When you’re in the market to buy a home, looking at listings is like looking at your future. You start to picture hosting friends and family in the living room, cooking dinner in the kitchen or perhaps setting up a nursery in a bedroom upstairs. It’s hard not to become a little emotionally attached when you find the one. And if someone snaps it up before you’re ready to make an offer, it can be a heartbreaking experience.
To prevent that homebuyer heartache, we launched a new service called “Last Call.” When a Redfin real estate agent is selling a home and receives an offer on it, or if the seller is planning to take the home off the market soon, the agent can send a “Last Call” email to anyone who might be interested in the home: those who have added the home to their favorites or who have viewed the property on Redfin.com or on the Redfin Real Estate app.
The email includes a photo and brief description of the home, the deadline for offers and the agent’s name and contact information, so anyone who receives the email can get in touch right away.
Many agents set a deadline to receive offers on a home, which has been shown to increase the final sale price and reduce the amount of time the home spends on the market. But before “Last Call,” the only way to know about an offer deadline as a buyer was to go to the open house or have your agent talk to the listing agent. With “Last Call,” Redfin agents can notify a much larger group of potential buyers than ever before.
And that’s great for people who sell their home using Redfin! It means more people have the chance to make an offer before the deadline passes.
It’s all part of our effort to make the whole process better for homebuyers and sellers. In June, Redfin launched Hot Homes, a feature that identifies homes that have a 70 percent chance or higher of having an accepted offer within two weeks of going on the market (whether or not they’re being sold by a Redfin agent). In August, we launched Redfin 3D Walkthrough, an online feature that provides a high-resolution, interactive view from every angle inside a home, giving people an up-close-and-personal look at homes listed with Redfin.
These new features help homebuyers prioritize which homes they want to see in person and when, so they don’t waste time touring homes that aren’t right, and so they can act quickly when they find the perfect one. These features also help home sellers attract a greater number of buyers.
If you’d like to talk to a Redfin agent about buying or selling a home, please get in touch! You can find a list of Redfin agents and read reviews from their previous clients at redfindevelop.wpengine.com/real-estate-agents.