After working long 12+ hour days building www.redfin.com I go home and sit on my couch and have a beer and watch TV for an hour (while e-mailing of course.) I do this to bring my stress level down to something that enables me to get at least a few hours asleep. Unfortunately while on the couch I usually pull up this link: blog search for Redfin.
Most nights I’m able to resist blogging reactions to other’s blog posts on our company but the other night the article that struck a nerve and prevented sleep for a few more hours was this one wondering, Is Redfin.com a True Web2.o Experience? And this sunny Friday afternoon instead of writing up the results from last night’s focus groups I’m going to blog my response.
The post’s argument that we’re not web 2.0 seems to hinge on three points:
- We’re not transparent
- We don’t give consumers the information to do it themselves
- We aren’t a social network
1. Transparency
Well, I would surmise by my own appraisal of Redfin.com that you can easily do more than Redfin is doing, and probably are already. With the transparency debate exposed all over the blogosphere, I look at Redfin and wonder, where exactly is the transparency?
Compared to many other real estate brokerages sites I think Redfin.com is incredibly transparent.
What any 2.o service based industry must provide is information and Redfin offers none.
For as many listings as possible we show the following information accessible to you the consumer 24/7 without ever having to pick up a phone:
- Sales history
- Tax information
- Contact information for listing brokerage
- Lot outline on the map
- We’re adding the lot outline to the details page next week
- Zestimate
- We show as much information about the listing as allowed by MLS rules
- Days on Redfin
- $/square foot
- E-mail notifications about price reductions, price increases and changes in status
Firstly, I’d love to know what else you’d like for us to display. I know that there are a few more online appraisal sites we could pull estimates from. We could also do a better job by showing the listing’s price history on the details page.
Secondly, are there any ‘Realtor non-2.0′ sites (or otherwise) that come close to showing that level of information for every* MLS listing in the market they serve that we do? (*Redfin does not have land or multi-family listings yet)
Realtor Non-2.o sites in general offer more in their informational teases than you’ll get on Redfin.com.
We also display all this information without requiring registration on Redfin.com (with the exception of the Boston market where we’re required to not show a large amount of information unless you are signed in.) We think we can do a better job of requiring even less registration and in the future we plan on enabling features like saving to favorites and creating saved searches for non-registered users. Hell, Glenn, our CEO, gets upset that we even ask you for your first and last name when you register for an account on Redfin!
And if you do login we do not contact you until you contact us first. We do not cold call or cold e-mail to check up on you and find out how your real estate search process is going.
There’s just no heart or soul on the redfin.com site itself with the only exception being the picture of the random agent on each page.
I agree we can add more heart and soul to some of the About, Buy and Sell pages and we plan to do that with our July/August release by incorporating more photos of Redfin customers and employees. But really we never use stock imagery and with a number of our employees blogging and our corporate blog I think there is a huge amount of heart and soul about Redfin out there on the web. I think you’d be hard pressed to find companies with CEOs willing to disclose as much as ours does.
2. DIY
There must be something more! Click on Buyers and what do you get? Tons of information on how to buy a home? NO! Click on Sellers and you get more of the same nothing-just more clean 2.o white space. It lacks the Why? What? When? How? All of that is missing on Redfin.com; why? They’re not a teaching company, they’re a profit company just like any other major corporation. The only difference being that they aren’t profitable- not in the slightest. What would happen if they actually gave the consumers the transparency they preached? Consumers would actually take the knowledge and cut Redfin.com out all together because Redfin offers the same Where? that most Realtors already offer freely.
Realtor Genius is correct. We’re not a teaching company for DIY-ers. We’re an online real estate brokerage and would love it if you used our services to buy or sell your next home. Yes, we likely could provide more information on how to completely do-it-yourself but we believe that there are still parts of the real estate transaction best handled by a real estate agent. It is for these people that our content is geared towards. (But DIY-ers, we’re not leaving you out to dry and are adding a feature soon which should facilitate conversations between consumers regardless of their stance on representation.)
As the product manager for search at Redfin my focus is on building the best damn search experience whether you use us or not. Every week I field a few calls and e-mails from non-Redfin agents and non-Redfin customers because of an issue with their listing and how it appears on Redfin. Always, we are more than happy to work with them and resolve the issue.
3. Social Networking
Ah yes, social networking:
Unfortunately, there’s nothing really 2.o about redfin.com under the surface- as it completely lacks in the social networking department.
It’s likely no surprise that we’ve talked about the intersection between social networking and Redfin. Most of us here are on LinkedIn, MySpace and Facebook and almost all of us are old enough to remember Friendster. ‘We get web 2.0′ but when making the trade off between building a fast, simple and reliable national online real estate brokerage or adding social networking we’ve chosen the former. Once we’ve got that nailed and see the value in the later we’ll tackle it. In the meantime I’d love to hear your thoughts on the social networking features you’d like to see us add.
Back to the question
Were I to write an article on whether we are web 2.0 site or not I would first define web 2.0 and see how Redfin matches up against the web 2.0 criteria. For that list of criteria I would turn to Wikipedia: web 2.0. I need to get back to work shipping our next release but in short here are some of the web 2.0 criteria I think our website fulfills:
- Rich internet app: We use Ajax for our map page
- Mash-up: We combine information from over 50 different data feeds and display it on a map
- LAMJ stack
- Weblogs: Corporate blog, employee blogs, with blogs for our major markets
What we could do better:
- Add RSS to subscribe to a search or changes to your favorites
- Add tagging of listings
- Add reviews and ratings of listings (though this is a big can of worms since people will only review homes they don’t want to buy)
- Add social networking. See what your friends have favorited
- Clean and meaningful URLs. I hate our current URLs.
