Redfin announces sale prices in real time, uh, maybe

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The online brokerage Redfin announced a cool new tool for those interested in SoCal real estate prices. The Seattle-based online brokerage is now posting closed-sale prices and photographs for houses in a variety of big real estate markets as soon as the listing broker marks the property as sold.

The new version of the company’s website integrates data from the local databases that brokers use to take properties on and off the market, according to a release by the company this morning. The upgrade added 9.6 million photos for 1.4 million recent property sales with an average of more than 100 data fields on the property’s features.

Michael Smedberg, chief of of Redfin’s query and statistics team, says the upgrade will allow consumers to do their own comparative analyses of homes that were previously the purview of real estate agents.

“Comparative Market Analyses are one of the real estate industry’s ‘killer applications,’ ” Smedberg said in today’s release, “but they’re often shrouded in mystery; agents have direct access to data such as prices and photos for just-sold homes, but buyers rarely do. Without that direct access, consumers have had to rely on the expertise and availability of their agent, and this in turn made it hard to figure out on their own what to offer or ask for a listing.”

The company also announced that it has added trackbacks to its site, which will allow bloggers to automatically link to Web pages featuring properties.

Test run: It appears that Redfin’s site is groaning under the load of its new features. All morning the home page has had this message: “We’re working hard to bring you a better Redfin. The site is unavailable for a brief time while we update our service. Please check back in a few minutes.”

Redfin Chief Executive Glenn Kelman just confirmed in an e-mail that the site keeps crashing for “the first time in a year or maybe two” and that we should hold off on our posting. Whoops. Too late.

-- Alejandro Lazo