(And there was much rejoicing.)

Android fans have been very, very vocal about wanting their own Redfin app, and thanks to the hard work of a crack team of engineers, the day has arrived.

Go find out more! Go! Go you crazy kids! Be free!

Photo courtesy Stéfan via Flickr.

So, my original plan was to write a big long post going over every last nook ‘n cranny of our reader poll results in painstaking detail. But then I remembered that I basically have the attention span of a fruit fly.

So instead, I’m just going to post Pretty Bar Graphs of the results, and also give you a link so you can download the full excel version of the responses.

Without Further Ado… Pretty Bar Graph #1

As you can see, Updates on the Local Market was our big big winner, with around 425 votes. Trailing the pack was Profiles of Agents, with four votes.

And Now… Pretty Bar Graph #2

(…in which our hero discovers which feature types are most popular among readers.)

This one was a bit of a shockeroni for me, because I really thought video was going to dominate here. I mean, you kids love the YouTube and the Hulu and whatnot, right?

But I was wrong, as is often the case. Graphics and Illustrations came in first, and Nope, Just Articles was second, because you people love your precious words. So my next blog post will be a six-thousand-word essay on the impact of the Battle of Hastings on the 2000-2007 Real Estate Bubble. It should be riveting.

Point/Counterpoint was also pretty popular (with one truly awesome person actually suggesting that I team up with Jane Curtin), as was Instant Polls/Surveys.

Not Video, though. Or Contests. Which means I got my legs waxed for nothing.

Holy Cow! Guess What? It’s Pretty Bar Graph #3!

(…in which our hero runs out of clever subtitles and considers going to the supply closet for a Twix bar.*)

Okay, so this is where I asked about the name of Sweet Digs, because I’ll be honest with you, around the office it’s kind of a running joke. And not the funny kind of running joke, like when Steve Carrell would say “That’s what she said!” on The Office. No, more like the painfully tragic kind of running joke, where you’re laughing from a nauseating mix of nervousness and contempt, like anytime anyone said anything on the entire eight-season run of Full House.

But another surprise, people still like the name Sweet Digs, and the chart above proves it.

So there are all the pretty bar graphs, like I promised. If you’d like to read the full excel details, which includes all the free-form responses (minus identifying, info, of course), just click here to download it.

Whew! Thanks everyone.

*It was delicious.

HomePath

HomePath helps buyers buy covering their closing costs, up to 3.5% of the home’s purchase price.

To qualify, buyers must be purchasing a HomePath property; this is a home that is owned by Fannie Mae, usually as the result of a foreclosure or owner forfeiture.  Buyers need to make the initial offer on the home on or after June 14, 2011, and the purchase must close by October 31, 2011; initial offers made prior to June 14 are not eligible.

• View full details on qualifying for this program.
• Search for HomePath properties.
• Read an FAQ on the HomePath program.

First Look

In addition to HomePath program, Fannie Mae also offers an edge to buyers hoping to purchase a primary residence (as opposed to investors, or buyers looking for a second home). Under the First Look program, only offers from primary-residence buyers will be considered during the first 15 days that a Fannie-owned REO property is on the market.

Redfin agents and partner agents are always available to help you make a purchase on a Fannie Mae-owned property.

I wanted to say a big fat wet sloppy thank you to everyone who participated in last week’s reader poll. There were nearly 800 of you, and almost everyone had something useful, informative, or enlightening to contribute.

(There was, of course, a small but vocal minority who did nothing but make dirty jokes and request that we start posting illicit photos, but that’s life on the intertubes.)

We got so many responses with so many good suggestions, in fact, that I’m basically drowning over here. I promise I’ll give y’all a nice, thorough run-down of the results, but as for today, I’m going to give you the Xtreme Reader’s Digest version.

Big Winners:

Updates on the local market, market statistics, and profiles of local neighborhoods were the top three requests, in that order. Message received. You want more hard data, more often, and more tightly focused on the neighborhood level.

Interesting Thing I Noticed:

We had a lot of requests for things that are already on Redfin, which tells me that we’re not doing a great job making that stuff easy to find. That’s pretty much my fault.

For instance, tips about home buying was a very popular request, and we have an entire free online guide for home buyers right here. It has a ton of information on the entire home-buying process, much of it tailored to each individual Redfin market.

Other Interesting Thing I Noticed:

Readers seem to fall into two camps: people who want more “fluff” (like cool homes, tips on design, stories from agents, etc.) and people who want no fluff at all and think fluff is stupid and would punch me in the face right now if I would just stop saying “fluff.”

I don’t think there’s a way to make every post appeal to everybody, but it does seem like more variety will keep everyone intermittently not-unhappy. And what more could you ask, really?

By Popular Request:

Finally, a lot of people asked in the free-form comments why we don’t just go back to the old days, when we had lots of different bloggers writing content for every city’s version of Sweet Digs. This was all before my time, but basically it was just too big an operation for us to handle at that point, and we needed to focus more on the core business (which is, of course, panda-cloning.)

We also had the loose-cannon issue crop up a couple times; bloggers saying things in the Redfin name that were completely ridiculous, like that we were cloning pandas.

But moving forward, we do want to distribute the writing work on our blogs out a bit more, both among our agents and (possibly, don’t quote me on this) among non-employees.

How will we approach that? No idea. I’m making this up as I go.

More soon on the survey results, including a downloadable spreadsheet of the results (stripped of any identifying reader info, naturally).

Until then, thanks again, and keep the good ideas coming.

It’s one of my performance goals to write one of these blog posts every week, and every week, I approach the goal with a healthy heapin’ spoonful of a little something I like to call dread, or as they call it in German, dredenscheiningruvenshtocken.*

Now at first I thought that this dread was just some sort of performance anxiety, but I had an epiphany yesterday. Okay, maybe epiphany is a little strong. Maybe “duh-moment” would be more accurate.

I have no idea what you guys and gals want to read about. None at all.

But I’m not supposed to admit that, right? I’m supposed to just keep trying different articles and then track your pageviews like I’m some sort of criminal mastermind, then slowly and gradually hit on a winning formula of pure crowd-pleasingness; drawing you in, addicting you to content without you ever even knowing it. Mwa ha ha.

Frankly, that sounds like a lot of work, and really, I’m not the mastermind type. So I thought I’d just ask. Nicely.

So, could I please ask you to take a minute to fill out a little survey I came up with? Please? Pleeeeeease? (It helps if you picture me staring up at you with big puppy-dog eyes. It works especially well if you picture me as an actual puppy.**)

Take the Sweet Digs survey!

I can’t really promise you any toys or treats or anything, but I can promise that I’ll do my best to give you something worthwhile to read. And then everybody wins.

Thanks all!

*Not real German. Sorry Germany!
**Seriously, can you imagine that? Some cute puppy sitting at a keyboard, typing away with his little paws? That would be adorable!

What? No. I don’t know why you’re chasing a raccoon. Maybe it stole your sandwich.*

Anyway, you climb into the attic, wrestle the raccoon into submission, reclaim your sandwich, and then look over and see a tire jack holding your roof up. Wouldn’t you be a little upset? Even more so than you were about the sandwich?

This is why we have home inspectors. To inspect homes. For things like tire jacks and raccoon colonies.

You might think that you don’t need an inspector. You might say to yourself: “Self, I know how to tell if there’s something wrong with a house.”

But you’re probably wrong, because:

A: A good home inspector has the training and experience needed to identify hundreds of problems with a home’s structure, foundation, wiring, plumbing, ventilation, roofing, and other key components. Many of these problems are not obvious to the casual (or even business-casual) eye.

-and-

B: Home inspectors go into places like crawlspaces and attics, and spiders live in those places. Spiders.

We talked to over a dozen home inspectors, collected more than 200 images of common home inspection issues, and put that info into a neat little interactive home. It won’t make you a home inspection expert, but it will give you an idea of what to look for when touring a home. And hopefully it’ll help you realize how important a good inspection can be before you buy that home.

Don’t wait for a sandwich-stealing raccoon to show you the value of a home inspector. Check out our Interactive Home Inspection right now.

*It’s a roast beef sandwich. Unless you’re a vegan. Then it’s kelp or hay or something.

(Photo courtesy Gary Cornia & Cornia Consulting, LLC.)

That’s not to say we won’t continue trying to make the guide an even better resource for home buyers; we’ll be tweaking, polishing, adding to, and editing this thing until the next ice age. If you have suggestions, comments, or questions about any of our HBG content, please leave a comment here, or on any page of the guide itself.

But we are starting to gear up for our next big guide project — the Redfin Home Seller’s Guide. We’ll be packing it full of useful information, with a heavier emphasis on interactive features, quizzes, graphics, illustrations, and other goodies.

Here’s where you come in: if you’re selling a home, what’s the stuff that keeps you up at night? What can’t you find good information about? What’s confusing? What’s frustrating? What do you wish you’d known three months ago?

Finally, if you’d like to be involved in providing customer feedback on preview versions of the guide as it’s developed, just drop a comment here and let us know. We’d love your input, and if we choose you to be in our customer feedback group, we’ll send you a free Redfin T-shirt.

We thought so too. That’s why we’ve created annotated versions of some common mortgage documents. Specifically, we’ve marked up the Good Faith Estimate and HUD-1, as well as a standard loan application.

We’ve collected these documents here. Just pick the document you want to review and click the yellow info-points to bring up more information about every item.

These interactive loan documents are just a small part of our online Home Buying Guide. We’re adding several new sections to the guide in the next couple of weeks; we’ll let you know when it all goes live.

However, don’t lose hope and don’t panic! The tax board also admits that the estimated number is over-stated:

“The numbers are overstated as there will be duplicate, revised, and invalid applications included as we have not verified any of the applications. In addition, some purchases may be included twice if we have received both a reservation request and an application for the purchase.”

In reality, the credit will likely still be available for first-time home-buyers who close and apply in the first week or two of July, and maybe a little bit longer. The tax board is going to accept 28,000 applications for the credit, and at the current submission rate the tax board will stop accepting applications around the end of July. However there is no guarantee all applicants will receive they credit. The tax board will review the applications and allocate the credit to qualified applicants on a first come, first served basis. So if you’re a first-time buyer and you’re still looking for the right place you may not have enough time to find a home, close your transaction, and still benefit from the tax credit (unless you end up buying new construction – see below). It’s definitely down to the wire, but you should still apply because you never know (the application form is only 2 pages).

If you’re already in escrow on a property, don’t panic. Proceed to your closing date in an orderly, single-file line. Here are a few tips:

• Fill out the application ahead of time, and fax it in to the number on the page linked above as soon as you close your escrow, but not before. Submissions prior to closing will not be processed.
• Make sure you are using the 2010 form. You can find the application on the Tax Board’s website under “Forms and Publications.”
• The tax board will use the time stamp from the faxed application to determine priority order and it literally may come down to missing it by minutes, so be prompt once you’ve closed. At 2,500 applications / week, the tax board is receiving an application every minute if you assume most everything comes in during business hours.

One other thing to note, if you’re trying to get the federal tax credit as well the closing deadline is still June 30th, so make sure you, your lender, and your agent are in constant communication to carry the ball over the goal line.

If you’re hunting for new construction, whether you’re a first-timer or not, the new construction credit is only 41% allocated and will likely last until the end of September at the current application rate. Watch the tax board website for updates. They will post allocation updates every Friday morning so you can see how things are progressing and will post another update when they are no longer taking applications for the two credits.

Happy hunting.

June 30^th is the closing deadline for this tax credit, so there will be a lot of people trying to close on their homes. That means some serious volume at your local lender, with underwriters who are struggling to keep up with all the loan approvals.

Long story short: there might be some unlucky home buyers who try to close in time for the tax credit, but end up slipping into July. You don’t want to be one of those people.

We put together a list of tips for our clients who are trying to close in time to qualify for the tax credit. Here’s what we came up with:

1. Have all of your mortgage approval documentation ready. Put them in an easy-to-transfer electronic format, such as PDF. Keep these files ready on your desktop, a zip drive, or uploaded to an email account.  This documentation includes: pay stubs, W9s, tax returns, bank statements, employment letters, stock positions, ID, and any other information required by your lender.
2. Make sure your bank has ordered and processed your appraisal. Also, be sure that your loan file is in process with underwriting.  An appraisal can take anywhere from a few days to over a week and no loan is ready to close until it has been approved by your lender.
3. Contact your loan officer daily. Be a “squeaky wheel” to get your loan closed. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, and in this case the grease happens to be worth several thousand dollars.
4. Keep your agent in the loop. It’s your agent’s job to keep the process moving and to look out for your best interests. If your agent is napping on the job, nag them. Nicely. But nag them.
5. Move your money around now, and do not take out any new lines of credit.  No new loans, no new cars, no new credit cards, and no new major purchases. New credit = changes to your credit score. Changes to your credit score = your lender’s underwriter starting all over again. The underwriter starting all over again = bad.
6. Schedule your closing as soon as possible. You won’t be able to schedule closing until you get the final underwriter approval from your lender. Your lender should tell your agent as soon as this happens, but don’t take any chances — call your agent to make sure the info went through. Once you have underwriting approval on your loan, work to get your closing date set as early as possible. You want to have at least a two-day buffer before June 30^th, but a week is even better.
7. Perform your final walk through at least 2-3 days before closing. Make sure everything that was supposed to be fixed post-inspection was actually fixed. Also, make sure no new damage popped up in the meantime. This is especially critical with FHA loans, which can be rejected unless the FHA’s standards of livability are met. For example, we’ve had clients who needed to paint a set of stairs or replace rotted wood before their FHA loans were approved. Not the sort of thing you want to be doing on June 29^th.
8. Stay calm and collected. With a little planning, attention to detail, and teamwork with your agent, you should have no problem closing in time to claim the tax credit.