Matt Goyer’s Real Estate Blog

Facebook gets tabs.

We had the debate one version ago about whether we should tab our details page or not and decided to take the Amazon approach and make it longer but didn’t rule out tabbing it in the future.

I wasn’t surprised to see that Microsoft launches private beta of Internet Explorer 8 since on Friday I noticed that we’ve had 103 visits in the last month from IE 8 according to Google Analytics.

It’s rare to find blog posts from customers about real estate and real estate search sites so it’s refreshing to see a post like this one, US Bay Area Housing Research Online Tools.

To address some of the cons…

The MLS doesn’t let us show some addresses hence the undisclosed listings. Of course an agent or asking us can get you the address through the MLS database.

We do show price per square foot and Zillow Zestimate but not in the list of similar homes and similar sales. We wanted to keep that list simple.

And features for finding open houses are coming soon!

The Houston Association of Realtors has a surprisingly good search site (thanks to Joel for the post about it).

Some notable features:

• Based on Virtual Earth
• Search by drawing your own polygon (though John L Scott’s has a slightly better interface)
• Send listing details to text message
• Nice grouping of listings in a multi-unit building on the map
• Similar search criteria overlay metaphor that we use at Redfin
• The longest list of social bookmarking ever
• Integration with Virtual Earth for nearby stuff
• Language translation
• Compare listings side by side
• Email the listing agent (I wish all MLSes would include the listing agent email in their data feeds)

We encounter a lot of weird listings. Today our QA engineer found this open house for an undisclosed listing. We’re all puzzled why you’d keep the address undisclosed but yet advertise an open house.

Truliaholic lets you compare search traffic on their site between markets.

It’s interesting to see that in their home market of San Francisco Seattle beats them in traffic:

It’s also interesting to see that Trulia is offshoring, Technical Manager - Offshore Solutions:

Trulia is looking for an experienced technical leader, reporting directly to the VP of engineering, to drive and manage our offshore development team in India (currently 8+). The team is primarily responsible for our content acquisition technology and other selected development projects, which represent the foundation of Trulia’s exploding success.

We tried this at one time in Redfin’s history, found it to be unsuccessful. Now all our development is done from Seattle and San Francisco. Giving us the best of both worlds.

Of course Trulia is also looking for local engineers. We’ll need to post a similar top 10 list for working at Redfn. Our #10 would be that we have a XBox 360 with Rockband hooked up to our main conference room projector.

Roost has also added keyword search, Finding That “Special” Nest Just Got Easier. I really like their interface of having the keyword become an attribute. Food for thought when we consider in this in 2H-08.

The Washington Post discovered Sawbuck today, Online Real Estate Brokerage Magnifies Discounts.

Most interesting to us is their comparison to Redfin:

Sawbuck is not the first Web site to offer full multiple listing service access in the area. Redfin.com, for one, offers it. But Sawbuck makes the information easier to find and provides more price data for recently sold homes.

Redfin recently boosted its price-comparison content, but its pages are statistic-heavy and harder to interpret than Sawbuck’s. The latter’s approach is easier: Click on the map, look at the house picture, and see the sellers’ original asking price and their current price. You can click from house to house and get the history of recent sales through the whole neighborhood.

Good coverage for Sawbuck. We’ll need to integrate past sales data from the MLS like they do and we’re always looking at optimizing our details page. I think a simple thing we can do is add the original list price to the map page.

A Redfin Forums user tipped us off to a new competitor in the region, Sawbuck Realty. They remind me a lot of Estately. They both match searchers with agents and have a nice website that is competitive with ours in terms of user experience.

Some of the notable features that Sawbuck Realty has are:

• Rate properties and filter your search by ones you’ve rated highly. You don’t even have to be logged in
• Share your search with someone else
• Rich past sales information
• Email alerts which include sales and you can subscribe to a RSS feed

I’ve subscribed to their blog. We’ll have to keep an eye on them :).

Lani wrote an interesting post on GenY & Why Redfin Works and some of the commenters seem to think that Gen-Y can’t afford real estate. Those folks must have missed the TechCrunch article on the $95,000+ offers that college kids are getting at Facebook and Google. Granted that is the Bay Area but Seattle numbers aren’t that far behind (~$65-$80,000). It only takes a year or two of earning close to $100,000 including bonuses and living a college lifestyle for a Gen-Y kid to be able to afford a down payment on a condo.