Real Estate Marketing & Beyond
Real estate brokerage Redfin has just announced a new online tool called the "Redfin Estimate" that lets homeowners and buyers quickly get a rough idea of any property's value.
Users can use the tool, which automates an estimated value for each property, simply by typing an address into the search box on Redfin.com. The Redfin Estimate is displayed next to the last-sold price for homes that are not for sale, and below the list price for on-market homes.
The Redfin Estimate has the industry’s lowest published error rates, with a 1.96 percent median error for homes that are on the market, and 6.23 percent for all other homes, the company claims. It also displays several of the most relevant comparable homes used to calculate the estimate, based on a blend of similarity, distance, and how recently the comparable homes sold.
“Never before has a broker marshaled all the data available in local multiple listing services to estimate the value of homes across the U.S.,” said Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman. “Rule changes from the National Association of Realtors have made new troves of detailed home data available for pricing analyses, and massive cloud-based computing resources have increased the potential depth of these analyses by an order of magnitude. The result is a second generation of home-value estimates that can be significantly more accurate than their predecessors.”
At launch, the Redfin Estimate is available for more than 40 million homes in 35 major U.S. metro areas, including both for-sale and off-market homes. The Redfin Estimate is free for consumers. Homeowners can also contact a Redfin real estate agent to discuss what their home is worth, with no obligation to list the home for sale or work with Redfin.
The Redfin Estimate operates on cloud technology and uses the most complete and up-to-date data available on home listings and sales. As a real estate brokerage, Redfin has 100 percent complete, direct access to multiple listing services (MLSs), the databases that real estate agents use to list properties. This gives Redfin information about homes that non-brokerage real estate websites don’t have, like whether a home is located on the water or has a view or is located on a busy street. Anyone can sign up for Redfin Home Report emails to get updates on a home’s value and be notified when the home’s Redfin Estimate changes.
To read more about the Redfin Estimate, check out this blog post by Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman.
