Matt Goyer’s Real Estate Blog

Microsoft launched a Send to GPS feature, MSN Direct Enables Web Sites to Deliver Location Information to GPS Navigation Devices.

Interesting. This certainly would be nice to add to our favorites experience. I wonder what GPS devices are users have? Or are most popular?

How Accurate Are Listings On Real Estate Sites?

Which I think is a great question to ask and surprising it has taken TechCrunch and the like so long to ask.

Why? Because a consumer searching for a home in San Diego doesn’t care that Trulia/Zillow has 3 million listings nationwide; they care how many listings the search sites in their area have.

Unfortunately for Redfin we’re not in every market but the markets we are in we have almost all the listings.

Where do we get our listings from?

• The local MLS. In some areas (SoCal) we get listings from 5 different MLSes to piece together most accurate MLS picture. But even so we don’t import multi-family, land and other MLS listings. We plan to change this soon.
• Zillow who gives us for sale by owner
• 50+ other FSBO partners
• A bank listed foreclosure partner

What’s missing? Craigslist which gets a large number of FSBOs.

We’re also up front about what our listing inventory includes with the statement, Do I see all the homes for sale on our map page.

Glenn’s got rundown on the latest version of Redfin.

The things we really debated about in this release were:

• The icons we added to the details page and use on the new favorites page. Do they look good?
• The last chart on the neighborhood pages. Do you understand it?
• The entry point for neighborhood pages on the map page. Can you find it?
• The entry point for neighborhood pages on the details page. Can you find it?
• Expand/collapse on favorites. Would people discover it?
• Default view for favorites is collapsed. Is that the right default?

Any thoughts?

ZipRealty Announces Second Quarter 2008 Results

• At June 30, 2008, there were 2,559 ZipAgents employed, up from 2,070 agents at the end of the second quarter 2007. On a sequential quarterly basis, agent count increased by 274 from March 31, 2008.
• The total value of real estate transactions closed decreased to approximately $1.32 billion in the second quarter of 2008 versus $1.41 billion for the same period in 2007.
• The total number of transactions closed increased approximately 17.4% to 4,681, compared to 3,988 in the second quarter last year.
• Average net revenue per transaction decreased approximately 16.6% to $6,381 from $7,649 in the second quarter of 2007.

So, revenue is flat but they’re working on more (smaller) deals. At the same time they’ve increased the number of agents by 20% decreasing their revenue per agent.

Update: Ah, now that I’m listening to the call I see that the agents were primarily added for their new expansion markets.

Here’s the Inman wrap up of our panel on building a better brokerage website, Clients can tell you how to build ‘killer’ Web site.