We worked hard to make Estately exceedingly easy to jump into and start searching for homes, yet also extremely powerful. This means we limited the myriad of search options we could have added, combined other options, and made the options that only 0.1% of the users in this world “absolutely need” accessible via the text search box. Our goal is to get people to searching and refining in seconds. When we recently added notes, we made some design choices to keep this ease of use.

Make it easy to add a note. And another.

No links, no separate pages. Just click in a box at the bottom of the page, write a note, and post. If you want to add another note, do it again.

Type and add - pure and simple

Make notes accessible

New, unregistered users and old logged in users alike can add notes - we skipped the forced login screens. People who stumble on the site can write as many notes as they want. Of course, we don’t want people to accidentally abandon their notes and lose them to the ether, so we encourage them to sign up or log in. Notes are permanently saved when people log in.

The log in warning appears when you create a note

Make notes easy to search

Don’t add more clutter to the interface - we let you search your notes through the text search interface that a lot of people are using already.

Of you being interested in a the same house another client of your agent? Slim to none, but it happened. They’ll describe the outcome this weekend.

I have always had a horrible memory, but recently technology has made it even worse. I only remember keywords now and whenever I want to remember something, I search my computer or my gmail (I write myself memory emails). I think a lot of people are like me in this respect. So when I look at one of the 42,643 homes for sale in Washington (or the 3,388 homes for sale in Seattle alone), I only remember the ones with dramatic photos (good or bad).

There is a better way

Add a note to the property. Once you learn more about it, add another. As you go along, you’ll collect a nice inventory of information about the homes in a neighborhood and you’ll (almost) never forget what you know about a house.

Questions you can now answer:

• “Was this the one that could politely be described as a “fixer?” “Yep!”
• “What did we think of this one when we saw it? It says here we liked it, but our agent thought it was priced about $40,000 too high.”

Your notes are searchable

Full text search already let you search pretty much everything you see on the details page for a home - the agent comments, the amenities, and pretty much everything else. Your notes are included in text search too. Take notes with the confidence you can find them again through a quick, dynamic search.

Step 1: Find a house and type a note

Step 2: Add a note. Rinse and repeat if necessary

You don’t have to be logged in to give it a try - just pull up a home and add a note.

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.

Thanks for all the support!

According to RemodelingOnline, on average, no major home improvement project yields a significantly higher resale value than you put into it. Here are the stats from the Seattle area and here is a soon to be pay-walled summary. So, as with most things in life, think about what makes you happy first, then think about how much it will cost.

That said, if new siding, a new deck, or a new kitchen would make you happy, it’s 80% off once you sell your home:

The most profitable project on the national level was upscale siding replacement, recouping 88 percent of costs upon resale. Wood deck additions and wood window replacements also returned more than 80 percent of costs, at 85 percent and 81 percent, respectively. On a national average, the only interior project to return more than 80 percent of remodeling costs this year was a minor kitchen remodel, returning 83 percent of project costs at resale.

People often ask us why we don’t “just put some ads on Estately.” In part, because we don’t click on ads. In fact, we don’t know anyone who clicks on ads, probably because we don’t know that many middle aged women in the Midwest. We built Estately to solve real-world problems; to help people find and sell homes and to help them find great professionals to guide them along the way. Rather than promote this process, we feel ads would get in the way. Ads demand more page views (ever see those sites with a 10 page story and each page has 2 paragraphs - the need to place more ads makes that possible), which, in our case, means less user-friendly interface.