Blog > Posts by Guy Wolcott

We honor your ancient traditions, people of Phoenix.

Our relentless march to give homebuyers everywhere the most up-to-date and accurate real estate information (and access to the best local agents) continues. Today, we are happy to announce our arrival in Phoenix, Arizona. Prospective homebuyers in the Phoenix metropolitan area can now directly access real-time MLS data, set up home tours online, and save big money with the Sawbuck Savings Guarantee.

Sawbuck’s data warriors have conquered another massive data horde and the taste of victory is sweet. Over the past few weeks, we’ve added 385,000 new homes to our database, including nearly 40,000 active listings and over 3 million new pictures. Phoenix homebuyers can now take advantage of the best real estate search website in Phoenix, which includes real-time updates of every new listing, price change, contract and sale.

Yes, the Phoenix housing market is in the doldrums. Yes, people have told us that we’re crazy for expanding into Arizona. However, we are committed to providing the citizens of Phoenix with powerful online search tools and access to top-rated local agents. To that end, we have partnered with Russ Lyon Sotheby’s International Realty to give our customers unsurpassed local expertise and unmatched customer service. We’re really excited to be working with them!

Our Advisors and local agent partners are standing by, ready to help Phoenicians find the right home, a great agent and the best mortgage deal—guaranteed.

Many thanks to everyone on our hard-working team for yet another successful launch. Unfortunately, there’s no time to rest because we’re nowhere near done yet. We still have several more major expansions in the works for 2010. If Sawbuck isn’t available in your area yet, stay tuned; you might be next!

In Boston, will everyone know our name? (Hint: it's not "Starbucks".)

It didn't involve beer or trivia but we're pretty sure Norm & Cliff would be proud of us anyway. As of right now, Sawbuck is live in Boston, Massachusetts and Providence, Rhode Island.

Homebuyers looking in and around New England's two largest cities can now use Sawbuck to search for homes for sale and research recent sales. Even better, they can take advantage of the ease of finding the perfect home with our new and improved map-driven search functionality!

It's never easy fitting a square peg into a round hole but once again our dedicated data mongers have persevered. Including Boston & Providence, we added approximately 350,000 homes to our database, including more than 43,000 active listings and over a several million new photos. Thanks to the homebuyer tax rebates, the number of new listings, contracts and sales are all up. Is that a light at the end of the tunnel?

Sawbuck rocks because we give buyers and sellers access to tons of useful data they can't find anywhere else, including detailed market stats and real-time updates on every new listing, price change, contract and sale. Our Advisors and local agent partners are standing by, ready to help New England find the right home, a great agent and the best mortgage deal — guaranteed.

We're excited to extend our coverage in New England, and look forward to continued expansion in 2010 — to Philadelphia, Phoenix, Houston, San Antonio and beyond. Many thanks to everyone on our hard-working team for yet another successful launch.

Even my grandfather realizes that mobile is the next big thing on the Internet. And mobile makes even more sense for real estate than many other industries; to look for a new home, at some point you have to leave the house. During the second half of 2009, we thought about how Sawbuck should do mobile.

The obvious play was an iPhone app. I have an iPhone, my wife has an iPhone, my Dad and brother have iPhones—and we love them (OK, my wife doesn’t love hers, but that’s because she still has the original model—no 3G or GPS, and pretty slow). But in looking at our stats, and the way people come to our site now, we didn’t feel that was the place to start (though it will still happen down the road). Instead, we created a location-aware mobile web site, which we released about a week ago. Here are a few reasons why:

• Our “regular” site is not great on a mobile phone, even a smartphone. We do a lot of AJAX, use Google Maps, and really take advantage of the large screen size of a desktop computer. This makes it slow to load on a phone, even with a 3G connection, and hard to use—it’s just not built for a small browser.
• Most people find our site by clicking a link from someplace else—often a search result on Google. If they are mobile, we want the first page they see to load fast, look good, and give them the answers they seek (which is why they clicked on the link in the first place). Even for iPhone users, having a page that says “download our iPhone app” is not a great answer—you haven’t yet shown them that you have information/functionality worthy of installing an dedicated app, and it can take a long time to download, even on 3G.
• When driving around, many home shoppers Google the address of a home they are looking at on their phone. Our site often comes up high in these search results, and those users don’t want to install an app—they just want to know how much this houses costs, how many full baths it has and what it looks like inside. We want to give them that information with one click.
• Stopping what you are doing in your browser and switching to an app can be annoying. When we do launch an iPhone (or Android) app, we want using it to be a choice—not the only way to interact with Sawbuck on your phone.
• There are an increasing number of people with smartphones that aren’t iPhones, including Blackberries, and especially Android. These devices have GPS and advanced (WebKit) browsers. We wanted to serve these users as well.
• In recent months, the web broswers on iPhone, Android and (many) Blackberries added the ability to tap into the user’s location. Previously, this was only possible in an app. This allowed us in include location-based functionality (homes for sale near me, open houses near me, etc.) in a mobile web site.

Our solution was to launch a location-aware mobile web site designed primarily for newer smartphones with GPS and more advanced web browsers. Now, if you visit Sawbuck with a mobile phone, you’ll go to this new mobile site at m.sawbuck.com.

As with many developing technologies, there have been some hiccups. Just like it is hard to make an advanced web site that also looks good on Internet Explorer 4.0, it is hard to build an advanced mobile web site that still looks good on your Motorola RAZR. Really, you would have to build a third version of the site that is just simple text and text links. Our stats show that we don’t get a lot of traffic from these older phones—but I’m sure the few people that use them are not impressed.

Also, the way each device allows interaction between a web site and the phone’s GPS is different. There are at least seven different flavors—iPhone has one way, Android has another, Blackberry has several. We did our best to find devices that use each of these methods and test, but we obviously didn’t do enough.

One of our favorite real estate reporters, from the Washington Post, had trouble using the GPS part of the mobile site on the day of our launch—and said so in her column. She uses a Blackberry Curve—which has some newer features (GPS), but an older browser. Of course this was not a phone we had tested with, and we all felt deflated when her post went up.

We went back to improve the Blackberry GPS code, and add better error handling, but I’m sure there are still combinations of Blackberry hardware/browser that will give the mobile site trouble. I think over time, more iPhones and Androids will replace RAZRs; and Blackberry seems to be moving towards more standards in their newer phones. As things evolve, we will do our best to make the mobile site work well for as many people as possible.

And, when the time is right, we’ll release our dedicated iPhone and Android apps.

Let me know what your experiences with the mobile Internet are. What phone do you have? What sites work well on it? What sites work poorly? How does our mobile site work for you? Did we make the right choice?

"It's 106 miles to Chicago, we’ve got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarrettes, it’s dark and we’re wearing shades."

We’ve been looking forward to our arrival in Chicago for some time now. Truthfully, we thought it would have happened much sooner—December isn’t really the hottest month for real estate in the Windy City. But here we are, live in Chicago tonight!

More than most markets, Chicago’s MLS gave our data team fits. Around every corner lurked a new, uh, challenge—an Opportunity to Excel, as my father would say. But our team hung in there, improved our technology, and patched the potholes in the MLS data/tools—once again, they’ve done a great job. We’ve added 638,000 new Chicagoland homes to our database, including 80,000 active listings and millions of photos.

Compared to other areas where Sawbuck operates and monitors market conditions, the Chicago market is somewhat sluggish. As a whole, the metro area has about 11 months of inventory—meaning that at the current rate of sales, it would take 11 months to sell all the homes currently on the market. For reference, Dallas has 8.5 months of inventory, Washington DC has 5 months and San Diego has just 4 months.

Some of this difference reflects the fact that the Chicago market has been nowhere near as volatile as those on the coasts (more like Dallas). Prices haven’t dropped here the way they have in Southern California, so buyers aren’t rushing in to pick up bargains. The inventory level is also partly caused by the time of year—in normal real estate markets in the US, inventory tends to build up toward the end of the year before being drawn down during the spring market.

In Chicago itself, some of the healthiest neighborhoods are: Auburn Gresham (5.4 months), Chicago Lawn (5.7) and Edgewater (6.5). Some of the least healthy: Kenwood (25.1), Avondale (18.3) and Grand Boulevard (15.7).

Outside the city, some of the healthiest markets: Romeoville (7.3 months), Schaumburg (7.4) and Oak Forest (6.7). Some of the least: Downers Grove (16.9 months), Prospect Heights (24.0) and Highland Park (24.1).

We’re excited to offer Chicago buyers and sellers access to the same data, tools and service we’ve become known for, starting with detailed market stats and real-time updates on every new listing, price change, contract and sale. Our Advisors and local agent partners are standing by, ready to help Chicagoans find the right home, a great agent and the best mortgage deal—guaranteed.

Our team is working hard to bring our site and benefits to more cities in the weeks ahead, including the Bay Area, Boston, Providence, Phoenix and Philly.

Tonight, we launched Sawbuck in San Diego.

For the past month, our developers have been overhauling the system we use to configure, download, store and reconcile data from so many different sources. As we’ve said before, every MLS has different data and different rules, and we try to make them all work together seamlessly. San Diego is our first new market since this overhaul, and has served as sort of a guinea pig. But these changes should allow us to add new markets more quickly—and stay current with data changes in existing markets more easily—as we move forward.

We’ve added approximately 130,000 San Diego area homes to our database, including 8,500 active listings and over a million photos. The second of these numbers is pretty remarkable. There are only 8,500 homes for sale in the entire San Diego metro area—and only 3,800 listed under $500,000. While prices have dropped considerably in the last two years, the market—especially for lower priced homes and condos—is incredibly tight.

As in other markets, we’re here to give buyers and sellers access to tons of useful data including detailed market stats and real-time updates on every new listing, price change, contract and sale. Our Advisors and local agent partners are standing by, ready to help San Diegoans find the right home, a great agent and the best mortgage deal—guaranteed.

We’re excited to extend our coverage in Southern California all the way to the border, and look forward to continued expansion in the fourth quarter—to the Bay Area, Chicago, Philadelphia and Boston.

Thanks to everyone on our hard-working team for another successful launch.

Since we launched the newest version of our site last month, we’ve been taking requests. Users (and our own staff) have given us all kinds of ideas for improving Sawbuck’s home search. Many of these were from users of our original site who missed the free-form map-based searching they had come to love. Some offered constructive criticism like:

“You have destroyed my favorite real estate site. Bring back the old site. I loathe you.”

OK, that is more of a paraphrase. But we could tell they missed the freedom that our old no-boundaries map search offered. We always liked it too, but wanted to offer a lot more tools and information that could only come with defined “areas” (cities, towns, zip codes, neighborhoods, etc.). So we set to work improving our Map View.

By default, Map View shows you an outline of the area you’re looking at, with icons for the homes that match your search criteria. Only homes inside the area are shown—and you can switch to List View or Gallery to view and sort those same homes. Around the edges are icons for that area’s nearest neighbors, each with a count of the matching homes in that area—mouse over those icons to preview the area’s boundaries or click on it to jump to that area, with your search criteria intact.

But what if you want to see homes across boundaries? Now you can. Pull down the new “Show Me…” menu at the top-right of the map. The second choice is “All Homes on Map”. Pick this to remove the nearby area icons from the map and show matching listings across the map without regard for the boundaries. You can scroll or zoom the map infinitely to see more matching homes.

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As the saying goes, everything is bigger in Texas...and now, so is Sawbuck!

Today, we launched our site and service in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metro Area.

For the last few weeks, we've been downloading, processing and storing millions of DFW data points. We've added 335,000 new homes to our database, including 47,000 active listings and 1,500,000 new pictures. Dallas users and customers can now take advantage of our real-time updates, including new listings, price changes, contracts and sales.

On the business side, we're ready to help Dallas buyers and sellers find great agents and get great deals on their mortgage and settlement. Every time we come to a new market, it is a real learning experience. Each state, each city and each MLS have their own unique rules and customs that combine to make real estate so very local.

We decided long ago to rely on the local expertise of top real estate agents and teams, rather than try to become expert--everywhere--ourselves. So far, this strategy has worked out well for Sawbuck and our customers alike, and we're excited to bring it to Dallas for the first time.

Last month, we launched in L.A.; today, we're live in Dallas. And we have major expansion plans for the remainder of 2009. If we aren't in your area now, you might be next. Stay tuned!

Being out at Inman Connect last week, I had far more time than usual to think about the big picture—what are we doing? How is it different? What’s wrong with the current system? Several themes emerged from this thinking, and I don’t have time for all of them right now. So I will start with one...

Online real estate directs consumers toward less-good agents.

Think of the pool of local real estate agents as a pyramid, with the best agents at the top. They are experienced, knowledgeable, professional, and businesslike; they are an active part of a local community of other top agents. If you were the ultimate real estate insider, these are the agents with whom you would work.

They actually do help you sell homes for more, buy better homes for less and solve problems when they inevitably arise. In short, they really do all the things NAR says every Realtor does.

At the bottom are the opposite kind of agents: newbies, part-timers, outdated old-timers, low-volume, slow-volume, no-volume. Basically, they’ve got a license. Over 2.77 million people in the U.S. do—what are the chances that any particular one of them is really good at their job?

In between is everyone else—OK, average, and pretty-good agents who do their job and move buyers, sellers and homes through the system.

So there’s your pyramid, probably similar to that of any other field or occupation. Take doctors or architects or IT guys and the breakdown works the same way (though the ease of entry to real estate caused the bottom of our pyramid to swell between 2002 and 2006). In all cases, it’s pretty obvious who you want to work with, right? The question is just how you identify and find them.

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Last month, Sawbuck was named a finalist for an Inman Innovator Award for Most Innovative Brokerage. Inman News is the leading voice in real estate news, and the awards are given out annually at their Inman Connect conference in San Francisco. In 2006 and 2007, the winners in our category were gigantic brokers Remax and Coldwell Banker.

As you would think, we were really excited to be nominated. We're just getting started in this business, having launched only five months ago, and serving just one market so far (our home market of Washington, DC). Though we have big plans, and feel great about our consumer-friendly model of making buying or selling easier and less expensive, we didn't expect to really be on Inman's radar at this stage of the game.

But on Friday, a strange thing happened...we won!

The awards are the last order of business on the last day of the conference, and Most Innovative Brokerage is the very first category. I was sitting in a special little section at the front with the other finalists and stood up when they read our company names. When they announced the winner, to my surprise, our logo popped onto the giant screens and our name was called. I hopped up a few steps, shook Brad Inman's hand and walked away with a petite, but very nice (and dense) trophy of crystal and marble.

I was quite sure we were not going to win, so it was a most pleasant surprise. The representatives of the other finalists were super-gracious, and many people came up afterwards to congratulate me/us. Afterwards, I made sure to thank the folks from Inman, and let them know we would work hard over the next year to make sure they didn't regret their choice.

Hopefully, this unexpected award will help us as we grow, move into new markets and attract new agents and customers. While we're just getting started, we're onto something.

I spent the last four days in San Francisco at Inman Connect 2008, the leading real estate-meets-technology conference of the year. For a down year for the real estate industry, it certainly seemed crowded to me (through it was my first time, so I don't have a benchmark). While the sample might be somewhat skewed, it sounded like many brokers and agents were using this downturn to redirect traditional advertising dollars online. So maybe that helps explain the turnout.

There was a lot said about blogging, both by agents for consumers and among those in the real estate and technology industries. This obviously served as a reminder that I my blogging has been woefully infrequent of late. So I'm going to try harder.

Another discussion of one of my personal shortcomings came from Merlin Mann, the keynote speaker, proprietor of 43folders.com, and proponent of Inbox Zero. In short, he tries to give people (like me, and probably you) who can be overwhelmed by email a way out. He has a fairly simple and specific system to accomplish this, but it only works with a parallel attitude adjustment about what email is and is not. Worth a look.

I attended many sessions; as expected, some were more interesting or useful than others. One packed session was titled "Brokers & MLS vs. Listings Aggregators." Basically, it was a discussion of the merits of listing aggregators like Trulia and Zillow, and whether they were friend or foe of real estate brokers and their MLSs. It could have been really interesting, but while Trulia and some brokers and MLSs who supply them listings data were on the panel, there was really no one on the other side of the issue.

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