Property Photos: Kaput for 8 hours today
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.
Join the discussion »- July 14th, 2008
- by Galen
- real estate
Not a short sale!
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!“
Join the discussion »- July 11th, 2008
- by Galen
- real estate
Before and After with StreetView
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).
Join the discussion »- July 10th, 2008
- by Galen
- real estate
Estately San Francisco
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.
Join the discussion »- July 9th, 2008
- by Galen
- real estate
Compete sez: Real estate, medical advice or fake phone numbers?
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.
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