Blog > Sawbuck Website

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?

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.

Continue reading this post »

In each market we enter, we must strictly follow the local MLS (multiple listing service) rules governing the display of certain housing data.  In Dallas, local MLS rules do not permit us – or any other broker – to display the final "sold" prices for properties.  Therefore, any "Recent Sales" information that is displayed on Sawbuck is not based on actual final sold prices, but rather on the final "list" price of the property(s).

When you view a specific "Recent Sale" on Sawbuck, you will be able to see the date on which it sold and its final list price (along with the listing history, which shows the initial date it listed and any list price changes prior to selling), but not the actual sold price.  Also, all market statistics for Dallas which relate to recent sales are similarly driven by final list prices and not actual sold prices.  So, for example, when a median sales price is noted for a particular zip code in the Dallas area, it is based on the final list price of sold properties.

Despite the fact that it is not based on actual sold prices, we think the "Recent Sales" data for Dallas which we display on Sawbuck is still very useful and relevant to consumers who want to educate themselves about the real estate market.  Several data points, such as Total Sales and Days on Market, are particularly valuable.

This morning, we awoke to find thousands and thousands of people coming to the site. The Sunday edition of The Washington Post included a very nice column about our company and our site. Interestingly, lots of people seem to read that paper.

We had more traffic in a few hours than in the past few days, and our technology platform was creaking under the load. Our servers were doing just fine, but we were bumping up against some hard bandwidth limitations. We just didn't have fat enough pipes from the Internet to our servers. So the site seemed slow -- which is too bad after spending months making it as fast as possible!

We were able to take some action today to mitigate the problem -- mostly moving static files like images off to another server using a different connection. But after 12 hours of very-high-volume, we are still playing catch-up. It's somewhat like changing your tire while driving at 55 mph.

In addition to the site being hammered, we had to bring all hands on deck to answer phones and live chat requests.

Obviously, we are delighted that the Post (and columnist Elizabeth Razzi) took the time and trouble to write about us. It appears that she did a considerable amount of research on both the site and our business model, and we are grateful she had so many nice things to say. We will try our best to live up to them.

(And if you thought the site seemed slow today, it should be back on its feet quickly. We hope you'll give us another chance.)

Throughout development of our search technology, usability has been at the top of our list of priorities. We wanted to make something that regular people could actually use to find and evaluate homes. I pictured my parents using the site. Could we make it easy for them to understand and navigate while still maintaining the powerful search features? Turns out I was off by two generations.

Last night, I was using the site on my computer at home, putting it through its paces a few days before our public launch. I left it open to our main search page and was called away for a while by my younger son. When I returned, I found his brother, five years old, reviewing and rating properties—dozens of them.

Holding my laughter in, I watched quietly as he clicked on each little “X” icon, opened the “View Complete Listing” page, clicked the “View All Pictures” link, and reviewed each home to determine the number of ceiling fans it had. If it had a lot, it got four stars; fewer got two or three. He quickly gave listings with no pictures one star (like any buyer would!).

I did have to show him how to scroll the map around, but that was about it. And once I told him the “My Favorites” link collected all the three- and four-star listings, he was psyched. But he got the basic idea without any adults around—he even put the site in his Favorites in Internet Explorer. Our first fan.

Hopefully, this means my parents will be OK too. And everyone else.