You might be asking yourself what difference an hour or even 15 minutes can make in your home search? In a world where homes are selling in less than 24 hours, being the first to know about a new home can mean the difference between getting an offer accepted, or watching it sell to someone else. You could literally receive an Instant Update in the morning, tour a home in the afternoon, and make an offer with a Redfin agent that evening. Break out the champagne flutes with dinner – you’re a new homeowner!

Since Redfin is a real estate brokerage, our notification system is built around the Multiple Listing Services (MLS), which is the most accurate and timely source of real estate data. Aggregator sites typically don’t have direct access to the MLS, resulting in inaccurate and out-of-date updates, and since Redfin is committed to making sure our data quality is top-notch, you’ll never get an alert about a stale listing. Since rolling out Instant Updates last summer to Redfin.com and the iPhone and iPad, growth has been phenomenal. Last week alone, we sent out nearly 12 million Instant Updates at a time when inventory is down across the board.

Setting Up an Alert

To sign up to receive instant updates on your Android device, simply download the latest version and we’ll guide you along once you fire it up. Or, to jumpstart the process, you can always visit “Alerts & Emails” in the app’s main menu to add mobile notifications to any of your favorites or saved searches. If you happen to have set up Instant Updates on a (cough) iPhone, then you’re already done – we’ll transfer your settings over automatically.

A big thank-you goes out to our Mobile team for making it special for our Android customers. We think this is a big win for those with an Android powered device, and we’d like to hear your stories about how Redfin mobile has helped you buy or sell a home. How have you used Instant Updates to your advantage?

The post Need for Speed: Instant Updates on Android appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

Last December, we re-designed the Redfin property pages so pictures are 35% bigger, and pages load 31% faster. That effort got into the guts of the page, organizing details about each property into blocks and tables for easy scanning. The challenge there was the sheer volume of information we have about each property: as a broker, we have far more complete, local data about every home for sale than any other major site. But the property page’s color palette and style remained the same, so how the site felt didn’t change much.

Now across the whole site, the header is red, not blue. The background is white. We took out a bunch of lines, shadows and tints so you can focus on what you came to Redfin to see: all the pretty houses. We hope this conveys what we like best about Redfin as a company: the simplicity of our mission to change the real estate game in consumers’ favor, the brightness of the people here, the love we have for what we do.

This wasn’t easy. As Andrew Fischler, one of the lead designers on this project, writes in our developers’ blog about the effort:

What’s harder, cooking a great meal from scratch, or taking a bunch of leftovers and making a meal that tastes better than the original?

For all the frameworks software developers use to separate form from function, complete redesigns are less common now than they were a decade ago because of the sheer size and complexity of most websites, the proliferation of mobile devices that also have to be updated, the emphasis on frequently releasing smaller updates, and the metrics-driven approach for assessing the benefit of every update.

We decided on a site redesign all the same because we have to worry about a metric that’s impossible to measure: whether your days and nights on Redfin give you reason to trust that this company can represent you in the purchase or sale of a home. Despite ample, indisputable evidence of our rapid growth, we constantly hear that how people choose real estate agents won’t change because it’s an emotional process.

We agree that it’s emotional; we just happen to  think the experience of using a website or an iPhone application can be emotional too, especially when it’s as beautiful as Redfin now is. Many thanks to Andrew Fischler, Andy Taylor, Robert Law, Wei-Ting Lu, Iga Zyzanska, Eric Gideon, and the other designers, developers and test engineers — did I mention that changing every page on the site results in a sprawling, seething bug farm? — for your vision, perspicacity and hell-for-leather drive. When I walked out of the office over the last few months and still saw your lights burning, I knew this had become, like so many projects at Redfin, a labor of love.

The post What Price, Beauty? appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

The Offer Insights for some places, like the San Francisco Bay Area, are a horror movie: there was an offer for more than $50,000 over the list price of a Foster City townhouse that was still in the bottom five of 26 total offers. An all-cash offer for more than $150,000 over the asking price of an El Cerrito stunner lost out to a buyer who conducted a pre-inspection to be able to take the property as-is.

But there are also hopeful stories too, of buyers in Acton, Massachusetts who won out over four investors by building a relationship with the seller, or a Redfin client who simply beat everyone else to the punch, acting on an Instant Update to tour a cute little Dallas condo within hours of its debut, and then making an offer on the same day; backup offers poured in, but too late. Other customers made pre-emptive offers, coming in ahead of the offer deadline with a mostly cash offer and an easy close that were tough to top.

Whenever we represent a client on an offer to buy a home, we publish data on whether we won, how many competing offers we faced, how long the property was on the market, how much our buyer offered compared to list price and the rough amount of our buyer’s planned down-payment:

This is stuff you could only get before by working for months with a savvy real estate agent, but is now available to everyone Redfin serves, on a much larger number of sales: in areas where Redfin has plenty of agents such as northeast Seattle, Redfin clients have made an offer on 20% of the homes sold in December.

And more than ever, our customers want to know what it takes to win: in January, 69% of the offers we submitted for our clients faced competition, up from 53% a year ago. In the Bay Area alone, 94% of our offers were competitive.

To keep pace with the market, we get you the information fast. Because we capture all the details about an offer via the tools our agents use to prepare that offer in the first place, we can publish the details within seconds of submitting the offer to a listing agent.

Whoa, This is Sensitive Stuff! What About Confidentiality?

To avoid wrecking a deal still in progress, we identify the home only by its neighborhood before the sale closes; we also leave out the Redfin agent’s notes, and provide broader ranges around the price of our client’s offer and other deal details:

Once the deal is done, we ask our own client if we can identify the home on which that client bid. If the client prefers to keep the entire story confidential, we remove the Offer Insight without ever having identified the property it was about. Otherwise, we identify the property and publish more specific details about the offer.

We publish Offer Insights throughout Redfin.com, showing nearby deals when you look at an individual property but also highlighting juicy details about pending sales as you browse our map of listings:

To see a neighborhood’s entire deal history, you can just visit the page for that neighborhood:

And if you want more detail about an Offer Insight, you only have to ask, via an online form associated with each Insight. The Redfin agent who wrote the offer (in this case, Allie Howard) will respond to your questions, usually via email, typically within a few hours:

Offer Insights are not available in Atlanta, Philly and the Washington DC area because we are still awaiting approval from our data providers.

Our Vision: Why Offer Insights Matter

But Offer Insights is more than just a way to guide Redfin customers on how much to pay for a home. It’s part of a strategy based on our unique identity as a real estate broker and a software company. Unlike a pure online real estate company, Redfin employs our own agents in neighborhoods across 20 major American markets, working with thousands of buyers and sellers every month. This allows us to capture real-time information about every neighborhood from local folks on the ground.

And unlike a traditional brokerage, all of our agents use online tools for writing offers that are connected to the website consumers use to shop for homes for sale. This makes it easy to use the Internet to publish the collective wisdom of thousands of agents. The result is a crushing competitive advantage at the point that really matters for an anxious home-buyer, about what it takes to really win.

In March 2011, we first explored the idea of combining our agents’ neighborhood expertise with the vast data Redfin.com stores in the Internet cloud, when we began publishing Tour Insights, our agents’ candid, in-person accounts of the homes we’ve toured:

Since then, Redfin has become a vast repository of proprietary local knowledge, amassing over 250,000 comments about homes with a noisy road nearby or peek-a-boo views no one had noticed before, covering as many as 39% of the homes for sale in our most popular neighborhoods. We now routinely get calls from other agents asking us to publish a Tour Insight on their new listing because these listings get far more Redfin.com and mobile traffic.

With Offer Insights, we hope to deepen the repository of local knowledge we offer our customers. The Internet has been great at organizing and publishing a jumble of numbers and pictures about homes for sale. But it is only now beginning to tell a story, to capture what really just happened around the corner, to convey not merely the data stored by computers but the wisdom of people who have lived and worked in your neighborhood for decades.

This is why Offer Insights isn’t just a feature, it’s a new way for Redfin — and perhaps other companies that combine technology with real-world products or services — to be: big and small, juicy and dry, national and local, data-driven and personal, computer and human.

The post Redfin Publishes Thousands of Real-Time Insights on What It Takes to Win A Bidding War appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

Already the thousands of Redfin fans invited to a September trial of Collections have created a catalog of desire, collecting photos of modern architecture and celebrity mansions.

You can also draw on an inexhaustible supply of design ideas, from luscious gardens, to breathtaking kitchens, giant windows, and overstuffed libraries.

And of course there are a few wacky Collections, too: pretty pretty ponies, Panda Pandemonium, extreme taxidermy, and palatial tree-houses.

A Big Change for Redfin
The whole idea of Collections is a big change for Redfin. It wasn’t easy for the world’s nerdiest real estate website, with numbers everywhere about people, properties and prices, to get gushy about pretty pictures. But some of our most artistic engineers and agents fought for this change, on the website and in our culture.

Just look at how a Collection opens, with the photos taking their places on the screen like little kids in a school-play. We rarely go out of our way for touches like that, but at last we wanted to do justice to the sense of discovery and desire that are the best parts about a home search.

When I was reviewing the final Collections — and here you have to imagine the pursed lips of the food critic in “Ratatouille,” expecting not to be impressed — I was surprised by the intensity of my emotions over a perfect little bookshelf or a sudden vast expanse of green. It gave me a sense of what could be and a touch of what might have been.

It sounds silly but it really made me think of a poem someone made me read in high school, where “footfalls echo in the memory, down the passage we did not take, towards the door we never opened, into the rose garden.” There are a lot of rose gardens in Redfin Collections, a lot of emotion.

A Big Change for the Industry
Collections are also a big change for the real estate industry, which has had a fitful relationship with social networks. Home-buying after all is often competitive rather than social. And home-sellers are rightly sensitive about the things people say about their place.

This is probably why no broker has developed online social tools for website users to share real estate information with others. And it’s also why Redfin had to build our own social tools, because the privacy in real estate is tricky, and we had to get it just right.

Redfin’s Collections don’t feature pictures of pretty dresses or pieces of chicken; we feature people’s homes. The owners may want the photos removed from the web once the house is no longer for sale. The listing agent is entitled to attribution for the photos.

Redfin Collections includes not only these safeguards, but also the real-estate context that a general photo-sharing site can’t: for example, the price and location of each home featured in a Collection; access to full, accurate details on the property; and a way to actually see the home in person.

How to Create a Collection
To access Collections, just click the new “More” menu that appears in the header of every page on Redfin’s site:

To start your own Collection, just click the plus sign in the pop-up button that appears at the top right of a listing photo whenever your mouse hovers above it:

Then give the collection a name, and add a caption to the first photo:

Once you click Add Photo, you’ve created a Collection! When you add subsequent photos to a Collection, we’ll ask whether you want to contribute to an existing Collection or to start a new one.

Everyone can see any Collection, but once a home sells, individual home photos within the Collection may be limited to registered users, depending on what’s allowed in local listing agreements.

We also offer comments on photos, but with similar limits, based on whether the seller permits comments in the listing agreement:

If the seller doesn’t agree to comments, we don’t even allow a caption on the photo.

Of course, we make it easy to share Collections on Facebook, Twitter or via email. And we let you subscribe to a Collection, notifying you whenever a new photo of a gorgeous kitchen or a quirky bathroom is added.

Our hope is that we’ve found a way to let people share what they love about real estate while still respecting the rights of sellers and their agents.

The conversation about the homes we dream about — and laugh about, and can’t stop thinking about — has always been happening, and real estate agents have always been a part of it, even now as it moves online with Redfin Collections.

Many thanks to the whole Collections team, which rallied to get Collections out the door by year-end, and to the thousands of early users who helped us get it done right.

The post A Beautiful Find appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

As our customers know by now, Redfin stops at nothing to make sure our data quality is the best, and we obsess over making sure our customers have access to as much of the same information agents use to list homes or record sale information as we’re able. That said, like a day-old bagel I found under my daughter’s car seat, the previous property page felt (and tasted) stale. It takes a certain bit of crazy to reinvent your most-visited page, but sometimes you have to make bold moves to keep what you love moving forward. It frustrated us to no end when usability tests consistently showed that customers were missing out on detailed property history, tax information, School Attendance Zones, or public records because this information was hiding in plain sight on a jumbled page.

That’s why we didn’t take the design process lightly: it’s the culmination of years of feature requests and feedback from customers, months of in-person usability tests, surveys, and the largest public beta program we’ve ever put together. As this has rolled out, your feedback has already helped us optimize the design for the smaller screens of netbook computers, and convinced us (rightly so) that the map on the page absolutely had to be interactive.

So what’s different on the new page? The most noticeable change is the size of the images – big, beautiful images of the home are front-and-center. We all eat with our eyes, so we’re giving you a second helping of deliciousness. All the same information from the previous page is still there, and the reorganized layout makes it even easier to find the information you can only find on Redfin, like what our Redfin agents thought of a home when they saw it in person. If you decide you’re ready to tour a home, we’ve made it even easier to find the local Redfin agent who can make it happen.

Larger photos: Images are 35% larger, and you can expand it to a full-screen slideshow. Hit the left / right arrow keys to page through them all. (or hit the ‘?’ key to see all keyboard shortcuts)

Completely re-architected page: Loads up to 31% faster and it really screams on mobile browsers.

Easier navigation: An easy-to-navigate menu helps you keep track of where you are on the page and can take you to any section of the page quickly. Just click the section name and go.

Address bar: Core details, such as price, beds, baths, square feet, address and more “lock” to the top of the page as you scroll down, and you’ll always be able to favorite a home as you learn more.

Neighborhood map: In real estate, it’s all about Location, Location, Location. We’ve moved the map to the top of the page, so you’ll know as soon as the page loads where a house is located, or how much of the property it takes up. Adjust to satellite mode or zoom in, and we’ll remember your preferences from page to page. It’s the map of your dreams right there as soon as the page loads. One click takes the map full-screen.

Redfin Activity Stats: New Redfin Activity Stats (in the new “Activity” section), will give you a great sense for how many people have Viewed, Favorited, X’d-Out and Toured with Redfin for this particular listing, and across all time. It’s already a feature we find ourselves obsessing about on the homes we’re tracking.

A gigantic thank-you goes out to the engineering, marketing, products and design teams that made this happen. This was truly a company-wide effort, and we’re proud of all the hard work and careful planning that went into it.

We’ve built a helpful guide on how to get the most of the new design, and if you’re interested in some of the groundbreaking new technology we’re using on the new page, please also check out our Dev Blog on the development process. We discuss how we load the different elements of the page in sequence to show content even before the full page has loaded, as well as how we handle the different streams of data simultaneously.

As always, we want to hear what you think: Please share with us what you like best, or any changes you’d like to see. Let us know with your comments below.

The post You Look Beautiful Darling appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

Redfin agents have experienced this sentiment first hand, advocating for buyers whose primary home-buying goal “is that both (daughters) will have the opportunity to graduate from Newport High School.” Many of our website visitors have also spoken, asking for “a way to limit the house search to certain schools.” We are proud to announce that school attendance areas have been added into our search experience.

Here are some of the key highlights of how “school search” works on Redfin:

• Search by school name (i.e., Garfield High School):
  • Type the school name into the “Location” box above the map on Redfin.com. The school’s enrollment boundary will appear on the map, outlined in red. Additional details about the school, including its GreatSchools rating, will be available to the right of the map.

  

• Click a school icon  on the map page:
  • To the right of the map, click “Show Attendance Zone” to view the homes for sale inside the school enrollment boundaries.

  

• Extra Credit: Subscribe to a Redfin Instant Update or Daily Update so you are notified within minutes when a home is listed for sale within a particular school attendance zone.
  • Search by school name.
  • Click “E-mail me new listings” and choose Daily or Instant alerts.

  

School search also works on our iOS and Android applications. Just type in the name of a school and hit the “Search” button:

The first day of school represents the beginning of a new year, when students are given the opportunity to learn and take the next step toward achieving their dreams. The same is true for us at Redfin – we’re excited to share this feature with our customers, and look forward to collaborating with our data providers to ensure that the reliability and coverage of our schools data is as accurate as it can be.

As usual, a big “thank you” goes out to everyone on the team who contributed to this feature and a special shout out to Jamie DeMichele, our Technical Lead, and Llewellyn Botelho, our QA Manager, for taking charge on this feature.

If you find any inaccuracies or have any requests for additional coverage, kindly shoot us a note at data-issue@redfin.com and we will do our best to follow up with every inquiry.

The post First Day of School Search appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

Buyers: We’ll suggest other neighborhoods you might like

When you’re looking for a home, you get a pretty good idea of what neighborhood is the right fit for you. When a lot of buyers save their home searches in two or three specific neighborhoods, we know there are some similarities there that other Redfin users should know about. So we use our data to show you which neighborhoods people with similar search criteria are checking out. For example, people who saved searches in the Columbia Heights neighborhood of Washington DC also saved searches in U Street Corridor, Petworth and Mount Pleasant. It’s important because it gives buyers the chance to consider some other areas they didn’t think about before, especially when a lack of homes for sale in one neighborhood causes them to look elsewhere.

Sellers: You can edit your home in the Home Price Tool

Redfin gets some of our home information from public records, which are good, but they’re not perfect. Now, if the number of bedrooms, bathrooms or square footage you see for your home in the Redfin Home Price Tool isn’t accurate, you can fix it. Just click Adjust Details to update the facts and change the comparison properties, and you can save those changes in the estimate the Home Price Tool shows you. However, any changes you make will only be visible to you, and not to other people who use the tool. This was the number one request from people who used our Home Price Tool, and it helps us give you a more accurate price estimate for your home.

The post What Neighborhood is Right For You? Ask Redfin! appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

It’s called 2-Click Purchase, and it gives Redfin customers the option to become a home owner with just two mouse clicks. For one day only, our devil-may-care customers can make potentially the most important financial decision of their lives without the need to secure financing, see the home in person, write an offer, negotiate the deal and complete title and escrow.

Customers told us that in the current real estate market where what little there is to choose from often sells in three days or less, they need to hear about new listings first, and be able to act fast.  We released Instant Updates in March, to email customers immediately when a home is listed for sale that meets their search criteria. 2-Click Purchase takes it a big step further, and actually lets them buy that home immediately.

How 2-Click Purchase works
On every listing page, a customer can click the “Purchase with 2-Click” button that will put her on a path to buying the home with just one additional click.

After the customer chooses a shipping method, additional options and a payment method on the next screen, she’s sent a confirmation email (if she’s logged into her Redfin account) and her new home keys are processed for shipment.

2-Click Purchase isn’t for everyone. Most home buyers still want to tour a home with an agent who knows the market in that neighborhood, will meet them on their first tour, see the home before writing the offer, negotiate on their behalf and hand them the keys once they’ve closed. Redfin’s agents are still there to offer that personal service and guide them at every step.

What about my Redfin refund?

It’s donated to the Human Fund.

Is 2-Click Purchase real?
No. Redfin created 2-Click Purchase as an April Fools’ Day joke. We hope you got a laugh or two!

The post Home Buying on April 1 Just Became Unbelievably Easy appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

What does a day matter? Well, 17% of the homes that debuted and sold since the beginning of this year went under contract within three days of their debut. Giving our customers an extra day to get into the home and decide about an offer is a crucial competitive advantage, particularly when we now see home-buyers going door to door to ask if anyone in the neighborhood might be willing to sell.

To get instant updates, just click Email me new listings in the results box that appears on the left whenever Redfin presents search results in a map:

If you’re already getting daily listing updates, you can switch over to Instant Updates by opening the menu under your name at the top right of every page on Redfin.com. From there, just choose My Alerts & Emails:

Then scroll about halfway down the page, and change all your alerts from Daily to Instant:

And then brace yourself. New listings will start coming fast and furious:

You can always unsubscribe once you find a home.

You can get Instant Updates on individual properties too. If you mark a home as a favorite, you’ll get an Instant Update when the price changes, when it first goes under contract, and when it finally sells or comes back on market. We’ll also alert you if a Redfin agent tours the home and then shares her first-hand observations. Folks who are already using Redfin to track their favorite homes from day to day can switch to Instant Updates by accessing the My Alerts & Emails page.

How did we get so fast? Redfin was able to develop Instant Updates because we’ve made a massive investment over the past five years in direct, high-frequency integration with the local Multiple Listing Services real estate agents use to list properties and record sales. While other websites get partial or indirect access to some MLSs, only companies with real estate agents get full, immediate access to all the broker-listed homes for sale. As part of our commitment to getting data faster than just about anyone else, we tell the world exactly how often we refresh our listings, for every market we serve.

And as the web shifts from periodically updated pages to a continuous stream of new listings, prices and photos, the near-real-time data access Redfin enjoys as a market-maker is becoming more important. We expect over the coming year to deliver Instant Alerts through iPhone and Android alerting systems, and Facebook and Twitter timelines. I’m sure more real-time services will emerge over the next few years.

But as Redfin becomes a more frequent guest in your online life, we have to make sure we mind our manners.  Already, 264 customers have spent the past month helping  us design and test Instant Updates. One was able to beat out other bidders on a hot property because she heard about it first through Redfin. But mostly, we’ve been the ones who benefited: our customers helped us change up the subject line so that each update didn’t get bunched under one email thread, and asked us to allow different searches to send email alerts on different schedules.

The one request we didn’t address: a link that opens the listing in our iPhone and iPad apps, rather than in a web browser. That’s coming later this month.

For now, what I’m excited about is how Instant Updates change the speed of the game. In a world where a Las Vegas chef can now buy a fish from the Adriatic before the fisherman has even returned to harbor, it’s crazy to think that real estate updates have appeared like a 1950′s newspaper, queuing information into a new edition that shows up once a morning rather than in real time. Over the next few years, we hope that Redfin and other technology-powered brokers can help to make the whole real estate market better-informed, and faster too.

*Update: Sawbuck offered real-time alerts before Redfin did, as Sawbuck CEO Guy Wolcott kindly pointed out in the comments. When we get excited about being the first to offer a feature, we’ll check the Sawbuck site out first, just as we do the other big sites out there.

The post Dang. That's Fast. appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

To that end, we launched a feature on our search menu today to let you filter out homes above a maximum monthly homeowner’s association dues amount – or even “No HOA.”  Might not seem like a big deal at first glance (and maybe it’s not if you have an extra $600/month handy), but anyone looking at condos or townhomes can tell you that HOA dues can be the difference between a great home you can afford and one that’s out of your price range.

You can find the Max HOA option under Home Facts on the search menu.  This can be used for any search, including your saved searches, and even used on the iPad or iPhone through a saved search.  And it’s another way you can refine the homes that are exactly what you’re looking for with our Listing Alert feature.

So thanks for the feedback, and keep it coming! We do turn your ideas into features!  And in the meantime, what do you think of the new filter?

The post Now Available on Redfin: Filter by HOA Dues! appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.