Due to a nearly 8-hour outage with Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (commonly known as S3), you may have noticed that property photos have been missing. Thankfully, as I write this post, S3 is coming back online, and so, too, will Estately property photos. We apologize for this troublesome little issue that began shortly after 9 this morning. This isn’t the first time we’ve experienced such problems with Amazon S3, so we’ll have to look in to possibly ensuring that this is the last time we have these problems, if you catch my drift.

Salesmanship is all about taking away the objections. Listing agents know that people looking to buy homes are sick of waiting 3 months to get a rejection letter from a bank and they’re starting to advertise the fact that homes are “not a short sale!“

Streetview imagery is already getting old and it’s quickly becoming a good source of pre-listing, pre-touchup information. Take a look at the photos of 1471 Felspar in San Diego and then scroll down to the StreetView (you may need to do a 180 on the StreetView).

We launched in the Bay Area today with over 40,000 San Francisco homes and condos from four Bay Area MLSes today. This is our fourth major market - Seattle, Portland, and San Diego are all live on Estately right now - and the third major market we have entered this summer.

This is a geographic release - there aren’t buckets of new bells and whistles, just buckets of new homes for sale. We are excited to bring transit-oriented Real Estate search for BART and other local transit agencies to a very dense, transit-friendly area (Portland was a good starting point). So check out Estately San Francisco and let us know what you think.

PS: I’ll be down in the Bay Area to speak at Inman Connect in two weeks, so give me a call if you have a converted historic firehouse for me to stay in.

Everyone loves to talk about Compete.com’s accuracy problems, so this shouldn’t be new to anyone who has done competitive research on Compete. However, it is amazing how off-base Compete.com can be.

Question: How does Compete do with estately’s keywords driving traffic (follow along here)?

Number One: 27628 69th ave nw, stanwood, wa
We rank for it! But Compete actually now outranks us. I haven’t checked the logs, but I can guarantee that isn’t a top keyword for us.

Number Two: estately seattle
We had better rank for it (and we do)! Woo-hoo! We pwn Estately Seattle. Would you pay for more gems like that?

Number Three: 503-222-7777
Nope! We don’t rank for it. And, as far as we can tell, it’s never been on the site. We aren’t in the random, Portland area phone number business.

Number Four: prototype onmouseover
Nope! We don’t even rank for it. And, as far as we can tell, it hasn’t ever been on the site. We do use the prototype javascript framework though… Good try?

Number Five: diabetes
Nope! We don’t even rank for it. No one in my family has diabetes, but I can’t speak for the rest of Estately. We certainly don’t have any “diabetes homes” for sale.

Disclaimer: we’re small and don’t get scads of traffic. HOWEVER! We do get some traffic. And nearly all of our search engine traffic is searching for text that is on our site (and text that pertains to real estate!). When your data is embarrassingly bad, don’t display it.

And we’re serving them in Seattle and Portland. San Diego transit agencies will not share their stop locations, but they say they are considering it.

CNN story:

Portland homes for sale near light rail include this Overlook house and this Laurelhurst house.

Bonus link: Commuters are saying goodbye to the suburbs.

If you said, “nicer than Seattle’s,” I’d say, “bingo”. Is it nice enough to pack up, buy a house, and move there? One San Diego real estate blog is wondering if golf fans were enticed by the weather while watching the US Open. I think we can safely assume that Galen wasn’t watching it.

The San Diego Zoo, apparently, has its own Meerkat Manor, as the meerkats at the Elephant Mesa exhibit had a period of “general upheaval,” and Kasane appears to be pregnant. Who’s the father? We’re not even sure Kasane knows the answer to that question. They sure are cute, though, aren’t they?

The Kris Berg at the San Diego Home Blog has an interesting post about property value ranges (when the “seller will entertain offers between $535,000 and $595,000″). Why would a seller do this? Well, you’ll just have to read the post.

If you plan on being in San Diego–or, if you’re already there (lucky you)–the San Diego Blog has a good post about what you can do to have fun during the summer in San Diego. Be aware that alcohol has recently been banned from many San Diego beaches. If you’d rather be naked, you can always visit a couple clothing optional beaches in San Diego. Strangely, San Diego Blog doesn’t mention these beaches.

Also, there wasn’t much talk about it in the blogosphere, but the San Diego County Fair is in full swing until July 6th. There’s a lot of fun to be had there.