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.
Update: Knot free and working thanks to the massage machine.
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:
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:
And they sold more slowly (DOM is Days on Market, or the number of days the house was on the market before it sold):
(via ReAgent in Connecticut)
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?
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.
Marketers and developers - the same place as nearly any other young city. I like the concept that even the oldest and hoity-toitiest Seattle neighborhood names come from developers:
But even Seattle’s crunchiest neighborhood got its name from land developers, who named it after their hometown in Fremont, Neb.
Capitol Hill owes its name to turn-of-the-century superdeveloper James Moore, who bought property and persuaded a state legislator to introduce a bill to move the state capital there.
“It was really just a real estate promotion,” said Seattle historian Paul Dorpat. “There was no chance in hell they would do that … but he knew he could get publicity.”
Another name that stuck first appeared in a Seattle Weekly article in the late 1980s about how the industrial area south of downtown was changing with new businesses and artists moving in. Editor Rose Pike suggested the name Sodo for SOuth of the soon-to-be-blown-up KingDOme.
The name really caught on after developer Frank Stagen erected red neon signs on top of the area’s huge Sears building — until Starbucks replaced them with its mermaid.
I personally like descriptive, genuinely bottom up names like “Pill Hill” (aka “first hill”), “Frelard” (Between Ballard and Fremont), and the Denny Regrade (the area where they dragged tons of dirt from the top of Denny St. its base, thus regrading it).
A quick check using our text search shows no one (not a soul!) advertising a “West Edge,” “Park District,” or “Midtown” property. Maybe the Park District developer should learn from history and get his state legislator to promote a resolution to move Olympic National Park to North of downtown.
Sure, the Seattle-area real estate market is slowing down to “normal” rates while the rest of the nation wonders how long the downturn will last. But the online land rush, the domain land rush, is still going strong. Computer.com just sold for $2.2 million. Investment.com for $900k. No Bank of America no-fee-but-still-bad-deal loans available for these guys.
Off topic, but sort of on topic, here’s one map of the domains of the world (unfortunately size is not proportionate to registrations):
via: StrangeMaps
