Gayle Urick, a San Diego, Calif., broker who left Iggys House on May 2, said she also understood, like St. Louis, that “the company has shut down.”

Zip Realty (ZIPR) is also having a hard time with it’s share price dropping to $4/share.

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!

With the NWMLS leading most MLSes with additional data such as CDOM it’d be great to see the NWMLS support more than 15 photos.

It’d also be great NWMLS members would put their open house times not just on their own site but inputted them into the MLS as well. Given today’s market we all want to do what we can to drive more open house traffic.

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?

Guess we don’t have to worry about syndicating to Live now…

This is good news. I feel like they have been spiting us. In fact we’re one of only two of the top 15 US metros that don’t have Street View (the ones in bold have Street View):

1. New York
   
2. Los Angeles
   
3. Chicago
   
4. Dallas
   
5. Philadelphia
   
6. Houston
   
7. Miami
   
8. Washington DC

9. Atlanta
   
10. Boston
    
11. Detroit
    
12. San Francisco
    
13. Phoenix
    
14. Riverside
    
15. Seattle

Bonus link: Google Street View car gets pulled over

You would think clicking the “Get It Now” button would initiate a download of what you are looking for. But it doesn’t. You would think clicking any of the items circled in red might initiate a download; they don’t. Instead you need to look all the way below the fold to find the drop down I’ve circled in black.

This page is different than the one presented to Internet Explorer users but yet isn’t optimized around the user scenario of “so you’re a Firefox user looking to make the switch back.” There is no easy download button, no automatic OS detection, no messaging around why IE is better (is it?)

FAIL.

And if you think this is the only case of bad download design on Microsoft.com it is. The other day I had to download Virtual PC and I had to ASK SOMEONE how to download it.

The fatal and common flaw their pages share is the third hierarchy of tabs uses a button visual instead of a tab visual.

The listing is 123 Orange Grove Ave:

And yes, that’s the primary photo. The second, and last photo, is of the kitchen which is missing a fridge.

Yeah, we don’t require registration and sign in for Boston just for kicks :).

I was also pleased to read another post about similar issues, Silly MLS IDX Rules.

Now we just need to hear from the brokers who actually want all these rules. It appears that the tech folks and the users certainly don’t want em and Zillow and Trulia love them as it puts them at an advantage over those who actually do the buying and selling.

Hopefully more MLSes follow their lead, NWMLS to Allow Brokerages to share more Data:

he Northwest Multiple Listing Service has announced policy changes that will allow brokerages to display more information on their websites. This means that if brokerages choose to, people will be able to see the length of time a property has been on the market, referred to as days-on-market (DOM), as well as cumulative-days-on-market (CDOM), along with the listing price adjustment history. The NWMLS will only allow the DOM to be shown if the CDOM is also displayed in order to insure that consumers are not mislead.