SEATTLE, Nov. 5 (PRNewswire) — Online real estate broker Redfin today released a new version of its website featuring near-real-time data and photos of recent home sales, as well as automatic links to blog discussions of a listing. Redfin is among the first to deliver either feature on a national scale, integrating data from the local Multiple Listing Service (MLS) databases that brokers use to take properties on and off the market. With the addition of 9.6 million photos for 1.4 million recent property sales, each with an average of more than 100 data fields on the property’s features, the total amount of data and photos stored by Redfin increased by 340%.
Data on Recent Sales Empowers Consumers
With this upgrade, Redfin’s most important of the year, consumers get crucial powers that had previously been limited to real estate agents. “Comparative Market Analyses are one of the real estate industry’s ‘killer applications,’” said Michael Smedberg, leader of Redfin’s query & statistics team, “but they’re often shrouded in mystery; agents have direct access to data such as prices and photos for just-sold homes, but buyers rarely do. Without that direct access, consumers have had to rely on the expertise and availability of their agent, and this in turn made it hard to figure out on their own what to offer or ask for a listing. Now Redfin has given consumers the tools to investigate selling prices on their own, which they can couple with a real estate agent’s expertise as they see fit. If a house sold last week, all the sales data will be on Redfin.com. It’s a big leap in consumer independence.”
Prior to Redfin’s publication of MLS-powered sales records, the only data that consumers could access directly were based on public records, which involved delays of between two and eight weeks for the county to record the sale and for an aggregator to assemble the records. In that time, prices could change as much as 5%. Now Redfin users can access sales information within 15 minutes of the property’s being taken off the market, including the photos used to sell the property, and hundreds of fields detailing the properties’ amenities. Redfin then correlates this information with public records, making it easy to highlight any inconsistencies that result from renovations or listing misstatements.
Redfin users can access past-sales records on Redfin via the same map-based search interface available for listings. Neighborhood, city and region web pages also now feature a “Recently Sold” tab that highlights photos and listing details of the most recent sales.
Release the Result of DoJ-National Association of Realtors Settlement
Both the ability to publish recent sales data and to incorporate blog links are the result of a settlement between the National Association of Realtors and the Department of Justice, enforced for the first time in February of this year, that allows online brokers to publish the same information to the web that a real estate agent can share in person with his client.
In accordance with settlement rules governing the disclosure of sensitive information delivered via an MLS feed known as a Virtual Office Website, Redfin requires users to register in order to view at least some recent past-sales data. For each of the 15 MLSs integrated, Redfin complies with a different set of MLS rules governing the display of this data. A table at the bottom of this announcement summarizes key differences in registration requirements and display limitations.
For today’s launch, Redfin imported two years’ worth of past-sales records, but will allow the years of history available to accumulate over time. In the Seattle area only, the local MLS has a three-year limit on sales records.
Redfin First to Integrate Social Media With Real Estate Listings
The new version of Redfin’s site now also automatically links web pages about a property to blog posts about that property, using the same trackbacks technology that blogs use to link automatically to one another. Redfin studies have shown that social media drive more online traffic to a listing than any other source, so encouraging bloggers to discuss a listing is important for sellers. And giving buyers the context of the entire blogosphere for every listing drives a more informed purchasing decision.
For registered users, Redfin shows a link to the blog post with the post’s title and a brief summary; for unregistered users, Redfin shows a link to the blog post but doesn’t display the title or the summary. MLS rules in most market allow a seller to opt out of any trackbacks entirely. In the Seattle area, home-sellers opt out of social media by default; in Boston there is no opt-out.
“This is a feature I wanted to do from my first day at Redfin in 2006,” said Sasha Aickin, who leads development of Redfin’s search application. “But there weren’t enough local real estate blogs, and the rules around listings and blogs were murky. Now most of the markets we serve support dozens of neighborhood blogs, and the real estate industry has opened up to the wider world of social media. We think we can drive a lot of traffic to the blogs that link to us, and that they can drive plenty of traffic to the properties that home-sellers have listed for promotion on the Web.”
“Near-real-time sales data and trackbacks are a major contribution to our strategy of Freakish Depth, to offer more real estate data than any other site, with higher accuracy and lower latency, drawing on every source available via the Internet and local databases,” said Redfin Chief Technology Officer Michael Young. “A home is the biggest purchase consumers can make, and all our research shows they want to see everything they can get their hands on.”
Updated iPhone Application
As part of this release, Redfin also launched this week a new version of its top-rated Redfin for iPhone application, addressing the most frequently requested features, including new search filters on year built, lot size and days on market as well as the ability to exclude from search results short sales and properties under contract; iPhone users can now also search by address and MLS ID, and performance is better. Redfin’s iPhone application is the highest-rated real estate application on the Apple iTunes store.
About Redfin
Redfin (www.redfin.com) is the real estate industry’s first online brokerage, combining a customer-focused team of real estate agents with online tools for making the process of buying or selling a home easy. Redfin is the only major search site to feature listings direct from broker databases as well as for-sale-by-owner and foreclosure properties from across the Internet. The company pays its agents customer-satisfaction bonuses, not commissions, and surveys every client, publishing each survey alongside details on the agent’s deal history. Redfin’s service is available in the metropolitan areas of Boston, Chicago, Seattle, Washington DC, Baltimore, New York’s Long Island and Westchester County as well as most of California, including the San Francisco Bay Area, Southern California and Sacramento. To keep track of our daring exploits, subscribe to blog.redfin.com or our Twitter feed @redfin.
