Continuing in its goal to open the vault on as much real estate information as possible, Seattle-based Redfin today unveiled new features to its Web site which include automatic links to blog discussions as well as the addition of 9.6 million property photos and 1.4 million recent property sale listings. It is a huge upgrade, with Redfin saying that it increased the amount of data and photos on the site by 340 percent.

The only problem? Redfin's site crashed under the load. When we attempted to get onto the site earlier this afternoon, this message appeared: "We're sorry, we can't process your request." The Los Angeles Times also reported on the outage. Our last few attempts have been successful, but Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman said they have not completely resolved all of the issues and engineers planned to work on the problem into the night.

"I think we figured out how to keep (the site) up but we don't have it in the state we'd like it to be in terms of the performance and stability," said Kelman. Redfin issued a press release at about 6 a.m. on the site upgrade and started encountering issues about 40 minutes later.

Kelman said no customer data had been compromised as a result of the outage, but he did concede that some new customers who were curious about the online real estate service would not have had an ideal experience today. Agents from Redfin were notifying their customers about the problems throughout the day, he said.

Obviously, a Web site outage -- especially on a launch day -- can be extremely troublesome for a company that interacts with its customers online.

"We meet our customers exclusively via our website, and if the site isn’t trustworthy, why would anyone expect the service to be?," Kelman wrote in an earlier blog post introducing the new features today.

In an interview later, Kelman said the outage wasn't so much about lost revenue (as it would be with an advertising-based business) as it was the issue of trust with customers.

Kelman

So, what exactly is being added to the new Redfin? And what does it mean for home buyers and sellers?

Kelman said the company is now pulling data direct from brokerage databases that are used to take properties on and off the market. In Kelman's view, that could give Redfin some of the freshest and most compelling online real estate data on the Web.

If an agent were to sell a property, for example, Redfin could get access to that data within minutes to post on the site. Historically, it had to wait as long as two to eight weeks for that type of sales data to move through the county records' departments.

Redfin also is incorporating real-time discussions about properties by incorporating trackbacks to real estate blogs.

“Near-real-time sales data and trackbacks are a major contribution to our strategy of Freakish Depth, to offer more real estate data than any other site, with higher accuracy and lower latency, drawing on every source available via the Internet and local databases,” said Redfin Chief Technology Officer Michael Young in the release. “A home is the biggest purchase consumers can make, and all our research shows they want to see everything they can get their hands on.”

Redfin is gaining access to the real estate databases as part of the settlement reached last year between The Department of Justice and National Association of Realtors which indicated that online brokers could publish any information that an agent offered in a face-to-face meeting.

I also noticed on the site -- though this may have already been there -- a new coming soon button which lists new markets such as Phoenix, Portland and Atlanta. So, it looks like Redfin may have some expansion plans in the works. It currently offers service in about 10 major markets.