Matt Goyer’s Real Estate Blog

CondoDomain runs afoul of MLS PIN in Boston, CondoDomain Gets Slapped.

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.

This is great news!

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.

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.