Matt Goyer’s Real Estate Blog

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!

We debate every pixel at Redfin.

On Friday the debate was about background color of graphs.

White background:

Or gray background:

Mose, one of our developers with a flair for statistics found this quote justifying gray:

“The grey background gives the plot a similar colour (in a typographical sense) to the remainder of the text, ensuring that the graphics fit in with the flow of a text without jumping out with a bright white background. Finally, the grey background creates a continuous field of colour which ensures that the plot is perceived as a single visual entity.”

As well as, Using Gray in Plots:

The grid lines in Figure 1 are white lines on a light gray background (assuming decent color reproduction). The Washington Post commonly uses this approach. Cleveland’s plots use gray grid lines on a white background. I have a slight preference for white lines on a gray background since the gray background reduces the contrast and gives the plot more of a value-added appearance. With light gray and white both methods provide unobtrusive reference grids.

Thoughts?

Angela (operations), Chelsea (real estate operations), and myself (products) will be visiting the Eastside this Thursday to meet with Microsofties interested in Redfin. We’ll be at the Azteca Bellevue from 6:30 to 9 PM. Come eat and share your thoughts.

Did you know we give even more money back to Microsofties?

Interesting aside, yesterday we started to spam tell our Microsoft friends about the event only to quickly discover that Microsoft was blocking our website’s static image server internally. This basically prevented people from using Redfin from within Microsoft for about 24 hours. We received a huge number of support requests about it. After escalating this way and that we finally got the server white listed again.

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.

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.

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:

We had a new product manager join my team this week (welcome John!) and I was just about to email him a list of the blogs I thought he might be interested in and decided to blog the list instead.

Here are the real estate blogs I think are relevant for a product manager at Redfin.

• Future of Real Estate Marketing: Well written blog. One of the first I’ll read when it has updates.
• 4realz.net: Dustin blogs a lot about real estate and technology. Target audience is real estate agents.
• Blue Collar Agents: Trevor is a real estate agent at Redfin

I’d also recommend he follow these blogs since he’ll be heading up our query and stats team:

• Seattle Bubble: Very thorough real estate analysis. He can we automate this and make it presentable to your average consumer?
• Altos Research: Altos is doing some good stuff around aggregate statistics

It’s also important to keep up on your competitors. Fortunately a few of them have blogs:

• Estately’s Blog
• Roost’s Blog
• Sawbuck’s Blog
• Trulia’s Blog
• Zillow’s Blog
• Zip Realty’s Blog

To keep up with technology I watch Techmeme several times a day, to stay on top of the gossip I read Valleywag and to stay on top of the Seattle startup scene and startups in general I read these sites. Joel On Software is also recommended reading to stay on top of software engineering topics.

Noticeably absent from the lists above are any good blogs on program/product management, SEO, design, web trends and usability. I need to fix that. Recommendations welcome.

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.