Estately Smart Schools: A New Way to Find a Home

Today we are creating a new way for people to find a home: Estately Smart Schools. For people who want to live in a certain school area, Estately Smart Schools will help search only the homes for sale in any school’s attendance area.

We think this is a dramatic improvement in the way people find a home. Until today, people had to do an awkward multi-website + IRL (In Real Life) dance wherein they looked at homes, then had look at obscure school district maps and/or find someone who knows to ask, then go back and eliminate the homes that serve the wrong school, then look at a new batch of homes that fit within the bounds as they remembered them. Phew! All in all, it was a time-consuming and crummy way to make decisions.

Now you can pick the school or schools you want in your service area, type the name into Estately (we’ll help you spell it correctly with auto-complete) and we will show you every home for sale in that school’s area. Estately’s home listings come from MLS data, updated many times every day – we are hyper comprehensive and up-to-date. Additionally, you can combine the school search with any other criteria that are important to you – number of bedrooms, price range, the size of the yard or more.

Nearly a quarter (21%) of respondents to a survey of homebuyers conducted by the National Association of Realtors in 2008 indicated that school related issues are a deciding factor in their selection of a home. Estately is proud to offer our new Smart Schools feature as a tool for all homebuyers, regardless of their preferences for certain school districts or their familial status.

This has been one of our most requested features since the day we launched, but I think the reason it isn’t even more requested is because people don’t imagine that something like Smart Schools is possible. We’re going to be rolling out some improvements over the coming week to help people find Smart Schools even if they aren’t looking for it.

Estately Smart Schools is available now in (along with a randomly selected school from our database):

• Atlanta (like Riverwood High School)
• Baltimore (like Pikesville High)
• Bethesda (like Walt Whitman High)
• Chicago (like Kenwood Academy High School)
• Los Angeles (like Eagle Rock High)
• Oakland (like Skyline High)
• Portland (like Grant High School)
• Sacramento (like Mira Loma High)
• Seattle (like Roosevelt High School)
• San Diego (like Rancho Bernardo High)
• And a number of smaller markets (like Addison Elementary in Marietta, GA,  Lincoln High in Stockton, CA or Western High in Anaheim, CA)

I’m incredibly proud of the Estately team for producing such an easy-to-use solution to what was until now such a hard problem for people looking for a home. May the upgrades continue!