July 25, 2007
Introducting Estately True Areas
We just launched Estately True Area Search today to let you search within an area or nearby an area or an address. You’ll see the outline of the neighborhood, zip code or city you’re searching for on the map now. If you look up in the upper left, you’ll be able to limit your search to that area or to within a distance of the neighborhood, city, zip code or address.
Want to live within walking distance of Amazon? Near the Microsoft neighborhood? Share a zip code with Bill Gates? Now you can.
All the normal search options still work just the same. To recap how it works:
- Go to Estately.com
- Search for an area (like Ballard)
- Go to the upper left and limit your search to homes within a distance of Ballard (half mile? don’t go much farther or you’ll miss out on the “feel” of Ballard and end up in Doug’s neighborhood, Greenwood)
Here is Queen Anne:
We’re pretty excited about this feature (as we are with every feature, I suppose). It’s our response to the variety of requests for eliminating the east side (or the west side) from people searches – most Seattle-area home buyers seem to pick one side of Lake Washington and stick to it. It also make subscribing to the actual search you want easier: no longer will homes from Fremont seep into your Ballard search unless you want them to.
Where are the dynamically updated stats showing the average price and size of every home that matches your search? Fear not: they’re over in the upper right hand corner of the map. Just click the plus symbol.
I know I’m probably the only person in Seattle who also lived here in 1993, but we’re looking the slightly worn “Out of the Box” phrase in the eye and giving it new a new, Web 2.1 look and feel (that’s means it’s reflective and has sparkles). Estately True Areas: Search Beyond the Box.
July 25th, 2007 at 7:41 am
This new feature is awesome! Very well done. How did you come up with the neighborhood outlines? I suppose that is a secret.
The only way I can think of off-hand is to look at the historical neighborhood fields of the mls listings, match them with addresses, and use some type of average…
July 25th, 2007 at 8:10 am
Good idea Jonathan, that’s more or less what we do. We take all of our housing data that is tagged by the real estate agent as being in a neighborhood, remove the outliers (some agents love to stretch the truth to get their listings in a better neighborhood), and then programmatically draw a line around the points that are left. Drawing that line is actually what turns out to be the tricky part…and that is a secret!
July 25th, 2007 at 11:51 am
Very nice feature guys, congrats!
July 26th, 2007 at 12:29 pm
Wow– slick as hell.
Congrats!
December 17th, 2007 at 4:27 pm
[...] Estately first launched as ShackPrices a year and a few days ago and we’ve been improving ever since. We’re looking forward to continuing to improve Estately’s real estate search in the coming year. [...]