Matt Goyer’s Real Estate Blog

Today we pushed a new version of the Redfin site. It features not just a new look but a re-design of almost all of the user experience in addition to new content in our Buy and Sell areas plus we’re now in Boston!

Unfortunately I had a vacation planned long before this release was planned (if you can believe that) and had to leave work at noon while my co-workers toiled away on our largest release yet.

Once I get back from vacation and back from speaking at Mix07 in Vegas next Monday and Tuesday I’ll start to post about some of the decisions we made. But some of the highlights are:

• Improved performance (still more work has to be done…)
• Removed our custom tab interface, we’ll leave tab management to the browser
• Removed the balloon and put the content on the right side. This means the map isn’t obscured while you check out the details of a home
• Took the search options and put them in an dialog instead of always showing them
• You can re-size the window to re-size the map
• Map only view if you don’t use the list below the map
• Re-formatted the details page. All photo thumbnails are now visible.

Now that we have Redfin on a real map platform and have a good UX foundation expect the innovation machine to crank over time and our east coast expansion to take off :).

Here is a round-up of the coverage…

Press Releases:

• Redfin Launches Re-branded Website
• Redfin Launches Real Estate E-Commerce Service for the Boston Area

Coverage:

• New England Cable News, Redfin shakes up traditional real estate [video]

• Boston Real Estate Blog, Redfin hits Boston; real estate company offers refunds to buyers of real estate
• FoREM, Redfin Gets a Facelift and Expands Eastward
• Seattle PI, Redfin’s new look
• Insta, Terrible New Logo for Redfin. Redfin was not named after the fish. It’s supposed to be a play on the words real estate and re-define or something like that. Though no one at work really knows.
• Co-worker Savan has pictures of the sushi that fueled the team.

Joel blogs about how Extate Cranks Up the Heat:

A couple of new features extate has developed recently; that US based real estate search engines should perhaps take note of…

• No more balloon popups. Means the map doesn’t readjust when you select the markers - which I love. Maps jumping all over the place when I’m trying to click on a property. The property information displays the full details in the sidebar which is also nice.
• Markers change color once you’ve viewed them - a simple yet extremely useful innovation which answers one of the most basic questions a real estate shopper might have; “What freakin’ properties have I already seen here?”

Redfin already changes the color of the house icons if you’re logged in and we’ll get rid of the balloon very soon.

• Morae: Website usability software
• Cookie-Based Counting Overstates Size of Web Site Audiences: Frequent Cookie Deletion by 3 out of 10 U.S. Internet Users Leads to Overstatements in Audience Sizes by a Factor as High as 2.5

Redfin content is now being served up by a CDN (Content Delivery Network). Initial reports indicate that we serve up static content much faster (though not likely for Seattle users since you are already very close to the content.) While not the answer to our performance problems it is one step closer to a faster site. …In our next release we are doing a bunch of work to minimize the number of round trip requests we make both as part of our AJAX app and for static content.

Here’s a comment from another company worried about performance, Ev on Twitter performance:

Note: It is not good luck to post about how you’ve solved your performance issues. So this is not that. There will surely be more.

The Globe an Mail, Canada’s national newspaper, takes a look at the MLS situation in my home country, Battle over real estate listings spurs probe:

Full-service brokers worry that the service is being diluted by online realtors who list homes on MLS for a $695 fee and then let the home owner handle the rest of the sale. They say merely posting a home for sale on MLS is a misuse of the system, floods the service with listings and violates its regulations.

Many discount agents say full-service brokers are only trying to protect their high commissions.

As a contributor to Redfin’s Real Estate Consumer’s Bill of Rights I particularly enjoyed Karim’s post about the Anti-Consumer Bill of Rights. It’s almost as entertaining as reading agent blogs.

Yesterday the Microsoft Virtual Earth team released a new version of Local.live.com and a new version of their API. What is most exciting for us is that Microsoft started to compress with GZIP the v4 version of the map control which is the one we use on the Redfin site. This means that the Microsoft map control went from 435KB to 103KB; a big savings for users visiting our map page for the first time or for users whose map control needs to be re-downloaded (approximately once every 48 hours according to the caching rules set by Microsoft.)

As a reference the Google control is 54KB compressed.

• Rubber band guns
• Reality show looks for Seattle entrepreneurs. Glenn can provide some entertainment but so can Savan, Kelly, Bahn, Pam, Mose, Val, Ang and the list goes on and on and on:
  

  The company has already discussed the idea with Redfin, which is a good choice given that Chief Executive Glenn Kelman certainly could provide entertainment value.

• Top 30 Real Estate Websites - We need to get on this list next year, need to get in some more markets first though
• Realtor.com has a beta version featuring VE and AJAX.