Online real estate broker Redfin Corporation today released a new version of Redfin.com designed to give buyers the most thoroughly informed real estate search experience on the Internet, with new neighborhood boundaries and pricing analysis tools, more third-party data and extremely high-frequency updates from Multiple Listing Services (MLSs), the proprietary databases used by brokers to share listing information. The site also now supports the Apple Safari browser.

Separately today, Redfin announced an expanded home-tours program, offering customers one additional home tour, with additional tours paid at closing rather than in advance.

The Most-Up-to-Date Listing Data

To offer consumers the most immediate access to details about newly listed properties, Redfin increased the frequency of listing updates from ten of its 16 member MLSs, allowing Redfin.com users to access new listing information as quickly as 15 minutes within a property's being listed, re-priced or sold.

The Most Complete Information About Each Listing

The new version of Redfin's site also provides significantly more information about each listing. Prior to this release, Redfin.com already offered for each listing comprehensive photos and amenity details, precise lot outlines, county tax records, school and community information, and market value estimates from Zillow.com. With this release, Redfin also now provides for each listing:

• a set of similar listings and recently sold properties,
• a complete history of any price changes since the listing became active,
• a second market value estimate from eppraisal.com,
• local Redfin blog and message board conversations, and
• photographic bird's-eye views of the property.

Support for In-Depth Pricing Analysis

Beyond delivering data about individual listings, this release gives consumers a platform for analyzing prices in entire neighborhoods. Rather than using on-screen map boundaries to define the geographic parameters of a real estate search, Redfin.com users now can use neighborhood outlines as search boundaries, calculating median price, price per square foot and other metrics for that neighborhood. For the first time, users can download data to a spreadsheet for an in-depth analysis. Home buyers can use the data to prepare a comparative market analysis to estimate the value of a home.

"Serious home buyers want up-to-the-minute information about all the homes for sale, straight from the real estate agents updating the MLS," said Redfin Chief Technology Officer Michael Young. "Redfin's goal is to delight our audience of hard-core real estate fanatics by offering Freakish Depth on major real estate markets: more frequent listing updates, more photographs, more listing details, more pricing estimates, more analytical tools."

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 to blog.redfin.com or our Twitter feed @redfin.