Matt Goyer’s Real Estate Blog

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.

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.

Virtual Earth updated their bird’s eye imagery last week (we use bird’s eye on our details pages to give another perspective on the home.)

The updates include several areas we cover which will now have new and expanded coverage:

• Washington, DC
• Anne Arundel Co, MD
• Alexandria, VA
• Arlington Co, VA

Nice!

It’s rare to find blog posts from customers about real estate and real estate search sites so it’s refreshing to see a post like this one, US Bay Area Housing Research Online Tools.

To address some of the cons…

The MLS doesn’t let us show some addresses hence the undisclosed listings. Of course an agent or asking us can get you the address through the MLS database.

We do show price per square foot and Zillow Zestimate but not in the list of similar homes and similar sales. We wanted to keep that list simple.

And features for finding open houses are coming soon!

Our latest release got some good blog buzz but what excited me the most was the comments left by competitors on the various posts and our mention on Valleywag (fortunately Sasha set them straight on the math.)

Yesterday we were in an offsite meeting discussing “the future” when someone checked their email and found out in an email sent to the whole company that we were on the front page of Yahoo. Simultaneously everyone asked is the site still up!? And then reached for their laptops and cell phones. The funniest part was that the first reply to the email was ‘well that explains why the phones have been ringing off the hook for the last two hours’ followed by an email from our IT department threatening to break our fingers if we watched the videos at work (we are extremely bandwidth constrained (but we are moving to new offices with much faster Internet soon.))

Watch it: Real Estate: Buying & Selling Online:

What are the pros and cons of buying and selling your home on the Internet? Correspondent Lesley Stahl looks at the online real estate market in the high-tech mecca of Seattle, Washington.

Today we expanded to Washington, DC and Baltimore!

Bryan has the numbers:

• +50,000 homes for sale
• +~3,000 square miles of land
• +6.1m people and 2.1m housing units

The Washington, DC / Baltimore Redfin service area includes:

• District of Columbia
• Maryland: Anne Arundel, Baltimore, Howard, Montgomery and Prince George’s counties in
• Virginia: Arlington, Fairfax, Loudoun, Manassas, Prince William and Stafford counties as well as the cities of Alexandria and Falls Church.

We also raised $12 million. Cynthia has the numbers on that:

• $350 million in real estate transactions
• Refunded $6 million in commissions

But most importantly we got our first mention on Valleywag. And having met Emily last week I can say that she, like the rest of our board, is very sharp. I think she’s a great addition to the team.

And last but not least we’re throwing a party next week. I’m looking forward to it since I meant to go to the last one with resume in hand to give to Glenn but I unfortunately was sick that night. Fortunately, I was still able to get a job here.

After many late nights at work we released a new version of Redfin last week! I promptly went on vacation for the Forth of July which is why this post is delayed.

What did we add?

Redfin Forums, http://forums.redfin.com/. More on forums in a separate post. But let’s just say our second place name was Redfin Discussions and I’m glad we beat Zillow to the punch.

Overhead Map on the details page for a listing or a past sale shows you the lot outline if we have it or the house location if we don’t.

Search by lot size, year built and status have been the three most requested search features. Finally we have them. Let me know what you want next.

Listing update email infrastructure was completely re-written. You’ll now get the e-mail at the same time every day. We also improved the format a bit. The e-mail has a new title which tells you how many updates you have, the photos are larger and we added the city and state information.

New buttons to improve the discoverability of buying or touring a home through Redfin.

Improved readability by making the content pane’s background white and the text black. Whose idea was it to use a non-white background with a non-black font color!? :)

Our blogs imploded over the weekend so it’s been a crazy day at work trying to get them back online. As a result none of us have had the time to reflect on having Redfin named as one of Time Magazine’s Top 50 websites.

It definitely is an exciting time to be here.

Update: FoREM likes our site too:

All questions about their business model aside, Redfin unquestionably has one of the best real estate search sites out there, though limited in its national reach by the markets they serve. Kudos to their engineers and design team for coming up with a great product.