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It’s All About the Extras

Sometimes, it’s not about the choice of schools nearby, or how close major lines of mass transit are (a bit more on that early next week), and sometimes it’s not even about being a couple blocks away from a good coffee shop (although, admittedly, sometimes it really is about that).

No, sometimes it’s all about the extras (Google agrees with me a half million times). Sometimes, it’s about owning a home with an airstrip! That’s right, you read correctly. An airstrip. At the time of posting, Estately has 50 properties for sale throughout Washington and Oregon that have an airstrip, starting at a mere $160k (you can perform this search yourself by doing a Text Search for “airstrip”). Now you, too, can own a home with airstrip, without paying that airstrip premium. The money you save can easily go toward filling up the ol’ Cessna.

Estately can help you find some real gems. You just have to look.

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When buying a home, living near rail lines is better

We just released some improvements to our transit search (here are homes for sale within a quarter mile of Sound Transit’s Link Light Rail line) and, while we let people search for homes near bus routes, we’ve really prioritized light rail lines in our latest release. When people think about buying a home, they think about the fixed amenities – the rail stops – and not the transient things like buses. The huge upfront investment in rail and relatively smaller operational costs means that it’s really hard for agencies to kill or dramatically reduce transit and people know that.

Not only is rail better than buses, the word is that Seattle’s rail is going to be better than Portland’s rail. What do you think about that, Portland Transport?

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What’s the buzz on Portland real estate blogs?

Now that we’re in Portland, we have an array of new real estate blogs to subscribe to. I’ve been subscribing to the Turner Realtor’s Portland Real Estate blog for quite some time now to get a glimpse into what people are discussing in the Portland area.

Ron Ares is blogging about the newest real estate search website in town on his Portland Real Estate agent blog.

Turner Realtors spotted the now-highly respected Case-Schiller Report showing a 2% drop in Portland prices, year-over-year. Welcome to the Seattle market, folks.

Salvador Del Cid’s Portland blog points out something a lot of people forget; homes that are really good deals still get lots of offers.

The Oregonian’s real estate blog wonders what a 0.1% increase in prices between 2007 and 2008 actually means.

Like a lot of other folks, Tony and Libby Kelly are trying to nail down the metrics that will show a recovery in the market.

Mike Rohrig wants a map based search – sorry we don’t have an offering for agents right now, Mike, but you’re welcome to use Estately in the meantime.

Portland even has its own bubble blog in the Portland Housing Bubble, which reminds me of the ever popular and less objectively named Seattle Bubble. They even have open comment posts, just like the Seattle Bubble used to.

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Announcing Estately’s Portland Real Estate Search

Hi Portland, meet Estately, your newest real estate search website.

We’re adding 35,000+ Portland homes to our existing database of nearly 50,000 Western Washington homes. While it might rain a tad bit less in Portland (and you have a few more sunny days a year), we have a lot in common. While not fantastic, the real estate market is holding up relatively well in both cities compared to the rest of America. We both love local coffee (Portland’s Stumptown Coffee is even creeping into Seattle) and hip bands move back and forth (they mostly move to Portland). Portland is a sort of hipper, artsier, cheaper and more strip-club friendly Seattle.

Portland is no longer Stumptown, a name it earned in the mid-1800s when it was all stumps (we also share a tradition of keeping old growth forests as far away from populated centers as possible). A quick glance at our stats show that the 5,142 properties for sale in Portland proper have an average price of about $405,000 but you can find a place for as cheap as $84,000 (even if you apparently are not allowed to live there).

We hope we make it easier for you, Portland, to search for a home in the hip neighborhoods – Hawthorne, Woodstock, Lloyd, Belmont, The Pearl District, and Sellwood – and the less hip ones. We also hope we make it easier to decide if a house is actually right for you before having a looksy. We have math and reading scores for the schools nearby every property (take this one for example) and, in this transit friendly city, the nearby bus and Trimet rail stops (another example). We even let you search for homes near specific bus and rail lines so you can live the transit-friendly one car lifestyle you’ve always wanted to.

So give us a whirl and take some notes on a property or subscribe to email alerts notifying you of price changes on a property.

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I hate golf as much as the next guy

Golf Punk Magazine cover

And until I belatedly read the the New York Times bit on golf, I thought the next guy still liked golf.

If you are the rebel who still golfs, the golfer who subscribes to GolfPunk magazine, full text will help you find a home on a golf course: A quick search of the greater Seattle area shows about 400 homes advertising proximity to golf courses. (check it out – it’s a funny clustering of homes by the area’s golf courses).

My preferred search is “-golf“, which eliminates those 400 homes from the search and means I can get more non-golf home for my money.

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