Everything Changes

You might have noticed that the Redfin search page is sporting a new look this week.

Back in December, the CEO of Redfin Glenn Kelman had a chat with Today Show’s Meredith Viera and talked about how Redfin’s approach to the science of real estate. (Click here to see video)

Photo Courtesy of MSN.com

The spirit of the “science of real estate” really drove the folks at the headquarters (we bloggers are independent contractors able to write about whatever, whenever really) to continue using a data driven, scientific approach for Redfin users as the latest changes were launched.

Kelman explains the new changes the changes here. Definitely check it out to maximize your researching effectiveness.

What I love:
-Numbers, Charts & Pictures, Oh My! There’s enough data here to answer almost any question. The charts and layout really help simplify the information I’m looking at. Not to mention all the information I ever asked when searching for homes about the local area is at my finger tips.

-The Big Picture Often when doing research on single homes it’s hard to get a read on the big picture. We get so wrapped up in looking at one house we are interested we forget to check out the rest of the town/neighborhood/city. Now we can get the big picture to compare to our little/not-so-little house we’re scoping out.

-Breaking It Down Finally the numbers are broken down to separate condos from single family homes! This makes the data we get much better and more accurate!

-The Layout The handy dandy toolbar at the top of the page (see picture below) is super user friendly. In fact, I think a lot of the page is incredibly user friendly and I don’t have to refresh my page or hit the “back” button to look at another data set.

What I Don’t So Much Love
-Address Search For as long as I’ve searched Redfin using an address I only get a hit about half of the time. I often end up searching for a specific address by looking it up on a Google map and then manually searching the Redfin map.

-Street Search I can’t just type in a street name and pull up the listings. Sometimes I’ll drive by a house and forget to write down the address and get home and have to once again manually drag through the maps rather than being able to type in “Mendocino Ct. Laguna Hills” and get the listings on that road.

Overall, the the new system is great and offers up a ton of help to the data-driven junkie like myself. Anyone else have thoughts on the new system?