First-Ever Neighborhood View of MLS Data, New Online Home-Tour Organizer, Enhanced Favorites SEATTLE, Aug. 13
SEATTLE, Aug. 13 /PRNewswire/ -- Online real estate broker Redfin today
released a major new version of Redfin.com that allows consumers to evaluate
neighborhood inventory and pricing trends, using data previously accessible
only to real estate agents. For each neighborhood, city or postal code covered
by Redfin, consumers can view new listings, price reductions, open houses and
trends on how many homes are selling, how long they are taking to sell and at
what price.
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No other website provides metrics for each neighborhood from the Multiple
Listing Services used by brokers to list properties and record sales.
"Housing numbers for all of Boston or Los Angeles don't mean much to
someone shopping in a particular neighborhood, which may be holding up while
prices across the tracks are collapsing," said Redfin VP of Real Estate
Operations Scott Nagel. "This is the first time consumers have gotten data at
the neighborhood level they can trust, straight from the agents actually
putting properties on the market."
The new version of Redfin.com also lets consumers map their favorite
listings, organize Redfin-assisted home tours, and evaluate the Redfin agents
with whom they'll be working; for each Redfin agent, consumers now can see the
details on every recent home she has helped buy or sell. Finally, the release
adds thousands of for-sale-by-owner listings from Redfin partner Zillow.com,
extending Redfin's advantage in showing more houses for sale in its coverage
areas than any other site.
"Our goal is not only to offer the most complete real estate search
experience, showing homes for sale that other sites don't, but to build a
complete home-buying application from the initial search through move-in,"
said Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman. "This release focuses on what happens after you
preview a home online but before you make an offer: touring, comparison
shopping, pricing, agent evaluation. We believe we can offer more value to
consumers by taking them much deeper into the process."
Neighborhood Pages Help Consumers Evaluate Listings in Context
Neighborhood pages are the first major addition to the Redfin search
experience since the site's inception. Whereas Redfin's search application
previously consisted of a map of the homes for sale and a page detailing each
property, the new site now also features a third type of web page for each
neighborhood, city and postal code that Redfin serves. More than 9,000
neighborhood-level pages display new, price-reduced and open-house listings
along with pricing trends and school data.
Neighborhood pages open a new competitive front in Redfin's Freakish Depth
strategy to make consumers more self-sufficient when searching for a home.
Where the strategy originally focused on providing the most information about
each listing, now the company also will strive to provide in-depth data and
discussion about each neighborhood.
Shopping Cart for Home Tours Streamlines Home-Buying Process
With this release, Redfin developed an online shopping cart to organize
and schedule home tours with a Redfin agent. Previously, homebuyers identified
listings to tour one at a time, but the new organizer lets homebuyers group
several homes into one tour. Homebuyers also can review scheduled and
completed tours.
The free home tours that Redfin offers potential clients have become the
main source of demand for its home-buying service. In the last three months,
Redfin has conducted more than 1,200 client tours nationwide, and nearly 500
in July.
Enhanced Favorites Encourages Comparison Shopping
Consumers already can save listings to a list of favorites, but with
today's release users now can select one, some or all of their favorites to
display on the map, to get multi-point driving directions, to email to a
friend, or to download for offline analysis. In addition, customers now can
arrange their favorite listings by criteria such as how long each has been for
sale, open-house dates, price-per-square-foot or the last time the listing
agent updated it.
Redfin invested in these personalization features to deepen its advantage
among serious buyers who want to plan home tours and compare their favorite
listings with one another. Together, the new features focus on how to make it
easier for homebuyers to do everything between finding the houses they like to
making an offer.
About Redfin
Redfin (http://www.redfin.com) is the real estate industry's first online
brokerage, currently available in the Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Orange
County, San Diego, San Francisco Bay, Seattle and Washington, D.C areas.
Redfin combines the best real estate search site with local, experienced real
estate agents. Redfin.com's map search displays the most homes for sale and
the most information about those homes. Customers who use Redfin to buy or
sell properties earn a refund of most of the commission traditionally due
their broker, and get full support in paperwork, offer presentation,
negotiations and closing. Redfin has the highest customer satisfaction rate in
the industry -- 96 percent -- and is the only brokerage with a
100-percent-customer-satisfaction guarantee. To give the Redfin service a try,
visit http://www.redfin.com; to keep track of our daring exploits visit our
blog at blog.redfin.com, or our customer message boards at forums.redfin.com.
SOURCE Redfin
