Today we’re launching Estately Agent Match, a program to help Washington State home buyers and sellers find the best real estate agent for them. In a nutshell, you tell us what you need in an agent and we match you with 3 real estate agents who are a good match. Each agent will send you a personal introduction and you’ll be able to see reviews and ratings from their past clients. You interview your favorites and you’re ready to pair the power of Estately real estate search with expert advice from a great agent.

Why Agent Match? Ever since we launched the best Seattle-area real estate search site in December, we’ve had users emailing us asking how they can visit properties on the site and wondering if we could recommend any great agents. We had a great search, but at some point our users wanted to bridge over into the real world and get some professional advice. Since then, we’ve produced some happy beta testers and selectively recruited some of the best agents in Western Washington to partner with us. They come from big-name brokerages and small, intimate brokerages and have a variety of approaches to buying and selling properties, but they have some things in common: a commitment to their clients, businesses built on referrals from previous clients, and passionate clients who have nothing but good things to say about their agents.

Why do we match people with three agents? We’re confident that we matching each client with great agents, but personality is important in buying or selling a home. You should be really be able to trust your agent, so we want to be sure that you really get the right agent for you.

We’re excited to be the first site to really focus on helping people find the best agent for them. We’ve recruited a rock-star team of agents, many of whom do so much business from past clients and personal recommendations that we’re the first site they’ve worked with.

We’re very excited to announce our new name today: Estately. After some soul searching, we decided that ShackPrices was fun, but didn’t always convey how good our real estate search is, the variety of homes available on our site, and the vast amount of information available on our site.

We are absolutely smitten with Estately. It’s quick, easy to pronounce, and easily conveys “things concerning real estate.” We realize that entirely meaningless names are all the rage right now, but we’re bucking the trend: Estately. Can you tell how much I like typing it?
We remain focussed on making it easier consumers to find and buy the right home for them. Estately offers the same easy -yet-powerful search interface.

We’re still debating a tag-line, so we propose a contest: If you suggest the tag line we end up using, we’ll give you the very first Estately mug ever to come off the printing press along with a rare and out of print ShackPrices mug. We’ll take suggestions in the comments or on our contact page.

And yes, you can use Estately to search for properties on your iPhone.