in Southern California, the largest real estate market in the world. In one magnificent land-grab, we’ve more than tripled the area we have to cover: Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego and Ventura counties. To start, we’ve hired three new agents, who (if SoCal is anything like San Francisco was) will probably spend their first few months on the job waiting for action from the Web site, and e-mailing the rest of us to tell us they’re going loco.
Or maybe things will pick up a little faster: we’re closing a whopper deal in San Diego today, and we’ve already got a few others in progress. We’re supposed to show up on TV tonight in San Diego, and the LA Times published a nice spread about us today (smiling picture; intensely regretted & insanely provocative quote, which Kevin Boer has already called me out on); we got on the radio and a podcast too. Another positive development is the Southern California bloggers already are talking trash about us.
As usual, they call us discounters, when we’re not offering a discount on a traditional service, we’re offering an online service at a different price, with a different business model and 95+% customer satisfaction. Amazon.com is not a discount bookstore. Redfin.com’s goal is to be different and better too, not just cheaper.
And hey, did you notice that Redfin.com has smaller icons, and it’s running faster today? We put some serious hardware on company plastic, squashed our file sizes and got down and dirty optimizing our code. Some day, we’re going to have to write a post on the tradeoffs between Flash and AJAX, which we’ve had to learn about as we go. The big issue we’re still working on — crucifixion by comments, please — is Safari support, which we lost when we switched to Virtual Earth.
For now, please tell your Southern California friends about us, and thanks for all your support.
May 31, 2006
Redfin went bananas today, announcing $8 million in funding, expansion to the Bay Area, and over 40 pending or closed transactions. Best of all, there is our brand-new site, with a gorgeous new orange interface, time-on-market queries, and map-driven averages for past sales alongside new listings.
The engineers and designers who worked through the night on the release have gone home to rest up for the TechCrunch party, which, like everything else Redfin, will be open-ended, prone to lunacy, barely but enthusiastically put-together, fan-freaking-tastic. Mike Arrington, Paul Allen, Robert Scoble and John Moe are coming. We’ve heard rumors that TV crews might show up. We’re fretting over how many pizzas to order, and we hope you’ll bring your laptops to strut your stuff.
And we’re all watching the traffic to see how the Bay Area will respond to our site. Rosemary Vo, our lead California agent, drove us all over town yesterday to meet the Wall Street Journal, KRON TV, the San Jose Mercury News, the Contra Costa Times, the San Francisco Chronicle and Inman News as well as a few bloggers. It was a wild ride (my hair got so mussed up in the madness that a bird tried to land in it, which embarrassed us both). At the very end of the day, coming through the tunnel on 24, the whole bay opened up before us with the city showing white in the sun. It seemed like a brave new world, and it was exciting to feel, after all the work to come that far, that we had no idea what would happen next.
Please let us know what you think of the site, what problems we need to fix, and how many people you think will come to the party so we can apply the wisdom of crowds to the now-paramount question of how many pizzas to order.
