Matt Goyer’s Real Estate Blog

HomeHugg appears to be like Digg but for listings:

HomeHugg is a community of Home Buyers, Realtors and Lenders that help each other discover, save and share their favorite homes for sale or rent in their community. The members of HomeHugg are able to add homes, comment on homes, map their favorites and share them with their family and friends.

100% of all HomeHugg listings are generated by the members of the community. We do not pull information from each MLS or pull listings off the Internet. Our mission is to uniquely simplify your home search by introducing you to the most popular homes available on the Internet.

Though without anyone Hugg’ing condos in Seattle then I’m not that interested.

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Wall Street Journal, How Good Are Zillow’s Estimates?

Zillow came within 5% of the price in a third of the transactions studied by The Journal. It was more than 25% off target on 11% of them. In 34 of the 1,000 transactions, Zillow was off by more than 50%.

We currently display Zillow estimates on Redfin listing details pages. If you’d like to see us add additional online valuation tools let me know which are your favorite Zillow competitors.

Nice, our Sweet Digs blogging initiative got written up in the Chicago Tribune, Everyone’s an open-house critic online:

Good news for real estate obsessives (you know who you are): Some folks who share your fascination with homes are getting paid to visit and “review” open houses.

Taking a cue from Amazon.com and other sites that encourage online reviewers to post their thoughts about books, movies, music, etc., an online real estate brokerage on the West Coast has begun employing writers who visit open houses and offer their observations and comments.

USA Today, Home shoppers do their hunting online:

If there’s any lingering doubt about how the Internet is transforming the way people buy and sell homes, here’s eye-widening proof: Marnie Azadian and her husband just moved from Scottsdale, Ariz., into a $410,000 home in Tulsa that they bought 100% over the Internet.

Wow, that’s crazy! I couldn’t imagine buying a home online.

Seattle minimum tier high speed connection speeds..

Clearwire: 768 Kbps down/256 Kbps up
Qwest Choice: 256 Kbps down/256 Kbps up
Comcast: 4 Mbps down/385 Kbps up

It’s an odd question right? Well, not really considering how much client side data processing and complicated browser rendering we do.

As you likely know performance on Redfin is not what we would like it to be. One of the things we want to start doing is testing the site’s performance on a wider variety of hardware. However, the question I have is, what’s the ‘average’ amount of processor and memory that machines have today? I have a feeling like the machines we use at work likely aren’t typical of the machines that users have at home. What I’d love is to find a study showing the distribution of processors and memory so that we can pick a reasonable baseline profile.

Short of that I’ve been looking at minimum requirements for a variety of things and thinking of working forward from there:

Google Earth: P3, 500 MHZ, 128MB

Virtual Earth 3D: 1GHZ, 256MB

Windows XP: 233 GHZ, 128 MB

Windows VIsta: 1 GHZ, 512 MB

Flash: P2 450 MHZ, 128 MB

Sellsiu, Real Estate Commissions Around The World. Apparently it varies from 1% to 15%.

Marlow posts from the Puget Sound Business Journal, Residential Real Estate Rankings in the Northwest:

1. Windermere ($23,709.6 / 60,200 transactions)
2. J.L. Scott ($12,745.6 / 32,590 transactions)
3. Coldwell Banker Bain ($7,998.7 / 19,131 transactions)
4. Re/Max International ($6,649.4 / 19,662 transactions
5. Prudential Northwest ($2,997.6 / 8,719 transactions)

We’ve only been around a year so it is no surprise we’re not doing 8000+ transactions. However, I’d bet we make the list next year.

Three weeks ago we doubled in size. Today we’re more than tripling in size by expanding into Southern California (press release.) We also made a few tweaks to the user experience. The house icons are now smaller, parcels appear at a higher zoom level (except for IE6 users — please upgrade to either FF2 or IE7) and we improved the initial load time performance through aggressive .JS caching and GZIPing of content. We also fixed a bunch of other small bugs with the map experience. Yes, it has been a very busy January.

Chicago, Boston and Washington D.C. here we come :).

From around the web:

• Redfin Blog, Redfin, Cured of Epileptic Fits and Other Ticks, Enters the Great Southland Empire:
  

  As usual, they call us discounters, when we’re not offering a discount on a traditional service, we’re offering an online service at a different price, with a different business model and 95+% customer satisfaction. Amazon.com is not a discount bookstore. Redfin.com’s goal is to be different and better too, not cheaper.

• LA Times, Web real estate firms shake up home economics
• John Cook’s Venture Blog, Redfin expands to LA
• San Diego Home Blog, Redfin Revisited: Steve does not give our agents much credit.
• 3 Oceans, Redfin Attacks SoCal’s INTx’ers
• OC Register Blog, New brokerage offers commission rebates
• Luxury Home Digest, Redfin Security Issues:
  

  There are many new real estate models on the horizon, and Redfin is just one of the new rebaters. I don’t have a problem with the monetary side, but I do have an issue with a buyer’s agent who plays the role of a gray ghost and is physically absent from the transaction. Could the reason be that it isn’t “economically feasible?”

• On 10 video, Redfin: The Online Real Estate Company
• Future of Real Estate Marketing, Redfin hits the beach
• Seattle Times blog, Redfin goes SoCal
• Seattle PI, Online real estate broker Redfin expanding service
• Bloodhound Blog’s Greg Swann, Glenn Kelman on Redfin.com’s move into Southern California: “I’ve never had to think so hard in an interview in my life”
• 10 News, video clip

Too Much Skin: 10 Taboos for Office Attire

Whenever articles like these appear someone forwards them out with the subject ‘I think we’ve violated all of these dress codes.’ The beauty of startup life :).