Matt Goyer’s Real Estate Blog

Glenn has a great guest post over on Guy Kawasaki’s blog on DIY PR:

Just the other day a newspaper’s technology editor told me, “It’s just so hard to meet entrepreneurs these days. You always get their PR people.” A dozen entrepreneurs sprang to mind who would kill to tell their stories. All have agencies. So what I am recommending is not howto manage an agency, but something more radical: not hiring an agency at all. Here are ten reasons why.

There’s no doubt we do many things differently at Redfin.

Last week Glenn and Cynthia (our PR wizard) filled our conference room to the brim with Redfin employees interesting in hearing about how we approach PR at Redfin. They shared lots of tips and experiences giving us the background on how we’ve been able to spread the word about Redfin through the media. What was most remarkable about the hour is that at no time did they tell us not to talk to the media or blog. Above all else they trust us to do the right thing.

Contrast that with my previous job at Microsoft where I was allowed to blog (though negative blogging about Microsoft and its products was certainly frowned upon) and it was beat into our heads to never ever talk to a journalist and to always refer to them to WagEd. In fact when I blogged about changes to our employee benefits and was later quoted in the Washington Post I thought for sure I was going to be fired (thankfully I wasn’t!)

Over the weekend a happy customer blogged about us - Great customer service. Nice work, Redfin!

I personally know a couple people who have sold their homes this past year with the help of Redfin and the process according to them was painless. They also raved about the customer service. Which leads me to the reason of this post. I’ve sent Redfin a number of questions in the past and I always got very rapid responses. In fact, most of the time I sent them email in the late evening and to my surprise I got a personable reply that same evening! My most recent interaction with Redfin was no different…

What happens when you send feedback to Redfin is that a small group of us get your e-mail. The group is made up of product managers, our QA team, a few developers and our execs. Usually I’m the first to respond but many times Glenn, our CEO, beats me to the punch. Most feedback is feature suggestions or words of encouragement. A smaller amount of feedback is about problems on our website and we are usually pretty quick at responding to those. The most frequent problem is listings that are either slow to appear or have disappeared. The usual root cause is a hiccup in our MLS feeds. Unfortunately some are less reliable than others.

We also answer the phone. If you call our 1-800 number and have a question or problem with the website if Courtenay can’t answer your question you’ll likely be transferred to me. In fact last Friday I visited a customer in Issaquah to spend some time to get them up and running (you would think websites would just work!)

Now that’s how feedback works on the tech side of the business. If you call or submit a real estate question through one of our ‘Ask a Redfin Agent’ boxes you’ll get a response back from one of our real estate agents in 2-4 hours.

First a parody piece, ‘16 Minutes’.

Next an ad from a major real estate company asking, ‘Can a computer do it all?’

If you have tried out Redfin on both Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 6 you will notice that Internet Explorer 6 is much much slower. Wondering why one of our developers spent some time researching the problem and it looks like Internet Explorer’s JavaScript garbage collector is likely to blame:

The crux of the problem is that IE’s script engine uses allocations to determine when to run the GC; that is after 256 variable allocations, 4096 array slot allocations, or 64kb of strings have been allocated. Not only are allocations a bad indicator of garbage, but these limits are such that any decent sized application is going to make the GC run pretty regularly.

To compound this problem, the running time of the garbage collection routine is dependent on the size of the working set (O(N^2) as described in Lippert’s article, though the results below show a linear relationship). So as your application gets bigger the garbage collection runs slower.

Now Microsoft does have a fix to change the default GC triggers - You may experience slow performance when you view a Web page that uses JScript in Internet Explorer 6. However, the fix involves registry editing.

Typically when a customer on Internet Explorer writes in about poor performance I recommend upgrading to Internet Explorer 7. However a number of users are forced to continue to use Internet Explorer 6 either because they are in a corporate environment and are unable to upgrade or have to run Internet Explorer 6 because one or more other websites they use do not work in Internet Explorer 7. In either case recommending that they change registry values is hardly suitable.

Given that web pages are becoming more and more JavaScript intensive thanks to the adoption of AJAX and that Internet Explorer 7 adoption appears to have plateaued (likely for the aforementioned reasons) it would be very nice of Microsoft to consider pushing a critical fix for this issue via Windows Update.

One of our developers noticed that Google added a Street View in San Francisco recently. Here’s the view of the front door of our SF office:

It looks really sharp. We’d love to see similar functionality in the Virtual Earth API so that we could display street level imagery on the details pages for listings displayed on Redfin.

Congrats to Trulia on raising $10 million led by Sequoia. The race is now on between Trulia and Zillow!

The Venture Beat article, Real estate engine Trulia shows momentum, raises $10M, on the announcement discusses the difference in inventory between Trulia and Zillow:

Trulia says it has two million homes for sale. Zillow, by comparison, has only 130,000

It’s an interesting comparison but I don’t know how relevant that comparison is for the majority of consumers.

For instance, Redfin doesn’t compete at the national level like either of those companies. However at the local level in the markets we serve, where consumers care the most about available inventory, we have both beat. Living and looking for a home in Seattle I could care less who has more inventory outside of Seattle I just care about who has all the inventory in Seattle.

For as long as I have been working at Redfin we have received e-mails about our poor performance. This weekend we got an above average number of e-mail complaints about performance, I took several calls about performance, two long time users complained it had gotten worse and one of our developers said it was particularly bad.

From a concerned user:

The site takes too long to load on the initial visit. When it’s more than 20 seconds its too long. The search also takes too long. You really need to figure this out or you’ll be known as the real estate Friendster.

In typical fashion I politely responded about how we are working on it (which isn’t a lie, we are working on it, but performance isn’t a problem you normally solve over night) but one friend’s report nagged on my mind. 20 seconds to load the details page? That sounded really long. However, no one at Redfin was having pages take that long to load. We looked at our KeyNote monitoring but everything looked fine. We looked at our web servers, no bad web servers and the loads were a little higher than normal since 60 Minutes but not too bad. We looked at the traffic through the load balancer and it was up since 60 Minutes but not too bad. What was wrong?

Puzzled I e-mailed my friend back and asked him to install Firebug to take a look at all the HTTP requests our page was making to see if he could identify which one was taking an abnormal amount of time. Turns out it was the initial request which was puzzling since we weren’t seeing the problem. Being a tester at Microsoft he decided to experiment and noticed that logging out drastically improved performance. Once we found this out we all tried logging in and logging out. No one noticed a difference except for one account belonging to our CTO which turned out to have the same problem.

Still we were puzzled. The performance problem was occurring on the details page which shouldn’t make any requests to the user table. Or does it? We used A Poor Man’s Query Profiler and found out that for some user accounts we were making 2100 SQL queries when they hit pages which should not have resulted in a single query. Digging deeper into our login validation we found a bug in our hibernate mapping that caused us to relate PersonId to LoginId and then chain together object loads. We figure this effected at least 700 registered users.

Not wanting to be known as the real estate of Friendster a few hard working developers fixed this last night.

What’s interesting is that no one at Redfin happened to have an account they used frequently which repro’d the problem. Or that new accounts had the problem. What’s also interesting is how the issue came to head only after 60 Minutes caused an increase in both server load and an increase in user registrations which aggravated the problem to the point some users found it completely unacceptable.

Of course there is still much more work that we want to fix on performance but this at least solves a major problem.

We owe a big thanks to Justin the Microsoft tester and Redfin customer who gave us the first big clue to solving this puzzle.

Since CondoCompare launched I’ve been thinking of getting in touch with them to talk condos, websites and blogs since they run a Seattle condo MLS search site and I run a very popular Seattle condo blog.

However, when their CEO makes a comment about my company like the one below on Rain City Guide it really pisses me off:

But I wouldn’t necessarily compare us with Zillow as we are a brokerage and not with Redfin as we aren’t trying to cut the legs off of good agents

No one at Redfin has cut the legs off an agent, good or bad. I also think everyone forgets that Redfin is staffed by real estate agents. We now have so many in Seattle that I don’t know everyone crammed over in that side of the office any more.107 bad loan home creditloan no payday interest 16 11equity home loans 125bank loan 125 of america125 loan program1300 credit no loan2nd refinance loan 20 mortgage 1stloans car 1st investorsunsecured personal 2000 loan 00personal 2002 credit bad loan

I’m trying to motivate myself to keep working tonight so here are some blog posts and comments that stand out in the last few days…

Franz Honer, What Can The Real Estate Industry Learn From Detroit?

I tell this story because I see parallels between the hubris of Detroit and the attitudes of the real estate industry today. Detroit wrongly presumed that the full sized cars they’d been building must be the best and only way, the real estate industry is assuming the superiority of the “full service” model without sufficiently considering the idea that consumers may want something different.

For Sale By Owner, 43% of Real Estate Agents Do Less Than 10 Transactions a Year and More Interesting Agent Statistics:

So lets see, 75% of the NAR members who responded to the survey did less than 1.6 transactions a month with a majority of these doing less than one transaction per month.

This clearly represents the majority of real estate agents, the same ones who claim that they are significantly more professional and experienced than the redfin agents. I fairly certain that the redfin agent do more than 1.6 transactions a month. More transactions… equals more experience at handling problems.

Katie commenting on RCG:

This whole discussion is a perfect example of the reason we chose to use Redfin.

My question to Marlow, would she post statistics on another fellow agent? If she says yes, I question her ethics and if she says no, well I’m just tired of agents running around telling me why Redfin won’t work instead of persuading me as to the benefits of using a traditional agent.

I never trust someone to work for me who is trying to sell themselves by putting down the competition in place of standing on their own merits and abilities. The agent we strongly considered as an alternative to Redfin (and someone that I would recommend to sellers and buyers who are having trouble using Redfin) didn’t waste time trying to disparage Redfin, but rather discussed her own strengths, abilities, and track record. She was persuasive- and quite frankly we would have used her had we not been successful with Redfin.

And to those that say that Redfin buyers get the MLS leftovers, well we made our offer the day the house was listed in a multiple offer and three preinspection situation and got it. Just some food for thought.

The other day the Wall Street Journal had an article on Sweet Digs interrupted. Unfortunately it was behind their registration firewall. However someone else re-posted it, Brokerage Firm Stops Posting Home Reviews:

Redfin stopped posting new reviews on its site late last week to avoid losing its access to information on homes available for sale from Northwest Multiple Listing Service. Northwest MLS, based in Kirkland, Wash., and owned by participating brokers, operates a database of information on homes listed for sale in western Washington state.

Northwest MLS about a year ago sent a letter telling Redfin to stop posting comments about listed homes. The MLS cited one of its rules barring brokers from advertising details of homes listed by rivals.

Redfin argued that the comments, later expanded into more detailed reviews, weren’t advertising but rather supplemental information of interest to potential buyers. Northwest MLS rejected Redfin’s interpretation. Jeff Coop, legal-affairs manager of Northwest MLS, said other brokers reported that sellers complained that the reviews made it harder to sell their homes.

In April, Northwest MLS fined Redfin $50,000.

It will be interesting to see how this affects all the other Seattle real estate agent bloggers who review MLS listings.