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Estately is getting a massage

Sorry about a little unscheduled downtime this morning – Estately is getting a massage. Remember when Flickr used to get massages every other day? This is our first this year. We’ll let you know when we’ve worked the knots out.

massage machine

Update: Knot free and working thanks to the massage machine.

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Terrain on Google maps

You can now see the hills and valleys of America on Google maps. It’s not available for non-Google sites yet (including Estately). I love being able to see the direction of the valleys left after the retreat of the Cordilleran Glaciers just 10,000 years ago. Here is an example that is just south of Bremerton:


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Buy a home with no photos, save money

Our whole job is to make finding and buying homes easier, but it’s the hard to classify homes that are a deal.

If you’re willing to do a little extra work (or you have a local agent who has actually been to all the homes for sale in your area), you can really score – Frank Llosa did a little digging and found that homes for sale with fewer photos sold for less:

  • 1 Photo= 91.2% of Original Price
  • 6 Or more= 95% of Original Price

And they sold more slowly (DOM is Days on Market, or the number of days the house was on the market before it sold):

  • 1 Photo = 70 DOM Avg
  • 6 Photos =40 DOM
  • 16-19 = 36 DOM
  • 20 MAX= 32 DOM

(via ReAgent in Connecticut)

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Get high on 0 down

In case you missed it, the Seattle suburbs are the center of the home grown pot operation universe, brought to you courtesy of the so-called “liar loan,” which allows (or allowed) people to get a loan without proof of income.

Steve Heaney, the president of the chapter of the Washington Association of Mortgage Brokers said:

“I don’t think anybody in my industry — other than the bad guys, and I believe they’re a very small percentage — really want to facilitate the drug dealers. But if we eliminate completely loans with alternative documentation, there’s certainly a lot of legitimate Americans who aren’t going to be able to buy a home,” Heaney says.

And he means Americans who make a lot of income that isn’t easily documented. Like drug growers?

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Estately: Tryptophan free for Thanksgiving

Doug has been working on invisible-to-you backend stuff recently to help us lay the groundwork for some exciting future releases, but he spent some time yesterday tweaking things on Estately. You should find that the bubbles and property information pages load even faster than they did before. Like the gmail team, we are fanatical about speed. We just don’t have quite their man- and woman-power.

I have unfortunately been bogged down in non-development work, but it too should pay off in making the site better in the long (medium?) run. Oh, and we made the View It, Save It, Mail It buttons a little more obvious, so you can stop emailing us asking us how to send a property to a friend or family member. So I guess I have done something useful recently.

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