Redfin is launching a new feature today that allows the company’s real estate agents to speak candidly about the homes they tour, pointing out defects like too much road noise or positive attributes like a refinished basement.
The Agent Insights offering has been a long time in the making. You may recall that Redfin was forced to shut down home reviews on its Sweet Digs blog nearly four years ago. At the time, The Northwest Multiple Listing Service — which provides the data feed to Redfin — said that the home reviews violated its rules about advertising other brokers’ listings.
But things have changed in the real estate business in recent years, including a Department of Justice ruling that opened up more real estate data to consumers.
Part of Redfin’s mission has been to open the vault on home information, so having to shut down reviews on Sweet Digs has always been a thorn in the company’s side.
Now, Redfin is getting one step closer to sharing important details about the homes they tour.
At launch, Redfin says it will have more than 13,000 agent-reviewed homes in its system, including 31 percent of the homes for sale in Seattle. It plans to add more homes over time as agents tour more properties.
“It’s a perfect example of how a hybrid business can gather proprietary data from its operations that it then pumps back into its website; this becomes very powerful at scale,” said Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman via email. “And it’s something no other brokerage seems likely or able to do; it works for us because every tour is scheduled and monitored online, so agents are already recording details of each tour via their mobile devices and laptops.”
Given some of the past roadblocks, Redfin is being careful about how it shares the information with consumers. For example, the comments from agents are shared first with customers who may have toured the property with a Redfin agent.
That allows those customers to get first crack at digging deeper into the home’s attributes if the agent has positive things to share. The customer is then given two days to decide if the comments should be kept quiet or released for wider public consumption on Redfin.
Kelman says the customer who toured the home will always come first.
Only registered members of Redfin have access to Agent Insights — in part to stay within the rules of the company’s data providers. Users can register through Facebook, and that doesn’t bind the customer to working with Redfin in the future.
John Cook is co-founder of GeekWire, a tech news site in Seattle. Follow on Twitter: @geekwirenews.
