Here’s the news, snipped to the quick:
Online real estate broker Redfin Corporation today released Redfin Listing Metrics, a dashboard for Redfin’s listing customers to analyze neighborhood inventory trends and recent sales, and to compare their listing’s online traffic to that of other listings in the neighborhood.
That sounds slick, doesn’t it? A Redfin listing is a hybrid between a full-service listing and a for-sale-by-owner. This new software is a hybrid, too. On the one hand, Redfin is providing real-time access to information you wish you were getting to your sellers once a week. On the other, the Seattle start-up clearly intends for sellers to micro-manage their own listings:
The Listing Metrics dashboard, currently available only to Redfin listing customers, graphs how key marketing and pricing trends change day to day and week to week:
- Online traffic to the listing on Redfin.com as compared to the neighborhood average, so Redfin customers can determine if their listing is competing for online buyers’ attention;
- Sources of online traffic to the listing on Redfin.com, so Redfin sellers can evaluate the effectiveness of promoting their listing on other sites;
- The number of competing broker-listed properties in the neighborhood, so Redfin customers can evaluate supply and demand to determine if pricing conditions are changing; and
- The average days on market for broker-listed properties in the neighborhood, so Redfin customers can determine if their property is taking too long to sell.
The dashboard also provides an overview of nearby similar listings, so Redfin sellers can compare their listing’s pricing, photos and amenities to those of its competition, and an overview of recently sold properties in the neighborhood, so Redfin sellers can evaluate closing prices as well as listing prices. Using the dashboard, Redfin customers can also schedule and promote open houses.
Okayfine. Few blessings come to us unmixed. Sellers will surely like the greater control, even though an experienced lister might try — and fail — to warn them about the unhappy consequences of “over-marketing” a listing. But, guess what? Their house, their money, their risk. Redfin might not be giving sellers what you or I might think they really need, but it is proving itself unmatched at giving them what they want.
Did you catch this? “The Listing Metrics dashboard, currently available only to Redfin listing customers…” I thought, on first reading, that these tools would be cool if they were available to everyone. On second reading, I’m thinking that they will be. If you’re in a Redfin market, you might start thinking about how to respond to this.
And for what it’s worth, I think this is a very deft example of the kind of triangulation Redfin has always been good at. Whatever caveats a traditional Realtor might want to offer up about this technology, what consumers are going to hear is, “He wants to deny me access to information.” Do you want to know how to fight and win against this kind of data transparency? Even more transparency. Everything else is a rear-guard action — not winning, just losing slowly.
I cut quite a bit more than I kept from Redfin’s press release. If you want to see the rest, you know where to go.
Technorati Tags: disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing, Redfin.com, technology
Rick Marnon, Novi says:
This is something that I might have to look into. There are a number of people trying to sell their homes FSBO, and there have are a few that are still as I would say listed. It doesn’t seem to be working out for them. When do they realize that maybe the right agent can help them sell their home.
March 4, 2008 — 5:50 am
Greg Cremia says:
Cool. So in a year or two I can expect my MLS provider to offer us the same thing.
March 4, 2008 — 6:12 am
Glenn Kelman says:
Greg, excellent point about the limited availability of the tools. The main reason we didn’t make the listing metrics available to everyone is because of concerns over how it would perform in a wider release, and also because we didn’t have time to re-design the page on our website that shows listing details. We’ve also had a harder time selling houses, especially when we were designing this feature, so the priority was on helping our own customers first.
As for over-marketing the listing, you’re right there too: this has already been a problem. As part of our service, we market our listings on craigslist, which we have found to be the most effective site beyond the MLS for generating online traffic to the listing. But at least one customer has taken matters into his own hands and basically spammed craigslist, which ain’t cool… one reason we want the graphs is to show people at some point that they get diminishing returns.
March 4, 2008 — 8:36 am
Greg Swann says:
I realized late last night that I could have been clearer on the idea of over-marketing. What I meant was a pattern of behavior in the listing history that seems to suggest that seller is either desperate, mercurial or clueless.
The ideal form of an MLS listing is Listed, Under Contract, Sale Pending, Sold. When you see a home that has been listed multiple times or has all kinds of activity in the listing history — especially price changes — I would call that property over-marketed.
Why does it matter? My experience is that over-marketed homes are the ones that can be had at the deepest discounts. It’s dumb to cling to a price that is not working, but it’s also dumb not to give your new price-point a fair test in the market. The latter kind of dumb is worth money to buyers.
My supposition is that Redfin’s new dashboard doesn’t let sellers change their own price — though surely this will come from someone, sooner or later. And it’s both absurd and fruitless to argue against sellers having direct control over their listings. But this is an example where the benefit of having sold a lot of houses — the raw material of experience — can really pay off.
March 4, 2008 — 8:56 am
Greg Swann says:
Also, just to be clear: I think the dashboard idea is very cool. The fact is that internet-empowered sellers intend to be the driver of their listings, whether or not I might think that wise. That being so, it is incumbent on Realtors to give them the best quality information and advice — to be the best navigators we can be — with white knuckles and a reassuring smile. 😉
March 4, 2008 — 8:59 am