Matt Goyer’s Real Estate Blog

I’m at the airport headed home from Inman. I had to leave early to make it home in time for a birthday party :).

This was my second Inman Connect and re-affirmed what I felt the first time which was that the conference really is for real estate agents and their vendors. For those of us breaking away from the way things have been done there is little value in attending the sessions as the hard questions are never asked*.

However, there is definite value in the parties; they are a great opportunity to connect with competitors and allies alike to swap gossip and trade secrets. Thanks to both Trulia and Active Rain for hosting great parties (though how much did Active Rain spend on that penthouse monster suite I felt like we were partying like we were at the height of the bubble not the bottom!) …You know you had a busy night when you wake up the next day and remember that you forget to eat dinner the night before.

And thanks to whomever put me on the building a better brokerage website panel! The discussion from that panel can really be summed up as listen to your customer and do what is right by them.

It’s funny, because after the session someone came up and asked me the question that we really should have been discussing given the crowd, which is, as an agent do I really need my own listing site? This particular agent was concerned that he’d never be able to compete against the likes of Redfin, Zillow and Trulia by purchasing a listing site from one of the many vendors out there. And I think he’s likely right. Individual agents shouldn’t be spending the energy on listing sites because they will never build a site better than even the average site. I think agents would be best served spending time on blogging in order to build an online brand and attract people. However, if you want to build a serious real estate company you will need to have a listing site that differentiates and to do so you won’t be able to buy one because whatever you buy will be just like your competitors. What you’ll need to do is build one. And that is going to be a lot of work but teams like Sawbuck and Estately prove it can be done with only a handful of folks if you hire right.

Overall, I’m really glad I came, (though sad I’m missing the last night) but I’m headed home exhausted with a few ideas on what we can do better and determined to stay focused on the customer because it seemed like everyone else is too focused on leads, selling to each other, and competing on the wrong things.

*What are the hard questions? Some of the questions I wanted asked and discussed are:

• Better Home and Gardens launched a national search engine. So what? Everyone has a national real estate search site these days: HGTV, Yahoo, Google, Trulia, Zillow, and on and on. How many do people really need? How are they going to stand out?
• No, really, why do we have so many MLSes? What are we doing to consolidate them?
• Why do MLSes impose so many anti-consumer regulations (no co-mingling, no listings in spreadsheet form, login required to see address.) Who do these regulations benefit? Do brokerages really want them?
• Do brokerages really want to out source their SEO to Trulia? No one was questioning Trulia at all in the listing aggregators vs MLS discussion. Realogy, isn’t it embarrassing that your results don’t show up on Google but your listing on Trulia does? Brokerages are rapidly becoming addicted to Trulia and will start to feel the squeeze soon.
• Do we want all our MLS regulations in light of the regulation free world of listing aggregators?
• How can we improve our MLSes? Some things I’d like to see are short sale flags, expanded photo limits, and making the MLS the source of open house info
• How can we help customers navigate these troubled times?

Better Homes and Garden launched their new brand and real estate search site today. From a consumer perspective I don’t see why I’d switch from the current site I would be using to this.

Here’s a search for 98122.

Likes

• Their tabbing of the results list makes recent sales nice and discoverable
• I like how the search options expand (the default view) and collapse
• I like the rollovers on Look, Learn, Live. It makes the sub-content discoverable.
• Auto complete for search locations

Dislikes

• The site is slow. At Inman someone from the site said that they get all the listings in real time via a webservice call instead of storing them themselves. Yikes.
• They only have 6 listings in 98122. We have 314.
• The plus/minus controls for square footage and price require way too many clicks to get the value you want
• Auto complete for search locations doesn’t include neighborhoods

Most troubling for me is when someone at Inman asked them how the site was different for customers from all the other websites out there and the answer was a long winded response about a brand you can trust and a “lifestyle” brand instead of addressing what costumers are looking for and aren’t getting from their competitors that they now offer.

Iggys House site returns to Web

As you know I find it frustrating that so few Seattle agents put their open house times in the NWMLS.

Thanks to Ardell for pointing out to me that neither Windermere or John L Scott show the open house information from the MLS; they only show their own times. This seems very un-MLSy to me.

Facebook, at least for people bookmarking listings on Redfin. Though I’m surprised how many people Twitter listings…

We had a user contact us because they were able to find some listings on Windermere but not on Redfin. We dug into it and a recent change in the NWMLS rules is the culprit. Turns out you can only show subject-to-inspection listings if they are your own. Since Windermere is the biggest listing broker here they’ll have a lot of listings on their site that aren’t on everyone else’s.

I think this is a pretty bad user experience since user’s often compare sites and when they find listings on one site but not the other they tend not to trust the site the doesn’t have the most listings.

We’ve had a few people hit a weird bug with Virtual Earth and FF3:

I can’t move around in the embedded Virtual Earth map with Firefox 3 and the new Redfin release. When I click and try to drag the map, the map momentarily blacks out and then reappears, but zoomed in and offset in a direction and distance that is unrelated to what I did with the mouse.

A Microsoft blogger has more on the bug plus a work around,
Firefox 3 .pageX / .pageY bug.

Hard times in the online real estate world… From Inman, Iggys House CEO reports ‘restructuring’:

Gayle Urick, a San Diego, Calif., broker who left Iggys House on May 2, said she also understood, like St. Louis, that “the company has shut down.”

Zip Realty (ZIPR) is also having a hard time with it’s share price dropping to $4/share.

Last week we released a new version of Redfin.com.

What happened behind the scenes?

FF3

Without a question we dropped the ball on Firefox 3 support. Since we use a variety of components to build Redfin, some of which don’t support certain browsers, we warn if you’re not using a supported browser. FF3 was one of those browsers. And for good reason too, there were bugs with our site in FF3. Now we fixed those bugs and were planning to release before FF3 released but because of unforeseen issues around complying with MLS regulations in Chicago the release got delayed; delayed past when FF3 was released. We soon started receiving numerous emails every day. Some quite rude. Some asking us to fire out developers for ignoring FF3. We should have hot fixed in FF3 support but since we were just days away from releasing we didn’t. Now that we’ve released we’ve found a bug with FF3 and Virtual Earth. Unfortunately the bug appears to be in FF3. We’re working with Virtual Earth to find a work around but haven’t found one yet.

Zoom In

We were late to the game adding Street View but we now have Google Street View alongside Virtual Earth’s Bird’s Eye imagery and Virtual Earth’s Hybrid and Road views. That’s seven additional views for each listing.

We also not just added Street View to the details page but we added a link to all that imagery from the map page making it easy to get a quick look at the listing in question. In fact we wanted to name the feature “Quick Look” but there wasn’t enough room to the right of the photo nav arrows.

Like other sites we made Street View the default view when we have it. Unfortunately I think we made the wrong decision and may reverse that :).

On an imagery related note, we upgraded to Virtual Earth 6.1, this means that the Bird’s Eye view now shows the street names so you don’t get as disoriented switching between the various views.

Details Page

We also updated the right hand side of the details page. The reason we did so was we suspected that some users weren’t seeing it and so we’re trying a visual presentation where it looks more “attached” to the main content on that page. We also are trying to make folks aware that we’re a brokerage by adding pictures of customers and targeted inline messages. Again we received some good feedback on this and will consider making the messages dismissible. If you know we’re a brokerage no sense bombarding you with that message over and over again!

We were also able to improve details page performance this release so it loads faster. However, we still need to speed up the display of the forums and blog headlines.

On a related note we also changed our header to Search | How Redfin Works from Search | Buying | Selling (originally it was Find | Buy | Sell) to encourage more people to learn what Redfin is all about.

MLS Foreclosures

In our pursuit to add more and more search options we added one to find MLS listings that have some indication that they are a foreclosure. Typically we identify them as such by finding words like “foreclosure” or “bank owned” in the marketing remarks.

We had long debates about the UI for this feature. Should we combine MLS foreclosures and bank-listed foreclosures into one option? Should MLS foreclosures have the same icon color as bank-listed foreclosures? And on and one. In the end we went with the simplest implementation and broke it out to be its own checkbox (except in the Bay Area where its a drop down to comply with MLS regulations.)

Chicago

And most importantly we expanded to Chicago!