Details, Details

Hey all,

So, my original plan was to write a big long post going over every last nook ‘n cranny of our reader poll results in painstaking detail. But then I remembered that I basically have the attention span of a fruit fly.

So instead, I’m just going to post Pretty Bar Graphs of the results, and also give you a link so you can download the full excel version of the responses.

Without Further Ado… Pretty Bar Graph #1

As you can see, Updates on the Local Market was our big big winner, with around 425 votes. Trailing the pack was Profiles of Agents, with four votes.

And Now… Pretty Bar Graph #2

(…in which our hero discovers which feature types are most popular among readers.)

This one was a bit of a shockeroni for me, because I really thought video was going to dominate here. I mean, you kids love the YouTube and the Hulu and whatnot, right?

But I was wrong, as is often the case. Graphics and Illustrations came in first, and Nope, Just Articles was second, because you people love your precious words. So my next blog post will be a six-thousand-word essay on the impact of the Battle of Hastings on the 2000-2007 Real Estate Bubble. It should be riveting.

Point/Counterpoint was also pretty popular (with one truly awesome person actually suggesting that I team up with Jane Curtin), as was Instant Polls/Surveys.

Not Video, though. Or Contests. Which means I got my legs waxed for nothing.

Holy Cow! Guess What? It’s Pretty Bar Graph #3!

(…in which our hero runs out of clever subtitles and considers going to the supply closet for a Twix bar.*)

Okay, so this is where I asked about the name of Sweet Digs, because I’ll be honest with you, around the office it’s kind of a running joke. And not the funny kind of running joke, like when Steve Carrell would say “That’s what she said!” on The Office. No, more like the painfully tragic kind of running joke, where you’re laughing from a nauseating mix of nervousness and contempt, like anytime anyone said anything on the entire eight-season run of Full House.

But another surprise, people still like the name Sweet Digs, and the chart above proves it.

So there are all the pretty bar graphs, like I promised. If you’d like to read the full excel details, which includes all the free-form responses (minus identifying, info, of course), just click here to download it.

Whew! Thanks everyone.

*It was delicious.

Fannie Mae Covers Closing Costs on HomePath Properties

As part of their neighborhood stabilization program, Fannie Mae is offering buyers’ assistance through a couple of different programs, HomePath and First Look.

HomePath

HomePath helps buyers buy covering their closing costs, up to 3.5% of the home’s purchase price.

To qualify, buyers must be purchasing a HomePath property; this is a home that is owned by Fannie Mae, usually as the result of a foreclosure or owner forfeiture.  Buyers need to make the initial offer on the home on or after June 14, 2011, and the purchase must close by October 31, 2011; initial offers made prior to June 14 are not eligible.

• View full details on qualifying for this program.
• Search for HomePath properties.
• Read an FAQ on the HomePath program.

First Look

In addition to HomePath program, Fannie Mae also offers an edge to buyers hoping to purchase a primary residence (as opposed to investors, or buyers looking for a second home). Under the First Look program, only offers from primary-residence buyers will be considered during the first 15 days that a Fannie-owned REO property is on the market.

Redfin agents and partner agents are always available to help you make a purchase on a Fannie Mae-owned property.

Waving as I Run By

Hey everyone!

I wanted to say a big fat wet sloppy thank you to everyone who participated in last week’s reader poll. There were nearly 800 of you, and almost everyone had something useful, informative, or enlightening to contribute.

(There was, of course, a small but vocal minority who did nothing but make dirty jokes and request that we start posting illicit photos, but that’s life on the intertubes.)

We got so many responses with so many good suggestions, in fact, that I’m basically drowning over here. I promise I’ll give y’all a nice, thorough run-down of the results, but as for today, I’m going to give you the Xtreme Reader’s Digest version.

Big Winners:

Updates on the local market, market statistics, and profiles of local neighborhoods were the top three requests, in that order. Message received. You want more hard data, more often, and more tightly focused on the neighborhood level.

Interesting Thing I Noticed:

We had a lot of requests for things that are already on Redfin, which tells me that we’re not doing a great job making that stuff easy to find. That’s pretty much my fault.

For instance, tips about home buying was a very popular request, and we have an entire free online guide for home buyers right here. It has a ton of information on the entire home-buying process, much of it tailored to each individual Redfin market.

Other Interesting Thing I Noticed:

Readers seem to fall into two camps: people who want more “fluff” (like cool homes, tips on design, stories from agents, etc.) and people who want no fluff at all and think fluff is stupid and would punch me in the face right now if I would just stop saying “fluff.”

I don’t think there’s a way to make every post appeal to everybody, but it does seem like more variety will keep everyone intermittently not-unhappy. And what more could you ask, really?

By Popular Request:

Finally, a lot of people asked in the free-form comments why we don’t just go back to the old days, when we had lots of different bloggers writing content for every city’s version of Sweet Digs. This was all before my time, but basically it was just too big an operation for us to handle at that point, and we needed to focus more on the core business (which is, of course, panda-cloning.)

We also had the loose-cannon issue crop up a couple times; bloggers saying things in the Redfin name that were completely ridiculous, like that we were cloning pandas.

But moving forward, we do want to distribute the writing work on our blogs out a bit more, both among our agents and (possibly, don’t quote me on this) among non-employees.

How will we approach that? No idea. I’m making this up as I go.

More soon on the survey results, including a downloadable spreadsheet of the results (stripped of any identifying reader info, naturally).

Until then, thanks again, and keep the good ideas coming.

What Do You People WANT?

I’m just going to level with y’all.

It’s one of my performance goals to write one of these blog posts every week, and every week, I approach the goal with a healthy heapin’ spoonful of a little something I like to call dread, or as they call it in German, dredenscheiningruvenshtocken.*

Now at first I thought that this dread was just some sort of performance anxiety, but I had an epiphany yesterday. Okay, maybe epiphany is a little strong. Maybe “duh-moment” would be more accurate.

I have no idea what you guys and gals want to read about. None at all.

But I’m not supposed to admit that, right? I’m supposed to just keep trying different articles and then track your pageviews like I’m some sort of criminal mastermind, then slowly and gradually hit on a winning formula of pure crowd-pleasingness; drawing you in, addicting you to content without you ever even knowing it. Mwa ha ha.

Frankly, that sounds like a lot of work, and really, I’m not the mastermind type. So I thought I’d just ask. Nicely.

So, could I please ask you to take a minute to fill out a little survey I came up with? Please? Pleeeeeease? (It helps if you picture me staring up at you with big puppy-dog eyes. It works especially well if you picture me as an actual puppy.**)

Take the Sweet Digs survey!

I can’t really promise you any toys or treats or anything, but I can promise that I’ll do my best to give you something worthwhile to read. And then everybody wins.

Thanks all!

*Not real German. Sorry Germany!
**Seriously, can you imagine that? Some cute puppy sitting at a keyboard, typing away with his little paws? That would be adorable!

One Seriously Jacked-Up Roof

Imagine you’d bought a home, and one day you went into the attic while chasing after a raccoon and–

What? No. I don’t know why you’re chasing a raccoon. Maybe it stole your sandwich.*

Anyway, you climb into the attic, wrestle the raccoon into submission, reclaim your sandwich, and then look over and see a tire jack holding your roof up. Wouldn’t you be a little upset? Even more so than you were about the sandwich?

This is why we have home inspectors. To inspect homes. For things like tire jacks and raccoon colonies.

You might think that you don’t need an inspector. You might say to yourself: “Self, I know how to tell if there’s something wrong with a house.”

But you’re probably wrong, because:

A: A good home inspector has the training and experience needed to identify hundreds of problems with a home’s structure, foundation, wiring, plumbing, ventilation, roofing, and other key components. Many of these problems are not obvious to the casual (or even business-casual) eye.

-and-

B: Home inspectors go into places like crawlspaces and attics, and spiders live in those places. Spiders.

We talked to over a dozen home inspectors, collected more than 200 images of common home inspection issues, and put that info into a neat little interactive home. It won’t make you a home inspection expert, but it will give you an idea of what to look for when touring a home. And hopefully it’ll help you realize how important a good inspection can be before you buy that home.

Don’t wait for a sandwich-stealing raccoon to show you the value of a home inspector. Check out our Interactive Home Inspection right now.

*It’s a roast beef sandwich. Unless you’re a vegan. Then it’s kelp or hay or something.

(Photo courtesy Gary Cornia & Cornia Consulting, LLC.)

Case-Shiller: Home Prices Nearly Flat in LA in March

It’s time for our monthly check-in of the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices (HPI). The Case-Shiller data is generally considered to be the most reliable measure of overall home price changes for a region, since they only consider repeat sales of homes when calculating their index, instead of looking at all the homes that sold in a given month.

For the full source data behind this post, hit the S&P/Case-Shiller website. For a more detailed explanation of how the Case-Shiller Home Price Index is calculated, check out their methodology pdf. Also remember that the data released on the last Tuesday of a given month is for the period two months prior (i.e. – March data is released in May).

Here are the basic Case-Shiller stats for the Los Angeles area (which Case-Shiller defines as LA and Orange Counties) as of March:

Eighteen of the twenty metro areas tracked by Case-Shiller saw a decrease in their HPI between February and March (one less than the previous month). Washington DC saw a 0.9% increase while Seattle eeked out a 0.1% bump.

Here’s a look at the latest local tiered data, back through 2000:

And here’s a closer look at the recent changes, with the vertical and horizontal axes zoomed in to show just the last year:

LA’s middle tier was the only one that had much of a real change. Month to month, the low tier was flat, the middle tier fell 0.6%, and the high tier decreased 0.1%.

Read the rest of this entry »

Help Us Write a Home Selling Guide, Get a T-Shirt

Today, we’re officially launching the remaining sections of our Home Buying Guide. This is something we’ve been working on for a long, long time, and it feels good to get it out the door.

That’s not to say we won’t continue trying to make the guide an even better resource for home buyers; we’ll be tweaking, polishing, adding to, and editing this thing until the next ice age. If you have suggestions, comments, or questions about any of our HBG content, please leave a comment here, or on any page of the guide itself.

But we are starting to gear up for our next big guide project — the Redfin Home Seller’s Guide. We’ll be packing it full of useful information, with a heavier emphasis on interactive features, quizzes, graphics, illustrations, and other goodies.

Here’s where you come in: if you’re selling a home, what’s the stuff that keeps you up at night? What can’t you find good information about? What’s confusing? What’s frustrating? What do you wish you’d known three months ago?

Finally, if you’d like to be involved in providing customer feedback on preview versions of the guide as it’s developed, just drop a comment here and let us know. We’d love your input, and if we choose you to be in our customer feedback group, we’ll send you a free Redfin T-shirt.

Learn About Mortgage Paperwork

If you’re just starting to look for a home, you may be a little confused by the paperwork involved with getting a mortgage. Wouldn’t it be great if someone could give you a line-by-line explanation of the forms you’ll be dealing with during the home-buying process?

We thought so too. That’s why we’ve created annotated versions of some common mortgage documents. Specifically, we’ve marked up the Good Faith Estimate and HUD-1, as well as a standard loan application.

We’ve collected these documents here. Just pick the document you want to review and click the yellow info-points to bring up more information about every item.

These interactive loan documents are just a small part of our online Home Buying Guide. We’re adding several new sections to the guide in the next couple of weeks; we’ll let you know when it all goes live.

Case-Shiller: LA-Area Home Price Losses Increase in February

It’s time for our monthly check-in of the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices (HPI). The Case-Shiller data is generally considered to be the most reliable measure of overall home price changes for a region, since they only consider repeat sales of homes when calculating their index, instead of looking at all the homes that sold in a given month.

For the full source data behind this post, hit the S&P/Case-Shiller website. For a more detailed explanation of how the Case-Shiller Home Price Index is calculated, check out their methodology pdf. Also remember that the data released on the last Tuesday of a given month is for the period two months prior (i.e. – February data is released in April).

Here are the basic Case-Shiller stats for Los Angeles area (which Case-Shiller defines as LA and Orange Counties) as of February:

Nineteen of the twenty metro areas tracked by Case-Shiller saw a decrease in their HPI between January and February (the same as December to January). Detroit of all places was the only city that saw a month-to-month gain (up 1.0%).

Here’s a look at the latest local tiered data, back through 2000:

And here’s a closer look at the recent changes, with the vertical and horizontal axes zoomed in to show just the last year:

All three of LA’s price tiers took a hit in February, but the middle tier fell the furthest. Month to month, the low tier was down 0.7%, the middle tier fell 1.4%, and the high tier decreased 0.8%.

Read the rest of this entry »

Case-Shiller: More Home Price Drops as 2011 Kicks Off

It’s time for our monthly check-in of the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices (HPI). The Case-Shiller data is generally considered to be the most reliable measure of overall home price changes for a region, since they only consider repeat sales of homes when calculating their index, instead of looking at all the homes that sold in a given month.

For the full source data behind this post, hit the S&P/Case-Shiller website. For a more detailed explanation of how the Case-Shiller Home Price Index is calculated, check out their methodology pdf. Also remember that the data released on the last Tuesday of a given month is for the period two months prior (i.e. – January data is released in March).

Here are the basic Case-Shiller stats for the Los Angeles area (which Case-Shiller defines as LA and Orange Counties) as of January:

Nineteen of the twenty metro areas tracked by Case-Shiller saw a decrease in their HPI between December and January (the same as November to December). Washington DC’s tiny 0.1% increase was the only month-to-month gain.

Here’s a look at the latest local tiered data, back through 2000:

And here’s a closer look at the recent changes, with the vertical and horizontal axes zoomed in to show just the last year:

All three of LA’s tiers were down in January, with the high tier losing the most ground. Month to month, the low tier was down 0.8%, the middle tier fell 0.7%, and the high tier decreased 0.5%.

Read the rest of this entry »