With our latest release, we are allowing consumers to collaborate with friends and family on their home search; every Estately account now comes with the ability to share saved properties, notes on properties, and saved searches with friends and family members and to solicit feedback from them!

Here are some ways to use My Estately sharing:

1. You and your significant other are looking for a new place. Now, each of you can have your own account while, at the same time, collaborating! Write notes on each others saved properties. See what homes your special someone has been looking at recently.

2. Need some input from your friends or family on your first buy? Invite them to look at your saved properties and leave notes on them.

3. Are you an social networking butterfly? Link to your My Estately page on your website/blog/Facebook/wherever!

So what are we trying to achieve with this release? Simple: share; collaborate. Your quest for a new home doesn’t have to be intimidating, especially when you’ve got your friends and family behind you, providing their thought and insight during your search.

Don’t have an account and want to see the new My Estately in action? Take a look at the Estately team’s pages: Galen, Doug, John, Eric, and, lastely, little ol’ me.

This map is amazing.

(from Strange Maps)

Last week the Seattle PI reported that people who give up a car and ride the bus can save up to $8,400 a year. That’s $700 a month!

That’s a lot of cash - it’s the difference between affording payments on a $300,000 home and a $400,000 home. The handy Estately mortgage calculator, given a 30 year loan with $60,000 down and 6.31% interest shows:

• Payments of $1,487 a month on a $300,000 home (example home here)
• Payments of $2,101 a month on a $400,000 home (like this one).

The result: You could ditch one of your cars, go from a $300,000 to a $400,000 home and still have $75 a month left over every month.

Disclaimer: we didn’t include all of the fees and, heck, you might not even qualify for a loan. Don’t sue us if you end up paying more.

I’m no prognosticator, but I do like reading others’ predictions. Seattle Bubble has a nice chart comparing the amount of upwards price movement during the boom against the amount of downward price movement in the recent, ehem, “soft” market. The takeaway:

This snapshot does appear to support the assertion that there is a good correlation between boom and busts cycles across markets -and that generally speaking, the more you go up, the more you go down. But there appear to be outliers versus the trend: Namely, Detroit on the down side, and Seattle, Portland, Charlotte, and possibly New York on the up side. This is interesting to me because the relationship between up and down markets is usually cited as evidence that the Seattle market will remain relatively stable compared to other markets - when according to this view, we appear to be bucking the trend and perhaps poised for a fall. We are down 7% to date when the trend line suggests we should be off 15-20%.

Go read the whole thing

When we were nominated for the Best Web Service Inman News Innovation Award, we were pretty surprised and, being a tiny shop out of Seattle up against some industry giants, we didn’t expect much to come of it. So I was extremely surprised when I, on the final day of the Inman Connect conference last week, we won the award!

There were no tears from the runners-up and, throughout the conference, we received what seemed like more than our fair share of praise for Estately’s real estate search. We’re pretty proud of what two guys with a clear vision and a serious willingness to iterate and constantly improve have done (you may have noticed from our recent Portland and San Diego releases that we can do a lot more now with five).

We want to thank Inman for the award - it is truly an honor - and we are going to do our best to create enough new, fantastic home-finding features over the next year that we are eligible for it again.

A special shout-out to the nominated blogs this year - what a fantastic selection:
AgentGenius – A winner of a blog (and of an award) with a host of fantastic agents writing explicitly for agents. How do you become a fantastic agent? AgentGenius has some good ideas.
1000Watt Blog - A great blog written by a couple of dudes who think long and hard about what is wrong with the real estate industry (and how to fix it).
Big Picture Blog - What more description do you need - it’s the Big Picture. It could also be called Macro Master.
FBS Blog - It is amazing to me how interesting and thoughtful a guy who runs a company that creates software for MLSes can be day after day. What will the mls mess look like in a few years?
Homegain Real Estate Blog - Homegain real estate blog is what happens when you bring together the heavy hitters who blog about real estate and ask them to talk shop.