RISMEDIA, Feb. 4, 2008–Online real estate broker Redfin Corporation has released a new version of Redfin.com designed to give buyers the most thoroughly informed real estate search experience on the Internet, with new neighborhood boundaries and pricing analysis tools, more third-party data and extremely high-frequency updates from Multiple Listing Services (MLSs), the proprietary databases used by brokers to share listing information. The site also now supports the Apple Safari browser.Separately, Redfin has announced an expanded home-tours program, offering customers one additional home tour, with additional tours paid at closing rather than in advance.
Listing Data
To offer consumers the most immediate access to details about newly listed properties, Redfin increased the frequency of listing updates from ten of its 16-member MLSs, allowing Redfin.com users to access new listing information as quickly as 15 minutes within a property’s being listed, re-priced or sold.
More Property Details
The new version of Redfin’s site also provides significantly more information about each listing. Prior to this release, Redfin.com already offered for each listing comprehensive photos and amenity details, precise lot outlines, county tax records, school and community information, and market value estimates from Zillow.com. With this release, Redfin also now provides for each listing:
– a set of similar listings and recently sold properties,
– a complete history of any price changes since the listing became active,
– a second market value estimate from eppraisal.com,
– local Redfin blog and message board conversations, and
– photographic bird’s-eye views of the property.
Redfin also now identifies users’ favorite listings with a special icon on its map interface.
Support for In-Depth Pricing Analysis
Beyond delivering data about individual listings, this release gives consumers a platform for analyzing prices in entire neighborhoods. Rather than using on-screen map boundaries to define the geographic parameters of a real estate search, Redfin.com users now can use neighborhood outlines as search boundaries, calculating median price, price per square foot and other metrics for that neighborhood. For the first time, users can download data to a spreadsheet for an in-depth analysis. Home buyers can use the data to prepare a comparative market analysis to estimate the value of a home.
“Serious home buyers want up-to-the-minute information about all the homes for sale, straight from the real estate agents updating the MLS,” said Redfin Chief Technology Officer Michael Young. “Redfin’s goal is to delight our audience of hard-core real estate fanatics by offering Freakish Depth on major real estate markets: more frequent listing updates, more photographs, more listing details, more pricing estimates, more analytical tools.”
“And thank goodness!” Redfin’s Young added. “We now support Safari.”
For more information about Redfin, visit http://www.redfin.com.
