I wasn’t surprised to see that Microsoft launches private beta of Internet Explorer 8 since on Friday I noticed that we’ve had 103 visits in the last month from IE 8 according to Google Analytics.
The Houston Association of Realtors has a surprisingly good search site (thanks to Joel for the post about it).
Some notable features:
We encounter a lot of weird listings. Today our QA engineer found this open house for an undisclosed listing. We’re all puzzled why you’d keep the address undisclosed but yet advertise an open house.
Roost has also added keyword search, Finding That “Special” Nest Just Got Easier. I really like their interface of having the keyword become an attribute. Food for thought when we consider in this in 2H-08.
The Washington Post discovered Sawbuck today, Online Real Estate Brokerage Magnifies Discounts.
Most interesting to us is their comparison to Redfin:
Sawbuck is not the first Web site to offer full multiple listing service access in the area. Redfin.com, for one, offers it. But Sawbuck makes the information easier to find and provides more price data for recently sold homes.
Redfin recently boosted its price-comparison content, but its pages are statistic-heavy and harder to interpret than Sawbuck’s. The latter’s approach is easier: Click on the map, look at the house picture, and see the sellers’ original asking price and their current price. You can click from house to house and get the history of recent sales through the whole neighborhood.
Good coverage for Sawbuck. We’ll need to integrate past sales data from the MLS like they do and we’re always looking at optimizing our details page. I think a simple thing we can do is add the original list price to the map page.
A Redfin Forums user tipped us off to a new competitor in the region, Sawbuck Realty. They remind me a lot of Estately. They both match searchers with agents and have a nice website that is competitive with ours in terms of user experience.
Some of the notable features that Sawbuck Realty has are:
I’ve subscribed to their blog. We’ll have to keep an eye on them :).
Lani wrote an interesting post on GenY & Why Redfin Works and some of the commenters seem to think that Gen-Y can’t afford real estate. Those folks must have missed the TechCrunch article on the $95,000+ offers that college kids are getting at Facebook and Google. Granted that is the Bay Area but Seattle numbers aren’t that far behind (~$65-$80,000). It only takes a year or two of earning close to $100,000 including bonuses and living a college lifestyle for a Gen-Y kid to be able to afford a down payment on a condo.
Transparent Real Estate has a post about OpenHouse.com:
Although developed and managed by Realogy, OpenHouse.com is positioned as non-denominational and is encouraging any brokerage or agent to participate by submitting listings feeds. It’s significant that one of the largest brokerages is developing an “open data” product for the benefit of the industry.
If OpenHouse.com truly is a non-demoninational website truly supporting “open data” not only should they make available an API for submitting open house information but they should also make available an API for extracting open house information so that we can all contribute and reap the benefits on our own sites.
But of course the site might be soon killed off given this comment from a soon to be ex-Realogy employee:
You know the site is a dud when even Realogy’s own brands don’t use it. I jst ran a search on open houses in a few major cities and little or nothing came up. This open house should be cancelled
Rotten Neighbors, locate bad neighbors before you move.
I feel like MLSes should have a rule that listing photos shouldn’t include people.
