Redfin today launched version 4.4 of the website. Many of my friends and colleagues worked incredibly hard on making this release happen.  After it launched this morning, I received an email from one of my co-workers which said “Wow!  I feel like an idiot for only thinking this was a *big* release.  This is a *huge* release.” And huge it was. Here is a synopsis:

• We got sick and tired of getting (well deserved) hate mail from Mac users. So this release now supports one of Mac’s favorite search engines, Safari.  Since 3.19 percent of people browse the Internet using Safari, this should open up the Redfin site to many more tech savvy home searchers.
• We introduced pricing guidance. This is probably one of my favorite parts of our new release. The listing detail page now shows: Past sales price; recent price reductions; nearby listings of similar age, bed/bath, and square feet; nearby recently sold property with the same criteria; an e-ppraisal property valuation; assessed tax value; and a zestimate. Here is why this update is absolutely key: Consumers can now use the exact same data and tools that we as agents use in order to comp homes. This step is revolutionary (and I don’t use that word casually) in the fight to open up once proprietary real estate data to the consumer.  The veil has been lifted. The Oz has been found out. Data is now transparent. Check out an example of the data in action on this Ruston (Tacoma) home.
•  We introduced neighborhood boundaries. This is another great addition to Redfin’s search capabilities. Previously when a person searched for a home in Tacoma, virtual earth brought up an annoying screen which said, “do you want to search for North Tacoma, or South Tacoma, or Tacoma, WA, or Hope, AK (OK. I made the last one up)?” Now the map pops up a well defined boundary of what is considered to be the city or neighborhood you searched for. For instance, now if you search for Tacoma it looks like this. If you search for the neighborhood of Tacoma known as Old Town, it pulls up a neatly outlined neighborhood, so that there is no confusion about what is considered Old Town and what is considered North Tacoma or Ruston. Even better, you can now download your search results, with all the gory data included, to Excel. There it can be analyzed and dissected to your heart’s desire. 
• We quadrupled our free tours. This effort was a huge push from our real estate team who believed that 1.) our one free 3 hour tour was too long (they are now 2 hours), 2.) by having no qualifier for who we toured, we were having too many tire kickers (we now require a pre-approval letter to tour) and 3.) we needed to give people more opportunities to look at homes without the fear of “I don’t want to use my free tour” or “I don’t want to run into a nasty listing agent.” Special props to my friend and colleague Marcella Branniff for designing and implementing this much needed change to our tour program.
• 15 minute updates. 16 of the MLS’s that Redfin services will now update and add new listings to Redfin.com every 15 minutes. I could be overly bold in saying this, but I don’t know of any other website that updates listings that fast. I experimented with a couple of Seattle Broker’s websites and it seemed to take about 30 -60 minutes at least to update listings.

So, like my friend said, this was huge. Heck, it even got Greg Swann to give Redfin a few compliments.

Others talking about it: Future of Real Estate Marketing, TechCrunch