Redfin Updates

Looks like Redfin just did some maintenance and updates to their live service.

I’ve been using Redfin during our house hunting as our preferred directory of available houses.  I’m not planning on making my offer through Redfin – this is our first house in Washington state, and the market seems totally different than it is in Texas.  Our realtor has been great in giving us insight into the market, and I don’t think we’d be successful going this on our own.  Maybe next time we’ll go the Redfin route.

Anyhow, I went to check on some properties earlier today, and Redfin said they were down for maintenance.  A few minutes ago, they’re back up, and boy what a difference. 

My main complaint about them was that they were slow – dragging the Virtual Earth map controls around gave you a spinning searching prompt as it was looking for listings in the new area.  Now, it’s fast.  Takes maybe a second before it shows you listings, compared to the probably 5 seconds it was before.  It seems like they pull the new search results asynchronously.

I notice that the little icons for listings have changed too. One thing I wish they would do is use those icons to differentiate houses from townhouses and condos.  I know that I can limit my search one way or the other, but it would be nice to see that at a glance.

Can’t notice anything else that’s changed, but the speed improvements are all that were needed in my opinion.  Redfin is a great aggregator of MLS data, and it’s been very helpful to Diann & I as we’ve been searching for houses.

No updates on the updates on Redfin’s blog or on Matt Goyer’s blog (Matt is a former Microsoftie who now works at Redfin).

EDIT: Sasha Aickin wrote in to let me know they’ve posted details about the upgrade to the Redfin blog now.  heh, I scooped Redfin. 🙂


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One response to “Redfin Updates”

  1. Sasha Aickin Avatar

    Marius,

    Sasha Aickin here; I’m the engineering lead for the Redfin search team. Thanks for blogging the upgrade, and I’m pleased to hear that the performance increase was noticeable. We’ve been working hard on it, and although we have more room to improve, we’re happy with the strides we made today.

    We’ll be blogging over the next few weeks about what we did to make it faster on devblog.redfin.com ; for now you can see the general announcement on our blog at http://blog.redfin.com/blog/2007/10/making_real_estate_search_faster_and_more_local.html

    Cheers,
    Sasha.

    P.S. We hear you on the condo vs. home icon; I promise you it’s on the (very long) feature list.