A One-on-One Tutorial in Real Estate Shopping Via iPhone

Matt Goyer of Urbnlivn and Redfin.

"It should find the place that's for sale right here," Matt Goyer said, gesturing toward Trace Lofts as we stumbled blindly down 12th Avenue between Pike and Pine, both of us staring down at our iPhones as rush-hour traffic idled at the light. "So, it pulled out 1408 12th Avenue, number 407, so that's one of the two units for sale right now."

This was last Friday afternoon, and Goyer was giving me an on-the-spot demonstration of Redfin's iPhone app (click here to launch iTunes), along with some insights into a couple other apps that deal with real estate and neighborhoods. His day job is actually at Redfin, where he works in marketing, but in certain circles he's better known as the author of Urbnlivn, one of Seattle's best condo blogs.

Like Tim Ellis's Seattle Bubble, Urbnlivn was a product of Seattle's housing boom, but whereas most real estate and condo blogs were little more than marketing efforts by real estate agents, Goyer won his readers by offering thoughtful (and frequently critical) analysis of both condo design and market trends.

"One of the scenarios we really wanted to make sure we got was, you're standing outside of a house, it's got a 'for sale' sign, you want to get more information," Goyer said. Redfin is, of course, an online real estate brokerage, so the iPhone app was intended primarily as a tool for the company's online customers, allowing them easier interaction with Redfin's features while out about town.

As we continued north toward Olive, Goyer continued explaining the features. GPS mapping allows you to find the houses and condos on the market nearest wherever you're standing, complete with most of the listing info available online. The app lets you add these to a list of favorites on your Redfin account to come back to later, with notes and photos uploaded directly from your iPhone.

"Our app is powered by the MLS [Multiple Listing Service]," he explained, "so in Seattle, we get all our listings from the Northwest MLS. It's a real estate agent run database of all the homes that are for sale in the region. And we also pull in for-sale-by-owner from Zillow, from forsalebyowner.com."

Zillow.com, who also has an iPhone app (click here for iTunes), covers a lot of similar territory as Redfin, but with a different business model. Zillow was founded by the former Microsoft execs who launched Expedia, with the intent to do to real estate what they'd already done to travel, by providing more information to consumers. But whereas Expedia brokers sales, Zillow makes its money off advertising.

"The difference between our app and the Zillow app is that our app is powered by the MLS," Matt explained as I pulled up their app. "The Zillow app is powered by all the listings they've collected from going from brokerage to brokerage. So they call up Windermere and say, 'Hey, can we get all your listings?' and they call up Coldwell Banker and they say, 'Can we have all your listings?' And they've done that for a lot of places, but it doesn't give them all the homes for sale."

Not being a brokerage firm, Zillow doesn't have access to MLS, so their listings aren't quite as complete. But in combination, the two apps (both of which are free) provide a huge amount of info.

"One of the good things about the Zillow app that our app doesn't have right now is it'll show you what a home sold for," Goyer said, standing at the corner of 12th and Olive. "And it'll show you its estimate. Our app is really good for homes that are actively for sale right now, but Zillow is better about giving you information about homes that have sold a few weeks ago or a month ago."

"So we're standing outside 1125 East Olive," he continued, demonstrating the app's photo feature, "and we're looking at this house, and sat we actually went inside or even the exterior, we can take a photo of it and it'll attach it to your account on Redfin. And this is really helpful because they never look like they do in the online photos."

I asked him what other services were available through the app, and, curious, he want to check whether Redfin's agents still had their contact info on the listings. "Right now our agents are actually pretty busy, so I think we may have taken off their contact info," he said before confirming it. In other cities where Redfin operates, though, like Boston, that info may still be available.

"It's definitely a buyer's market!" he said, as the conversation inevitably turned toward the state of the real estate market today. "There were two auctions last weekend for 80 [condo] units, which is a lot of units. So that's driving the prices down and that's going to cause a lot of people to have to re-think what they're selling the places for."

This is where the info available through both the Redfin and Zillow apps and websites comes in handy. Together, they can offer a huge amount of information for perspective buyers, including sales history, assessed values, prices for adjacent homes, and so on. Throw in something like the Walkscore app (click here to lauch iTunes), which contains information on nearby businesses and services, and using your iPhone alone you can get a pretty fair picture of what's going on in any neighborhood you visit, whether you know it well or not.

Which is good, because even in a depressed market, there's still some excitement to be found in real estate.

"I feel like that while no one's building new condos, people are still building townhouses," Goyer said. "So I think you'll find that out in outer neighborhoods there are some good townhouse developments being built. PB Elemental has built a bunch, and they've been built by a variety of folks."