I’ll be in San Francisco today and Friday for Redfin’s semiannual Hackathon, an intense coding marathon where our crack team of software developers come together from Seattle, San Francisco, and Austin to crank out incredible experimental features in mere hours. The basic format has ten teams of four to six developers competing to produce the sweetest new website features to delight our customers, with prizes in various categories such as “customer delight.”
While the projects that the Hackathon teams produce in just two days are not “production-ready,” many features that exist on Redfin today were birthed in the Hackathon (e.g. Instant Updates).
Of course, everything that’s being coded this week is top secret, but I thought it would be fun to have a discussion on Seattle Bubble about what features you would like to see as users of real estate search sites.
One caveat before I open the floor: Don’t just say “more search filters.” Power users want more search filters, but unfortunately very vew people use the filters we already have. It turns out most people just pick the area where they’re thinking of buying a home, and look at pretty much everything that comes on the market.
So what feature would you like to see on real estate search sites? Just to get your juices flowing, here are a few ideas I’ve had over the years: Side-by-side home feature comparisons, automated home ratings, public “guess the price” contests on every listing… But those are just my lame ideas. I want to hear yours.
So what do you think is missing from real estate search sites?