In real estate markets where homes are in short supply and competition is fierce, being the first to know about a new listing can mean the difference between getting the house and missing out. According to a new independent study by award-winning social science and market research firm SSRS, Redfin customers who subscribe to email notifications have the advantage when it comes to speed.
The study, published by Redfin, shows that Redfin notifies its subscribers about newly listed homes hours faster than other leading real estate websites. The study compared property notification speeds in 20 markets nationwide and considered 184,206 individual properties for which both Redfin and one or more of the other websites sent out email notifications during the period of the study.
Based on the overall median difference in notification speed, Redfin alerted subscribers 3 hours faster than Zillow and Realtor, and over 18 hours faster than Trulia.
The speed advantage is expressed as the median difference in notification speed between two websites. For example, if Redfin delivered an email notification for a new listing at 1 pm, and Realtor delivered a notification about the same listing at 4 pm the same day, Redfin was three hours faster. Redfin sends notifications instantly when a new listing appears on the site, while other websites may send bulk notifications once per day. This could account for some of the difference in speed between websites.
The Redfin speed advantage was greatest in San Diego and Seattle, where the median difference was at least 19 hours and 11.6 hours, respectively.
Redfin was faster to notify subscribers in almost all cases, with 94% of notifications delivered faster than Zillow, and 99% of notifications delivered faster than Trulia and Realtor.com.
“Evidence from recent data for 20 major metropolitan areas nationwide shows that Redfin is significantly and uniformly faster to notify its subscribers about newly listed properties than other leading websites such as Zillow.com, Trulia.com, and Realtor.com.” said Dr. Aniruddha Banerjee, Senior Vice President of Advanced Analytics at SSRS. “We used a standard and rigorous statistical methodology to arrive at this conclusion.”
Redfin commissioned SSRS to conduct the study. Click here to download the full study.
To get instant notifications about new listings that match your criteria, click the Save Search button in the upper right corner of the map when you search for homes on Redfin.com.
Study Methodology
Prior to March 23, 2017, SSRS registered for email notifications from four real estate websites, Redfin, Zillow, Trulia, and Realtor.com, across the 20 largest Metropolitan Statistical Areas in the U.S. From March 23 to April 5, 2017, SSRS collected email notifications for new properties. Once collection was complete, SSRS used email parsing and reporting structures to create a database of 184,206 individual properties for which both Redfin and one or more of the other websites sent out email notifications during the period of the study. SSRS then used notification timestamps for the properties in the database to measure the relative speed performance of the notifications that matched. The difference between any two timestamps then provided the difference in notification speed. SSRS computed various summary statistics (medians, robust means, and their associated 95% confidence intervals) and distributions of the speed differences to determine relative speed performance in head-to-head matchups between Redfin and each of the other three.
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