Defining Online Service
My co-worker Trevor who works on our real estate team has a great blog post about the seller tools in our latest release and how it defines online service, Defining Online Real Estate. In the post he talks about our move to including professional photography and our seller dashboard.
Both of these were partly influenced by experiences our CEO Glenn and I had trying to sell our places this past summer using Redfin.
One of the first thing our team told us was to get professional photography. Turns out its only $150. At that price why wouldn’t we go beyond encouraging all our customers to get it and instead make life easy and simply include it as part of the package? I now grimace every time I see any listing with bad or even just decent photography. It’s such a easy thing for agents to fix but yet they think they provide a good enough photo service when really they don’t and instead should hire a professional.
Next up our team would tell us how many hits a day our listing was getting on the MLS. We were both amazed that they had this information and this fueled our hunger for more information. I’d ask our data team to look up how many times my listing was viewed not just on the MLS by agents but also on Redfin by our users. On the other hand Glenn included a Flickr link in his Craigslist ad so he could see how many people viewed his extra photos. Being web folks we wanted access to the same set of metrics we used to drive our online business. The commerce team took this feedback and expanded on it to come up with a whole set of metrics to include in a dashboard view for our sellers. It rocks.
Our listing offering it’s come a long way in a year.