Matt Goyer’s Real Estate Blog

We’ve been running completely flat out at Redfin lately (several of our IM status messages refer to Redbull i.e. Redbull + Redbull = The Jitters, I miss taurine and we need more Redbull!) So much so that I haven’t even blogged about our last release and yet we have a new release out tonight. While I should be catching up on sleep I should blog so I don’t fall further behind :).

As the search product manager I’m most excited about these new features:

RSS

I’ve been asking for RSS for the last year and a half and this release Michael did the work to get his old RSS prototype working again, I did the work to finish spe’cing it, Michael then finished it off and a few of us tested it and we’re all very pleased with the results!

You can subscribe to a feed of new listings by clicking ‘Save this Search’ and selecting your favorite feed reader.

We may have been late to the game; here’s the competition:

ZipRealty

Estately

Trulia

But we display a lot more information in the feed.

Something I’m excited about is syndicating listings to blogs. Here’s an example of my Urbnlivn blog now showing the most recent condo listings in downtown Seattle:

I installed the SimplePie plugin for Wordpress, created a Wordpress cache directory because I didn’t have one, created a new template because I didn’t like the defaults and it worked. The only hiccup was that SimplePie didn’t like our rather complex URL so I took the URL I got from Redfin and then created a TinyURL which SimplePie liked much more.

Open Houses on the Map

We’ve been putting off both using open house icons on the map and search for open house for several releases because we were ashamed of our open house data. After looking at our data more carefully it turns out that for most of our regions we actually have really good open house information except in Seattle (we have a Seattle bias which I’ll have to write about more another time.) Turns out in Seattle real estate agents don’t advertise their homes in the MLS. This makes it very frustrating for anyone trying to build an open house search experience. Worse, it’s very frustrating for consumers because there is no central database of open house times and they’re forced to go to each broker’s website to find them. Fortunately most other markets use the MLS.

After much deliberation this is the open house icon we settled on:

It’s a little small and will likely take users some time to recognize and I am sure we will get emails asking what ‘OPEN’ means (we got emails asking what the little heart on the icon meant when we introduced it last release and in my head I’m like, duh, favorite!) but users should quickly learn that this means a listing has an open house and that they can find the next open house time in the details pane.

Cyberhomes

I was really bummed to see that Zip Realty beat us to adding Cyberhomes. We really wanted it in the last release when we added Eppraisal but it turned out to be incredibly hard to track down someone at Fidelity who could get us the details on the Cyberhomes API. After numerous emails I finally got lucky emailing the head of marketing after getting their contact information from a press release. Here it is better late than never:

Other Changes

We re-wrote the content in our Buy and Sell areas and introduced Active Listing so you can find out what’s happening to your listing.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 4th, 2008 at 5:38 am and is filed under Redfin. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.