Matt Goyer’s Real Estate Blog

I really wish I was headed to the Inman conference in NYC this coming week. I would love to have the opportunity to meet all the other folks working in the real estate tech space. Instead it’s Saturday and we’re in the office putting the finishing touches on our next big release. I’m sure if you see Glenn there he’ll tell you all about it. It’s actually too bad we couldn’t pull in the release date a few days to have it coincide with Inman but our date later in the week is going to be tight as it is!

Now back to triaging bugs…

Syndicated article in the Seattle Times, There’s rarely a point in paying points, experts say:

Only 1.4 percent of borrowers kept their loans long enough to make paying points worthwhile.

The study also found that borrowers who declined to pay points almost always made the right decision. Only 1.5 percent of them would have saved money by paying points.

You won’t catch me ever paying points!

Visit SaveOnRefinance.com for Current Mortgage Refinance Rates and no points deals.

On Friday we released a new version of the site which adds HOA dues and lots of other information to our details page. In addition to details about the listing we have also added in the listing agent’s phone number. For instance scroll to the bottom of this listing at 124 Bellevue Ave E #706:

ListingAgentInfo Hosted on Zooomr

This is in response to our users who felt it redundant that they had to ask us a question about a listing that they could just as easily have asked the listing agent themselves. Of course, we’re more than happy to keep answering your questions.

Joel at Future of Real Estate Marketing has an article on New Real Estate Search Mashups and makes the following comment about ‘clunky drop down menus’:

On first impression, dsSearchAgent has a nice simple design. It uses a tabs and sliders approach to refining search criteria that reminded me a lot of Shackyack and Blueroof.com. For me it feels like a much more intuitive way to search, as opposed to the approach taken by its closest competitor RealBird.com, which still relies on clunky drop down menus.

Here’s a screenshot of Blueroof’s sliders:

Blue Roof Sliders Hosted on Zooomr

At Redfin over the last several months we have been re-designing our user experience (you’ll get to see it soon!) and something we discussed was sliders vs drop downs (we currently use drop downs). Our design team (which is really just me and Mark) were both pretty opposed to sliders. While they initially look cool I think that most users have a hard time sliding them to the sometimes precise value that they are searching for (especially true for more mature audiences who haven’t grown up with a mouse in hand). The other huge drawback is the large amount of visual real estate they occupy.

On the other extreme are text input boxes which I feel offer a large amount of precision but are time consuming to fill out and add complexity to the error handling for validating the input and offering a useful experience when a user enters an incorrect value.

And so with our re-design we have chosen to continue to use drop downs which I think offer a good enough level of precision, don’t occupy too much visual real estate, are a familiar paradigm and are easy to use. My only concern is that the user has to expand the drop down in order to discover the values beneath.

In the same post Joel also points to, House Hunter 2.0, which uses a radius for searching instead of the traditional square/rectangle:

HouseHunter-SearchRadius Hosted on Zooomr

I must say that I really like this option for searching (and I would make it an option). I know that when I was looking for a house back in college what I did was take a CD and a map, center the CD on the university, drew a circle around it, photocopied it, gave it to my realtor and told him to only show me homes within the circle (which meant I was looking at houses that were no more than a 25 minute walk from the building on campus that I and my friends spent the most time in).

At Redfin your only option is to constrain searches to the map view you’re currently looking at which in our current site is roughly square but will be more rectangular in the future. Certainly not ideal for the walking commute scenarios. Hopefully we can improve this in the future!

PEW, Looking for information about a place to live [PDF]:

39% of internet users have looked online for information about a place to live - double the overall number of Americans who had done son in 2000.

This is why I work for Redfin and maintain Urbnlivn.

Let’s see if we can now double that number in half the time .

From Not Martha, on the purchasing of a home:

Like anybody who learns how to buy a house (and it is a steep learning process, at least for those of us who would rather put our fingers in our ears and sing “la la la” loudly than, say, balance a check book) I kept on reading the MLS for Seattle long after we’d stopped obsessing over what is out there. This is dangerous because of the woulda/shoulda doubts over houses listed after our purchase was legally binding. That said, I’ve been attached to Redfin Seattle blog lately and, happily, it’s making me more and more confident about the house we purchased.

It was not obvious to me how to do this so maybe it is not obvious to other people. But if you want to have your phone number links hooked up with Skype the syntax to use is:

<a href=”callto://+18885551212″>888-555-1212</a>

Note the +1 and the lack of dashs in the href…

And I will say it sucks that if a user doesn’t have Skype or some other useful telephony app installed that the Net Meeting wizard launches if the user is using IE. How confusing, if the app that monitors those tags isn’t installed/configured it shouldn’t try and handle them (and I know that the Microsoft PM who design it that way is going to argue that then their Net Meeting callto feature isn’t discoverable, but tough!).

The last few days we have received a few e-mails asking if there is a way to search for either multi-family (duplex, triplex, etc) or land parcels on Redfin. Unfortunately we have to e-mail the users back saying that while we don’t support searching, nor do we have inventory listed for either of these listing types, we hope to add it soon.

However, while you will have to search elsewhere if you have the MLS # for the property and it’s in California or Washington we can assist you with the offer so that you get a Redfin Direct rebate.

Over the weekend I wrote an article on the Redfin Corporate Blog about finding price reductions in Redfin. It’s the technique I use over at Urbnlivn to do MLS Watch.

Check out the photos for this listing, 16209 NE 90TH CT.

Do you really think their view of the mountain looks like the photo they posted??