Matt Goyer’s Real Estate Blog

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.

ZipRealty to Certify ‘Preowned’ Homes:

Homes that pass a 24-point, third-party inspection will land ZipRealty’s “certified preowned” seal of approval, which the company hopes can enable properties to stand out in today’s downtrodden market.

Interesting tactic. Desperate home sellers will do anything to move their homes.

Good for Estately and their expansion south to Portland! Adding your second MLS is always the hardest. I’m sure we’ll see them add more at a rapid pace now.

There hasn’t been much coverage of their expansion; most notably FoREM wrote about it, Estately Comes to Portland. What’s shockingly absent from the rather sparse coverage is the fact that Estately cannot show you the address of the home for sale. They can show you the location on the map but not its address.

We face something similar in Boston where to see the address of the home and its location on the map you need to register and sign in. Not surprisingly Boston is our market with the least amount of web traffic.

I’m surprised that none of our real estate blogger luminaries are talking about how maddening it is for customers that they either need to sign in in Boston or have to contact a real estate agent in Portland to get the address of the homes they are interested in. Especially when you can search on Trulia and get addresses for homes for sale in both cities.

Google Earth, meet the browser.

Maybe we’ll sneak this into the release where we add Google Street View to our details pages…

Google also recently announced, Love My Maps? Use its Line and Shape Editing in your API Apps!

Good for Google for continually expanding their API.

Update: After installing the plugin which took way longer than expected (even though you download the plugin it needs to connect back to Google to download more stuff) I’m not too impressed with this at all. On my 2ghz Intel laptop with 3.25 GB or RAM it runs incredibly slow. So slow that my mouse cursor doesn’t even move smoothly over the Google Earth div and music playback gets choppy.

I think the combination of traditional aerial maps + Virtual Earth Bird’s eye + Google Street View is plenty of imagery. Google Earth doesn’t add anything to that equation.

Zillow finally migrates from their own map platform to Virtual Earth. I’m surprised they waited as long as they did to do this. We certainly should have done it before we expanded beyond Seattle.

In our Virtual Earth news, Eric Jorgensen has been promoted to VP. Eric ran the group which Virtual Earth was a part of. It looks like Stephen Lawler is now the top guy on Virtual Earth.

“DashApps” - Third Party Services enabled by our open content platform!

Hunting for the home of your dreams? Coldwell Banker® allows consumers to search for homes with the “Coldwell Banker Home Search” button. It allows Dash drivers to access real estate listings and property details from their vehicle and instantly create a route to them.

We need to do this.

They’re $399 on Amazon…

If it was $200 I wouldn’t hesitate about buying one to play with. Maybe when I get a new car I’ll get one.

From the Future of Real Estate Marketing interview with Galen:

With the remaining money we’re going to build out some new features for our competitors to copy and we’re going to be expanding into new markets. We’ve received quite a few requests for new inspiring ideas from Redfin and Trulia of late, so we’re cooking up some great stuff for them.

Oh, I wish my job was as easy as pointing our developers at Estately to copy.

Recently the Seattle Times had a syndicated article on, Check out commute before you buy.

When you’re stuck in traffic burning $3+-a-gallon gasoline to creep along at walking speed, it offers time to think. Would it be easier if I left home earlier? Would I be better off riding a train? How bad will my commute be in five years? Would life be easier and cheaper if I found a job some place where the roads aren’t as crowded and the homes aren’t so expensive?

A new Web-based tool developed by the Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT), a Chicago-based urban-development think tank, can help put facts behind those daydreams.

I checked out the tool expecting it to give me some sort of Walkscore like experience but for commuting but the site helps me answer none of those questions. I think I need a major in stats or something to answer those questions using that website.

The Center for Neighborhood Technology would be well served to hire a user experience designer or program manager to represent the average customer in their design meetings so that they produce something usable.

Yesterday Inman reported on the new Cyberhomes site, Cyberhomes gets new look, capabilities and I’m surprised that no one is talking about.

Home Page

The first thing you’ll notice is their new first time visitor themes but I’m puzzled why they spent so much time on them if you only see them once!?

Although some considerable effort seems to have been expended on these backgrounds, visitors will only see them once.

Though once you use their site a bit the customized home page is very nice. It includes homes you’ve recently viewed, neighborhood price tracking widgets and news.

We definitely need to create a page similar to this for Redfin.

Searching

…I hate pagination!

I like on their search page that they show you region information related to the region you are searching in:

I don’t like how when I search for a neighborhood it maps the neighborhood to a zip code and then provides market data for the zip code. I want it for my neighborhood not the zip code since housing type is more similar across neighborhoods then zip codes, at least in Seattle.

I also don’t like how little Seattle inventory they have; very reminiscent of Trulia.

Interesting to see that they launched with foreclosure data including addresses. I’m glad we beat them to that though they have more inventory than us as they cover a larger market.

I’m also confused that sometimes when I click on a listing I’ll go to the listing brokers site and sometimes I’ll get a Cyberhomes details page. When you do get a Cyberhomes details page they include a lot of information about what is happening in the local market.

Details Page

If you can get to a details page they are certainly data rich with all kinds of information about comparables and what the zip code is doing.

Other

On their page about the redesign I find it surprising that they call out what is gone:

What’s gone but back soon

• PDF report
• Print page
• Nicknames
• Alerts
• Emailing a listing to a friend
• Map widgets
• Chart widgets

What’s out

• Saved Items. Tracking on the home page will replace this

While it is good they call this out it’s always very hard to take something away from users as users do not take kindly to this.

Good to see them supporting Safari…

It’s interesting to watch the real estate agents finally start to pay attention to Trulia’s SEO strategy.

Truliamazing tricks of the trade: don’t link to your trusted partners

Trulia Widgets: Truliamazing Trojan Horse(s)

Good for BHB on breaking these stories.