Matt Goyer’s Real Estate Blog

Tonight by popular demand we added bank-listed foreclosures (with addresses! you don’t even have to sign in or pay.) and for-sale-by-owner listings to Redfin bringing our inventory up ~5%. Curious about all the inventory we have? We added a page describing it.

This new inventory is included in searches by default and uses a different color icon. Here’s a quick guide:

I’m sure folks won’t like the colors we picked but icon colors deserves it’s own post. Needless to say we spent days getting them “right.”

We also added:

• Search for open house (this weekend or ever)
• Lowered the latency and added open houses for listings from MLS PIN (Boston) and SoCal MLS
• Redfin Listing Updates now include notification of open houses and you can get updates on your favorites
• Our RSS feed includes updates like our Redfin Listing Update emails
• For the most part our URLs are much more friendly both to users and for SEO
• If you’re making an offer with us, our “Offer Wizard” is much better

Read our press release or the first coverage in the LA Times blog. Dustin calls this release genuinely interesting.

Time to get some sleep :).

A thread on real estate webmasters had our dev team talking on Friday. Turns out someone tried to clone our site for the low low outsourced cost of $10,000.

The thread has been commented on by a few people, Marlow, Glenn our CEO and Savan our former designer.

Our tech team is 20-something people. We’ve been working on the site for years. At roughly $200,000/head we’ve spent millions building our site. It’s surprising to me that someone would find it surprising they could reproduce it for the low cost of $10,000; the equivalent of one employee for one month.

Anyhow, we all had a good laugh about this over the weekend.

The WSJ had a feature on short sales recently, Why Lenders Are Leery Of Short Sales.

We have been asked several times why we don’t have a short sale search feature. Aside from the fact that we don’t want to encourage short sale offers because of their very low success rate:

Redfin, an online real-estate brokerage based in Seattle, says it represented buyers on 65 short-sale offers in the first quarter but expects only two or three to result in a completed sale.

Many times short sales aren’t identified as such in the MLS making it very hard for us to search for them.

Today I came across 2414 SW Holden B in Seattle and the last photo isn’t rotated (and it’s been on the market 46 days!):

I also question the photo of the floor:

I love it. Some anti-Redfin person (agent?) hacked my blog. I left the post because it’s kind of ridiculous. I also upgraded my Wordpress to hopefully resolve this hacking problem that has plagued me now twice this week.

Redfin encourages their buyers to LIE!!!
This is how to STOP REDFIN ABUSE, SPREAD THE WORD

Savan asks about dev to PM to test ratios.

At Redfin we are targeting a 1 PM to 5 devs to 1 tester ratio but these days we seem to be stalled at 1 PM to 3-4 devs to 1 tester. As one of those PMs I think 1 PM to 3-4 devs is manageable (I am able to keep up with the developers) but 5 devs would be bordering on unmanageable (I would not be able to keep up with the developers.) As for test, initially our releases involved a lot of test time (a month for every two months of development) because we were operating under the model of the tester having to prove the code was broken. We have since taken a test first approach and developers now need to prove their code is correct through unit tests. This is significantly reducing our test time and so 1 tester per 3-5 devs is proving to be manageable in that department as well.

Back when I worked on Windows Media Center at Microsoft we had a 1 PM to 1-2 devs to 1 tester ratio. I found this ratio to mean that I spec’d a lot of stuff that never shipped because we never had the developer capacity which was quite demoralizing. At Redfin I know that what I spec will ship either this release or next. We don’t waste a lot of time writing specs that don’t ship.

Last week Microsoft released a new version of Virtual Earth (v6.1).

It’s great to see some of the following features:

• Bird’s Eye Hybrid View: It’s easy to get disoriented in Bird’s Eye. Seeing the street names will really help.
• Walking directions and traffic-based routing: Walking directions will be good for urbanites who want to measure the distance from a listing to work and traffic will be good fro suburbanites.
• Improved Safari Support: While introduced in v6.0 sounds like they fixed some bugs. Since re-enabling Safari support for our map our Safari traffic has almost doubled.
• Improved Printing Support: Lots of folks print out our maps and details pages when touring homes and we definitely have some bugs. Hopefully when we switch over to v6.1 we can kill those bugs.

I am less excited about their focus on improving 3D tours. I’d much rather see the team focus on adding street level imagery (more than later though). We’d also like to see a mobile version of the SDK and we are always looking for performance improvements (though it sounds like they improved the performance of panning.)

So when are going to move to VE 6.1? I’d expect us to switch in about a month and half. We do have a release going out sooner but to feel comfortable with a new version of VE we like to do a test pass with it on all our supported browsers and we already did the test pass for this earlier release.

We received this email over the weekend:

Hello -

I was wondering if/at what price you would sell me your domain name.
I would like to buy the rights to www.redfin.com

Please let me know.

Thank you.

Removed.

Janelle, the agent behind “Ask Redfin”, replied with:

Hello,

Thank you for your inquiry and interest in Redfin.

Our domain name is not for sale.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTmXHvGZiSY

Should you have further questions or want additional information please let us know.

The video she links to is:

Maybe next year we’ll get nominated once we add Chicago and a few more markets.