Matt Goyer’s Real Estate Blog

Recently the Seattle Times had a syndicated article on, Check out commute before you buy.

When you’re stuck in traffic burning $3+-a-gallon gasoline to creep along at walking speed, it offers time to think. Would it be easier if I left home earlier? Would I be better off riding a train? How bad will my commute be in five years? Would life be easier and cheaper if I found a job some place where the roads aren’t as crowded and the homes aren’t so expensive?

A new Web-based tool developed by the Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT), a Chicago-based urban-development think tank, can help put facts behind those daydreams.

I checked out the tool expecting it to give me some sort of Walkscore like experience but for commuting but the site helps me answer none of those questions. I think I need a major in stats or something to answer those questions using that website.

The Center for Neighborhood Technology would be well served to hire a user experience designer or program manager to represent the average customer in their design meetings so that they produce something usable.

Yesterday Inman reported on the new Cyberhomes site, Cyberhomes gets new look, capabilities and I’m surprised that no one is talking about.

Home Page

The first thing you’ll notice is their new first time visitor themes but I’m puzzled why they spent so much time on them if you only see them once!?

Although some considerable effort seems to have been expended on these backgrounds, visitors will only see them once.

Though once you use their site a bit the customized home page is very nice. It includes homes you’ve recently viewed, neighborhood price tracking widgets and news.

We definitely need to create a page similar to this for Redfin.

Searching

…I hate pagination!

I like on their search page that they show you region information related to the region you are searching in:

I don’t like how when I search for a neighborhood it maps the neighborhood to a zip code and then provides market data for the zip code. I want it for my neighborhood not the zip code since housing type is more similar across neighborhoods then zip codes, at least in Seattle.

I also don’t like how little Seattle inventory they have; very reminiscent of Trulia.

Interesting to see that they launched with foreclosure data including addresses. I’m glad we beat them to that though they have more inventory than us as they cover a larger market.

I’m also confused that sometimes when I click on a listing I’ll go to the listing brokers site and sometimes I’ll get a Cyberhomes details page. When you do get a Cyberhomes details page they include a lot of information about what is happening in the local market.

Details Page

If you can get to a details page they are certainly data rich with all kinds of information about comparables and what the zip code is doing.

Other

On their page about the redesign I find it surprising that they call out what is gone:

What’s gone but back soon

• PDF report
• Print page
• Nicknames
• Alerts
• Emailing a listing to a friend
• Map widgets
• Chart widgets

What’s out

• Saved Items. Tracking on the home page will replace this

While it is good they call this out it’s always very hard to take something away from users as users do not take kindly to this.

Good to see them supporting Safari…

It’s interesting to watch the real estate agents finally start to pay attention to Trulia’s SEO strategy.

Truliamazing tricks of the trade: don’t link to your trusted partners

Trulia Widgets: Truliamazing Trojan Horse(s)

Good for BHB on breaking these stories.

Inman, DOJ sues MLS in South Carolina:

The rules, the DOJ alleges, also “impose unreasonable objective criteria for membership and contain subjective standards for admission to membership that allow CMLS representatives to deny membership to brokers who might be expected to compete more aggressively or in more innovative ways than CMLS’s members would prefer,” which DOJ asserts could exclude such brokers or deter them from seeking membership.

Good for John L Scott. If you want a best of breed website I highly recommend not out sourcing your website development so it’s good to see them buying the company they outsourced to.

From John Cook, John L. Scott makes tech buy:

Real Tech’s nine employees will operate within the company’s marketing and eStrategies unit.

Speaking of, I’ll be speaking at Inman in SF on July 24th at a broker breakout session titled Building a Killer Web Site.

Tonight by popular demand we added bank-listed foreclosures (with addresses! you don’t even have to sign in or pay.) and for-sale-by-owner listings to Redfin bringing our inventory up ~5%. Curious about all the inventory we have? We added a page describing it.

This new inventory is included in searches by default and uses a different color icon. Here’s a quick guide:

I’m sure folks won’t like the colors we picked but icon colors deserves it’s own post. Needless to say we spent days getting them “right.”

We also added:

• Search for open house (this weekend or ever)
• Lowered the latency and added open houses for listings from MLS PIN (Boston) and SoCal MLS
• Redfin Listing Updates now include notification of open houses and you can get updates on your favorites
• Our RSS feed includes updates like our Redfin Listing Update emails
• For the most part our URLs are much more friendly both to users and for SEO
• If you’re making an offer with us, our “Offer Wizard” is much better

Read our press release or the first coverage in the LA Times blog. Dustin calls this release genuinely interesting.

Time to get some sleep :).

A thread on real estate webmasters had our dev team talking on Friday. Turns out someone tried to clone our site for the low low outsourced cost of $10,000.

The thread has been commented on by a few people, Marlow, Glenn our CEO and Savan our former designer.

Our tech team is 20-something people. We’ve been working on the site for years. At roughly $200,000/head we’ve spent millions building our site. It’s surprising to me that someone would find it surprising they could reproduce it for the low cost of $10,000; the equivalent of one employee for one month.

Anyhow, we all had a good laugh about this over the weekend.

The WSJ had a feature on short sales recently, Why Lenders Are Leery Of Short Sales.

We have been asked several times why we don’t have a short sale search feature. Aside from the fact that we don’t want to encourage short sale offers because of their very low success rate:

Redfin, an online real-estate brokerage based in Seattle, says it represented buyers on 65 short-sale offers in the first quarter but expects only two or three to result in a completed sale.

Many times short sales aren’t identified as such in the MLS making it very hard for us to search for them.

Today I came across 2414 SW Holden B in Seattle and the last photo isn’t rotated (and it’s been on the market 46 days!):

I also question the photo of the floor:

I love it. Some anti-Redfin person (agent?) hacked my blog. I left the post because it’s kind of ridiculous. I also upgraded my Wordpress to hopefully resolve this hacking problem that has plagued me now twice this week.