School Reviews, a Mortgage Guide and Better Performance! - Redfin Real Estate News

School Reviews, a Mortgage Guide and Better Performance!

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Updated on October 5th, 2020

Big news! After a long hiatus in which all our software development was focused on tools for our agents to schedule tours and monitor deals, some nifty features cropped up on Redfin’s site today, including ratings and reviews of schools, and the first chapter of a home-buying guide, on mortgages. We’re also now including foreclosures in properties’ transaction history, and we made the full details on each listing load faster.

But the change that everyone will notice first is the schools data, simply because it shows up on the map whenever you search for homes:

Each school’s rating, calculated based on standardized test scores, appears alongside an icon for the school, with basic facts and parent reviews appearing in a box alongside the map. If you click on the school, you get more details:

Since we just launched the feature this morning, we’re still importing some of the parent reviews and other details from our partner GreatSchools, a national nonprofit whose mission is to inspire and guide parents to become effective champions of their children’s education.

We still have plenty of work to do around schools, especially so you can search for homes only in a particular school district. But the challenge with that feature is that district boundaries change all the time, and in big cities especially, the school your child attends is determined by a lottery rather than by the address of your property. What we’ve added to the site this morning is a big step forward.

And we’re also pretty excited about the mortgage chapter in our new home-buying guide. For years, we’ve been waiting for someone knowledgeable to explain the whole home-buying process, in a free, reliable way on the web. But the problem is that everyone who understands the process doesn’t want to explain it. And that just means that our agents have to do that, over and over again, for each of our customers.

So we hired the incorruptible Bryan Howell, who used to write all the dialog for games and is still peripatetic-ally writing a novel,  to produce a masterpiece, and that’s exactly what he has done. Bryan just bought his first home, so it wasn’t hard for him to imagine how you feel when you have to figure all this stuff out yourself. He sat down with lenders, agents, consumers and everyone in between to document the whole process of getting a loan.

The result is all the inside info you could ask for from the best in the business, but delivered with Redfin’s staunchly consumer-first approach, and in lively prose. To read what Bryan and the design team have  wrought, just click on the Buy menu at the top right of every page on Redfin’s site. The last item on the list is the Mortgage Guide:

And now Bryan (bryan dot howell at redfin dot com) is eagerly awaiting your feedback! Thanks to all the Redfin folks who put the new features together, and all the customers who talked to us about how they should look. If you have ideas on what we should tackle next, leave a comment! And hang on to your hat, because one more, very fun, super secret bonus feature is coming your way in an hour or so…

Update @ 10:15 AM PST: Unfortunately we’re experiencing some website issues related to this new release and we’ve had to temporarily turn off schools on the map, the property history on listing details pages and the similar listings and past sales from the details page. We hope to turn them all back on again soon. – Matt

Update @ 12:40 PM PST: We’ve turned on most of the features that we had to turn off earlier today. What is still off are the similar listings and sales on the details page and schools on the map. We hope to have all features back to normal in a few hours. We also haven’t received any new listing updates since 8:30 am, we’ll start updating listings again shortly. Sorry for the inconvenience. – Matt

Update @ 12:40 PM PST: We’re now up-to-date on listing data. (We stopped receiving new updates at 8:30 AM PST.) – Matt

Update @ 6:00 PM PST: We’ve turned on our new schools on the map feature. However, we won’t be able to turn on the similar listings, sales and nearby schools on the details pages until tomorrow morning. – Matt

Update @ 12:20 PM PST on August 13th: We’ve turned similar listings and sales back on.

Update @ 9:30 AM PST on August 16th: Over the weekend everything should have returned to normal on Redfin. If something seems amiss for you please let us know at techsupport@redfin.com.

Glenn Kelman

Glenn Kelman

Glenn is the CEO of Redfin. Prior to joining Redfin, he was a co-founder of Plumtree Software, a Sequoia-backed, publicly traded company that created the enterprise portal software market. In his seven years at Plumtree, Glenn at different times led engineering, marketing, product management, and business development; he also was responsible for financing and general operations in Plumtree's early days. Prior to starting Plumtree, Glenn worked as one of the first employees at Stanford Technology Group, a Sequoia-backed start-up acquired by IBM. Glenn was raised in Seattle and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley. He is a regular contributor to the Redfin blog and Twitter.

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