Online real estate broker Redfin Corporation today released a new research report recommending seven tactics for selling a home more quickly and at a higher price. The report, which Redfin developed as part of its own data-driven program for selling homes, is the first to combine academic research, listing data from broker databases, and traffic patterns from a real estate website.

Available at www.redfin.com/scientist, the paper is part of a Redfin initiative to draw on its technical savvy to build not only a better website, but also a better brokerage. Redfin believes that by using research and analysis, it can develop a set of best practices that deliver improved results for its clients. The brokerage is incorporating this approach, termed "The Real Estate Scientist," into its training program for agents.

The company is scheduled to appear this morning on the NBC-TV "Today" program to discuss the results. Redfin also has created a new online forum for consumers and agents to discuss the just-released research, and to propose avenues for new research. Redfin plans to release new findings periodically throughout the coming years. Consumers can subscribe to email updates, read the blog and participate in the forum by visiting www.redfin.com/scientist.

The primary driver for when a home sells and for how much is the home itself, not how it is sold. And no single tactic by itself will result in a sale. But taken together, these tactics can, Redfin believes, yield a small but significant improvement in a home-seller's results:

1. Don't overprice your property: According to a 2002 academic study of 3,490 California listings, homes without a price reduction sold for 97 percent of initial list price, whereas homes with a price reduction sold for 88 percent of initial list price.Redfin's negotiating advantage was most pronounced for condominiums, where it is easiest to make the price comparisons used in negotiations, with Redfin averaging 1.351 percent below the listing price, and other brokerages averaging .366 percent above the listing price, for a total difference of 1.718 percent.
2. Set your price to show up in web searches: A September 2007 Redfin study analyzed how online search filters affect traffic to a listing. Because real estate sites filter on price in $25,000 or $50,000 increments, listings priced at or below these thresholds -- $250,000 rather than $251,000, or $325,000 rather than $326,000 -- get as much as 7.1 percent more online visits.
3. Debut on Friday: A December 2007 Redfin analysis of its online traffic for 119,079 listings across seven markets found that listings that debut on Friday get on average 7.7 percent more visitors in their first seven days than those that debut on the worst day, Thursday.
4. Stay engaged with your agent: According to several academic studies, motivated, active sellers are able to sell their property as much as 30 percent faster.
5. Market the property online: Promoting a listing on websites beyond the local Multiple Listing Service can drive a significant number of new online visits to a property. A December 2007 analysis of 121 Redfin listings found that promoting the listings on craigslist resulted in an average of 6.8 online visits to the property for each craigslist promotion.
6. When selling your home, stay put: The study of 3,490 California listings, cited earlier, found that vacant homes were 9.5 percent more likely to undergo a price reduction.
7. Wait to list your property until neighboring foreclosures are off the market: According to a November 2007 report from the Center for Responsible Lending, a foreclosure costs neighboring homeowners an average of $5,000 when listing their property.

To compile these recommendations, Redfin analyzed:

• 17 broker databases across seven different markets with more than 275,000 listings.
• Four months of usage data from Redfin's site spanning more than half a million unique visitors.
• Six, third-party studies spanning markets in California, Illinois, Ohio and Wisconsin.

"As the market slowed this fall, we began work on a comprehensive program to generate better results for our listing clients," said Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman. "But we found that we couldn't just rely on conventional wisdom about what worked, particularly since that often depended on which real estate agent you asked. Since many of us at Redfin are computer scientists, not sales people, it was natural for us to begin analyzing what was happening in the listing databases and on our own website. Rather than pretending to be the last word in selling a home, the findings we came up with can hopefully spark a dialogue about the best way to sell a house."

Unlike "The Redfin Advantage" study (www.redfin.com/advantage) published earlier this year, which used MLS data to demonstrate that Redfin and its buyers negotiated a better deal on a home than traditional commissioned agents, today's initiative focuses on tactics that clients of any real estate broker can use.

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.