Matt Goyer’s Real Estate Blog

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.

Common misconceptions about Redfin and our customers…

Misconception: They all play WoW

Comment on Three Oceans, If You Were Designing The Real Estate Industry From Scratch, Would It Look More Like Coldwell Banker Or Redfin?:

Redfin has a business model that I don’t particularly agree with but I think has a chance at succeeding in their niche- the 1% of buyers/sellers who are WoW (World of Warcraft) webdorks who wear witey tighteys, don’t want to wear shoes, and prefer their translucent skin tone over a tan due to not leaving their house other than mandatory migration to their cubicle at Apple.

I know this realtor’s wife is likely exaggerating but you tell me do any of our California or Washington customers look like they fit that description? Do any of our employees?

Granted… Someone brought in a Wii today and our productivity has plummeted to an all time low as everyone gathers around to play and watch in the conference room.

Misconception: People buy without touring the house

Realtor Wives, Why Redfin Will Succeed

BUT, buyers will never purchase a home sight unseen.

I’ve spoken to a lot of Redfin customers and I don’t know of a single one who has bought a house through Redfin site unseen.

How do Redfin customers see houses?

• Open houses
• Touring with the listing agent
• Touring with a Redfin field agent

Redfin, with our free three lunches a week and liberal snack policy beats Microsoft, but the Google package sounds pretty nice.

From, Life at Google - The Microsoftie Perspective:

If an employee eats an average of $15 of food per day (the actual average at Google which is closer to $10) it would cost Microsoft $3,750 per year per employee to offer 3 meals a day. Instead of increasing starting salaries, switch to free food. Give everyone else half the merit increases we would have gotten AND ANNOUNCE THE FREE FOOD AT THE SAME TIME. For that quoted $10 average Google provides free soda, free organic drinks (odwalla, naked juice), breakfast, lunch, and dinner (most people only eat lunch), free sport drinks (vitamin water, etc.), and free snacks (trail mixes, nuts, chips, candy, gum, cereal, granola bars).

That single benefit gets people to work earlier because hot breakfast is served only until 8:30. And since dinner isn’t served until 6:00 or 6:30 the people with a home-life tend to skip it.

What resonates with me is the idea of using free food to lure employees in earlier and forcing them to stay later.

We spell e-mail (or is it email?) inconsistently through out Redfin.

I thought it was clear cut since in the past ‘email’ had about 10x the number of hits on Google as ‘e-mail’. However it looks like now they’re about equal but I bet that is because Google normalizes the two to mean the same thing.

We recently debated this and came up with these data points:

• Wikipedia on it:
  

  Spelling of this term is disputed, and varies by field. While “e-mail” (with a hyphen) is used in journalism (such as by the CNN, BBC and New York Times), the computer industry primarily uses the spelling “email” (no hyphen).[1] In particular, the original spelling is “email” (no hyphen), based on the technical roots of the term, as seen in the RFC documents for SMTP [4], POP [5] and IMAP [6], which use “mail” or “email”.

• Wired style: email
• AP style: e-mail
• Hotmail: e-mail
• Google, Yahoo, Mail.com: email

What did we settle on? ‘email’.

A comment from a Seattle Sweet Digs post on town homes:

I hate townhomes and I wish I could exclude them from Redfin searches. I hate how hastily they go up and how unimaginative the architecture is. They’re like roaches.

Someone then e-mailed us this comment:

Blog readers hate townhomes too! Matt I’ll bake you cookies if you make it so we can filter out Style==townhome!

To which Glenn, our CEO, replied:

I just bought a townhome.

Why haven’t we added town homes to property types? Unfortunately most MLSes do not have it as a property type. But most have it as a style type. However each represents style differently and so we need to map the values from all the different MLSes we work with to a set of consistent values. Not hard work but not trivial either.

After working long 12+ hour days building www.redfin.com I go home and sit on my couch and have a beer and watch TV for an hour (while e-mailing of course.) I do this to bring my stress level down to something that enables me to get at least a few hours asleep. Unfortunately while on the couch I usually pull up this link: blog search for Redfin.

Most nights I’m able to resist blogging reactions to other’s blog posts on our company but the other night the article that struck a nerve and prevented sleep for a few more hours was this one wondering, Is Redfin.com a True Web2.o Experience? And this sunny Friday afternoon instead of writing up the results from last night’s focus groups I’m going to blog my response.

The post’s argument that we’re not web 2.0 seems to hinge on three points:

1. We’re not transparent
2. We don’t give consumers the information to do it themselves
3. We aren’t a social network

1. Transparency

Well, I would surmise by my own appraisal of Redfin.com that you can easily do more than Redfin is doing, and probably are already. With the transparency debate exposed all over the blogosphere, I look at Redfin and wonder, where exactly is the transparency?

Compared to many other real estate brokerages sites I think Redfin.com is incredibly transparent.

What any 2.o service based industry must provide is information and Redfin offers none.

For as many listings as possible we show the following information accessible to you the consumer 24/7 without ever having to pick up a phone:

• Sales history
• Tax information
• Contact information for listing brokerage
• Lot outline on the map
• We’re adding the lot outline to the details page next week
• Zestimate
• We show as much information about the listing as allowed by MLS rules
• Days on Redfin
• $/square foot
• E-mail notifications about price reductions, price increases and changes in status

Firstly, I’d love to know what else you’d like for us to display. I know that there are a few more online appraisal sites we could pull estimates from. We could also do a better job by showing the listing’s price history on the details page.

Secondly, are there any ‘Realtor non-2.0′ sites (or otherwise) that come close to showing that level of information for every* MLS listing in the market they serve that we do? (*Redfin does not have land or multi-family listings yet)

Realtor Non-2.o sites in general offer more in their informational teases than you’ll get on Redfin.com.

We also display all this information without requiring registration on Redfin.com (with the exception of the Boston market where we’re required to not show a large amount of information unless you are signed in.) We think we can do a better job of requiring even less registration and in the future we plan on enabling features like saving to favorites and creating saved searches for non-registered users. Hell, Glenn, our CEO, gets upset that we even ask you for your first and last name when you register for an account on Redfin!

And if you do login we do not contact you until you contact us first. We do not cold call or cold e-mail to check up on you and find out how your real estate search process is going.

There’s just no heart or soul on the redfin.com site itself with the only exception being the picture of the random agent on each page.

I agree we can add more heart and soul to some of the About, Buy and Sell pages and we plan to do that with our July/August release by incorporating more photos of Redfin customers and employees. But really we never use stock imagery and with a number of our employees blogging and our corporate blog I think there is a huge amount of heart and soul about Redfin out there on the web. I think you’d be hard pressed to find companies with CEOs willing to disclose as much as ours does.

2. DIY

There must be something more! Click on Buyers and what do you get? Tons of information on how to buy a home? NO! Click on Sellers and you get more of the same nothing-just more clean 2.o white space. It lacks the Why? What? When? How? All of that is missing on Redfin.com; why? They’re not a teaching company, they’re a profit company just like any other major corporation. The only difference being that they aren’t profitable- not in the slightest. What would happen if they actually gave the consumers the transparency they preached? Consumers would actually take the knowledge and cut Redfin.com out all together because Redfin offers the same Where? that most Realtors already offer freely.

Realtor Genius is correct. We’re not a teaching company for DIY-ers. We’re an online real estate brokerage and would love it if you used our services to buy or sell your next home. Yes, we likely could provide more information on how to completely do-it-yourself but we believe that there are still parts of the real estate transaction best handled by a real estate agent. It is for these people that our content is geared towards. (But DIY-ers, we’re not leaving you out to dry and are adding a feature soon which should facilitate conversations between consumers regardless of their stance on representation.)

As the product manager for search at Redfin my focus is on building the best damn search experience whether you use us or not. Every week I field a few calls and e-mails from non-Redfin agents and non-Redfin customers because of an issue with their listing and how it appears on Redfin. Always, we are more than happy to work with them and resolve the issue.

3. Social Networking

Ah yes, social networking:

Unfortunately, there’s nothing really 2.o about redfin.com under the surface- as it completely lacks in the social networking department.

It’s likely no surprise that we’ve talked about the intersection between social networking and Redfin. Most of us here are on LinkedIn, MySpace and Facebook and almost all of us are old enough to remember Friendster. ‘We get web 2.0′ but when making the trade off between building a fast, simple and reliable national online real estate brokerage or adding social networking we’ve chosen the former. Once we’ve got that nailed and see the value in the later we’ll tackle it. In the meantime I’d love to hear your thoughts on the social networking features you’d like to see us add.

Back to the question

Were I to write an article on whether we are web 2.0 site or not I would first define web 2.0 and see how Redfin matches up against the web 2.0 criteria. For that list of criteria I would turn to Wikipedia: web 2.0. I need to get back to work shipping our next release but in short here are some of the web 2.0 criteria I think our website fulfills:

• Rich internet app: We use Ajax for our map page
• Mash-up: We combine information from over 50 different data feeds and display it on a map
• LAMJ stack
• Weblogs: Corporate blog, employee blogs, with blogs for our major markets

What we could do better:

• Add RSS to subscribe to a search or changes to your favorites
• Add tagging of listings
• Add reviews and ratings of listings (though this is a big can of worms since people will only review homes they don’t want to buy)
• Add social networking. See what your friends have favorited
• Clean and meaningful URLs. I hate our current URLs.

Dustin wonders what the Consumer Benefits of a Statewide MLS would be.

To me at Redfin the consumer benefit would be that instead of us spending an inordinate amount of time dealing with ~15 different MLSes (each with different data feeds, standards, schemas and points of contact) so that we can provide inventory up and down the west coast of California we could instead invest in more consumer oriented features because we saved all this time by only having to integrate one MLS.

Rain City Guide had a recent post on signs, Go Dog Go! and I thought it would be a good opportunity to post a picture of a sign just down the street from me. First a quote from the RCG post:

The vast majority of the “for sale” signs in my neighborhood, are the usual boring rectangular shape and size. It’s sad because the most interesting yard signs in my neighborhood are from Redfin (memorable because of its non-rectangular shape and the BUY ME “button” on the sign) and from Plateau Real Estate, a small & local company down the street from me, (memorable because it’s logo has gradient greens and a unique font). It’s not like Redfin’s logo and Plateau’s signs are that great, but at least they try to stand out amidst an ocean of boring, rectangular, monochromatic signs from most of the big and independent brokers in the area.

And here’s a photo of our sign in front of a condo building:

Note that we have two styles. One style says ‘BUY ME’ the other ‘FOR SALE’.

Sadly it has been graffiti-ed but everything is on Capitol Hill. I just noticed that someone tagged the brick entryway to the garage of my condo.

What I like most about our sign is its non-standard shape and that it has a very clean design with minimal clutter. I remember when we were working on the design and had the first prototypes shipped to the office and everyone gathered around to try hanging it on the post in the office. Should the swoop by on the top? the bottom? Does it look too much like a guillotine? Which way should the swoop go? Should we make the BUY ME look more like a button? Or leave 2D like the rest of the sign? Should the post be white, grey or red?

In the future I hope we can be more Bloodhound like and include unique URLs on every sign.

Wow, Apple announced today at WWDC 2007 that Safari 3 is coming to Windows. This is an interesting move in so much that it will force developers to take the Safari browser that much more seriously given its potential increased reach.

Previously it was too easy for developers large and small to say that Safari is only 5% of customers let’s just ignore those 5% instead of supporting them. For us, we didn’t want to ignore them because 5% of your user base at a startup is very important but we had to because of some partner choices we made.The good news is that both of our partners who do not support Safari already had plans to support Safari before this announcement.

The other thing I really like about this announcement is that Apple is really boastful about their JavaScript performance. From Engadget’s Steve Jobs live from WWDC 2007:

I would love to see the other browser’s step up and start to compete not just on features but on performance. There is only so much we can do as app developers to make our apps speedy.

If you want to try out Safari 3 with Redfin you will need to make us think it is Firefox. Go to the debug menu and change your user agent to be Firefox 2.0.0.2. To enable the debug menu on Windows you need to (thanks to our Mac dev Sasha for digging into Windows for this tip :) ):

1. Open up %APPDATA%\Apple Computer\Safar\Preferences.plist in Notepad.
2. Add the following entry at the bottom of the file, right before the </dict> line:
   <key>IncludeDebugMenu</key>
   <integer>1</integer>

3. Restart Safari.

Please note that while it sort of works there are some quirks.

Update: Redfin now supports Safari 3. Yay!

About a week ago our Redfin Listing Updates to Yahoo customers starting going to their Yahoo spam folder. Yahoo is one of our top three e-mail domains so we’re pretty concerned with this. Yahoo appears to have a resolution mechanism that involves filling out a very long survey about the type of e-mail you’re trying to send. I can only assume it is in the hopes you give up. I’ll be curious to see once we finish filling it out today (it’s been a three person effort to answer all the questions) how long it will take for them to re-instate our non-spammer status.

Also, we do realize it could be easier to unsubscribe from our listing updates and so users may be flagging our e-mails as spam because they forgot their password on Redfin. We’re fixing this in a few weeks by adding a one-click unsubscribe link to all our listing update e-mails. This should make it much easier to unsubscribe.