Online real estate broker Redfin today announced the availability of the Redfin App on the App Store. The app lets iPhone and iPod touch users view homes for sale on the Multiple Listing Services (MLS) and upload photos and notes from a home tour to Redfin’s real-estate search site.
A Fast, Full-Featured Real-Estate Application for iPhone and iPod touch
Built by the team that coded Redfin’s search website, the Redfin App delivers a complete search experience built from the ground up to run fast and work well on the iPhone and iPod touch. Users can locate nearby listings or open houses using location-based services or search any neighborhood by name or postal code, filtering the search by property type, square footage or the number of bedrooms and bathrooms.
The Redfin App displays listings quickly using Google Maps, and includes every photo and feature of the listing, all in a native format that loads quickly and supports easy, gestured-based navigation using Apple’s Multi-Touch user interface.
“Redfin’s technology focus has always been on serious home-buyers, and this focus has always been underpinned by an overwhelming advantage in the quantity and quality of listing data we have for each market,” said Sasha Aickin, the leader of the search engineering team that built the Redfin App. “Where many apps show 70% of the listings, the Redfin app shows virtually 100% of the broker-listed homes for sale. And we show all the photos, not just one, with details on every feature of the house, not just a handful. Our goal in providing all this data on the iPhone was to be an addiction, not just a distraction.”
Synchronize Your Search: On the Web and On the Go
The Redfin App guides users through the home-buying process as they preview listings on the web, see homes in person and then go back to look again at listings on the web. Redfin.com visitors can also use the website to set up home tours or mark favorites, then download their itinerary to the app to get directions. Once out looking at homes, iPhone users can add additional homes that they see to their list of favorites, and take photos or notes on a home; this information immediately synchronizes with their account on Redfin.com. On returning to the website, users see a record of their tour with each photo or note automatically associated with the right listing.
“Redfin’s app is a home-buying app not a search app,” said Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman. “What that means is that we want to make every step of the home-buying process easier, not just a consumer’s initial search but when she tours the house, when she gets back to her computer to pick up the search again, when she’s ready to make an offer or after her offer is in escrow. By downloading clients’ home-tour itinerary onto the iPhone, and then uploading a record of that tour back to our website, we hope to deliver the first big upgrade to the home tour in a decade. We expect to couple our technology and our service in similar ways to make each stage of the process better for the consumer, from escrow to inspections to loans.”
The Most Complete Set of Homes for Sale
The Redfin App displays all the real estate agents’ listings from the MLS, as well for-sale-by-owner listings and foreclosure listings not yet available in the MLS. For each home for sale, the app shows every photo available, typically 15, and photos taken by the user. The Redfin App also shows how long a home has been for sale and what it last sold for, facts about floor-plan, pools, fireplaces, plumbing, heating, short-sale status and hundreds of other details. Other iPhone real estate applications only show one or no photos, and two or three details about the property.
The Redfin App is available for free from the App Store on iPhone and iPod touch athttp://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=327962480&mt=8.
Currently the app only includes listings in areas of the U.S. already supported by Redfin’s website:
Seattle area
San Francisco Bay Area
Sacramento area
Southern California
Boston area
Washington, DC area
Chicago area
New York’s Westchester County and Long Island, excluding the Hamptons
Redfin plans to expand to every major metropolitan area in the U.S. over the next two years.
With the release, Redfin has equipped all of its full-time field employees with iPhones and offered an iPhone incentive program to its other partners. The program’s goal is for the Redfin agent to take photos and notes during a tour that synchronize with the client’s account, regardless of whether the client has Redfin for the iPhone herself. In a future release, Redfin will make it easier for clients to give agents’ access to their list of favorites, easing collaboration.
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 as well as details on the agent’s negotiating performance and 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 toblog.redfin.comor our Twitter feed@redfin.
