Hooray! Today, Redfin’s launching Redfin Shared Search, for collaborating with your spouse or real estate agent on a house hunt.
With roles for husbands, wives, partners, parents and agents, Shared Search is Redfin’s biggest new search feature since Tour Insights, which let Redfin Agents publish hundreds of thousands of in-person observations about homes for sale, and Instant Updates, which alert our customers about homes for sale before just about any other online service.
Now with Shared Search you can share your favorite listings with whoever’s buying a house with you. Over time, we’ll evaluate how every feature of our site can be re-imagined as a collaboration between you and a spouse. For now, once you identify a listing you like, we’ll ask if you’re shopping with anyone:
Enter your partner’s email address, add a comment or ask for an opinion if you want, and then we’ll share that listing via email:
Your partner can respond via our website or mobile applications:
When either of you like or comment on other listings, we’ll share those with your better half automatically:
In Redfin’s map-based search, you can see at a glance all the listings either of you have liked or commented on:
You can also see a list of your favorites, with all the comments from you and your partner, so it’s easy to tell who saw it first:
At your discretion, folks like your mom or your real estate agent can comment on the listings you like too:
Advisers and agents can only comment on your favorite listings. Over time, we’ll let those folks recommend homes for you within the Shared Search framework, just like your spouse can now.
Where Search Meets Social and Why It Matters Most in Real Estate
Social search of course has been tried before, so someone shopping for a handbag can ask her friend about it. But only one person gets the handbag, whereas your whole family has to live in a house: 76% of our customers are married or in a civil union, and many work with one another more closely on the search for a home than on their wedding.
This is why we’re confident Shared Search will be important to you as a consumer. But it will also be important to our industry, which is now witnessing a revolution in end-to-end services that combine software and service, not just for buying and selling homes, but for getting a lift to a restaurant, or having groceries delivered to your front door.
Shared Search Takes Our Customers Deeper Into the Whole Process
At Redfin, Shared Search is another example of how this combination of software and service can take online real estate beyond the simple display of listings and help people every step of the way, from the discussion of which homes to visit, to the open-house schedule, to the last-minute private tour, to the offer prep and escrow process.
Because of real estate’s history of salesiness, we’ve had to be careful about how to bring service from an agent into Shared Search, first facilitating discussions just with your spouse, but also giving Redfin Agents — or any agent you want to hear from — a channel to support your search, integrated throughout Redfin’s online tools.
This brings the agent back to an online realm we were banished from a dozen years ago. When listings first came online, you could finally see homes for yourself without having to talk to a real estate agent. Hallelujah! But you didn’t suddenly stop appreciating an email from your agent about a listing or neighborhood you overlooked.
How Software and Service Come Together
All of us in real estate have often fallen into thinking about software and service as opposites, forcing consumers to talk to an agent when you just want to see the data for yourself, or to accept software in lieu of service when really what you need is an agent’s help getting into a house.
At Redfin, we believe consumers shouldn’t have to choose between software and service, and shouldn’t have to think about how those two work together. Shared Search is exciting because it makes it easier for you to work with your hubby on a house hunt, but it’s exciting too because it brings the agent back into the hunt, in a way that’s seamless with the rest of your online search, and led and controlled by you.
Sign in to Redfin to get started on your Shared Search today.
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