Townhouses: So Popular Nobody Wants Them
Last week we rolled out one of our most-requested features: townhouse search. Internally we call it “Remove #@!*#*@ Townhomes From My Search!” If you like townhomes, it does come with the ability to only look at townhomes too.
The townhome boom of the aughts was particularly concentrated in Seattle, but people throughout America are passionate about the topic of shared walls. Given the vehement hatred of townhomes by many of our users, it might seem amazing that any townhomes ever get built, let alone sold – but as one of our Seattle agents pointed out to me last month, everyone hates townhomes until they see the condition of the farther away free standing homes that are smaller and with fewer bedrooms that they can get for the same amount of money.
One thing is a virtual certainty: if you are at all serious about looking at both townhouses and old-school houses, odds are you’ll probably end up in a townhouse. It’s hard to beat the value. And if you are one of those people, we now have a townhouse icon so you can see them on the map.
Whether you are a townhome hater or a born again townhome lover, you can now tailor your search on Estately to reflect your deeply-held beliefs and never be forced to look at the way the other half lives again. Like the House and Condo search option, Townhouses show up on the map with an icon depicting a blue roof and shared wall.
This is available in many of our major metros – like these townhomes in Seattle and these townhomes in Los Angeles - and we will be rolling it out to additional metros over the next week.
Enjoy and, as always, contact us with any questions.
Join the discussion »Starting 2012 Right: Hello New York! (and Dallas! and Fort Worth!)
Today we are announcing the launch of Estately in the Dallas / Fort Worth Texas area and in Westchester and Putnam Counties in New York.
We have no allusions about the likelihood of our transit information on every property getting much use in Dallas, but in place where walking is unheard of, we find walkers really value having Walk Scores and high Walk Score neighborhoods do exist: Dallas only has one property available with a 95+ Walk Score, but in that building, you can go high and build out the penthouse or go for one of the other 5 units.
There are a many more listings in Dallas with 90+ Walkscores (here are a few) including one from 1865. Fort Worth also has three buildings that can play the 90+ Walkscore game (here are two).
It should be no great surprise that there are a lot more great Walk Score homes in New York. We have 95+ Walk Score listings all the way up the Hudson, from this place in Peekskill to this place in Croton-on-Hudson to this listing in Tarrytown.
We’re also bringing our (IMHO) awesome school search to Dallas and New York. Here’s an example for Bear Creek Elementary in Euless, TX:
Zoom in any where with homes for sale on Estately to see the local schools on the map. Click on any school to see its boundaries.
Backing out, I want to point out that we aren’t just launching in the big cities of Texas. You’ll find Estately to the north in Sherman, to the West in Weatherford, to the South in Midlothian and to the East in Greenville. From an outsiders view point, Texas appears to be a state rich with flavors and fragrances, from sweet-sounding Flower Mound and Grapevine to the savory Mesquite and the potentially foul smelling Sulphur Springs.
Our new New York markets that the average American may recognize include Yonkers, Poughkeepsie, and New Rochelle.
Join the discussion »Dear Washington DC, We’re Sorry!
Washingtonians (of the DC variety), Annapolitans, Baltimoreans and their neighbors, we would like to apologize for providing you with a sub-par search experience recently.
Recently some for sale listings on Estately were being removed from our map search before going off of the market. They still had dedicated pages on Estately showing all the nitty-gritty details we are known for, but they were not discoverable through our map search. I wish we could blame it on the earthquake or contagious congressional dysfunction, but I am simultaneously glad to let you know that we were able fix the problem without waiting for an antidote to political infighting and gridlock (and that as native Seattleites, we would need much more violent earth shaking to disrupt service).
New listings and old listings alike are available again in the greater DC area – from Friendly to Wolf Trap and Arnold to Bowie (and even from Germantown to Franconia). Or see every home for sale on N street in Georgetown.
Estately is backed by the most comprehensive and up-to-date database of homes available for the Greater Washington DC area – listings from the MRIS Multiple Listing Service – and we are keeping a close eye on this area to make sure this problem does not bubble up again. Please let us know if we’re missing even one listing or one iota of information on any listing – we are listening!
Join the discussion »Why Maps Matter for Real Estate
If we are to believe Greg Robertson, (Another nail in the coffin for map search?), the coffin is being hammered shut on real estate map search as I type because one of our competitors pulled their map prototype after a week or two in the wild.
But Greg is blurring product type with product execution and product audience.
When a company fails to successfully execute a feature, product or business, it does not mean that feature is dead. Apple, for instance, is a company that seems to exclusively create market segments where others failed so many times that the segment was considered dead (remember these?). Weebly grew like a weed at the exact same time that Yahoo decided Geocities was a dead business. Coupon sites have existed since the dawn of the internet, but Groupon got the formula just right. Close to my heart, Home Advisor’s failure wasn’t an indicator that people didn’t want to use the internet to find homes online, it just meant they went about it the wrong way.
Map search is alive and well in real estate: Estately’s surging user base is just one indicator of its health (more on that sometime soon). Traffic growth aside, the root of many of our feature requests is asking us to tweak our map interface: our customers don’t want us to run from maps; they want our maps to work harder for them.
While maps can be tricky for novices, they provide a world of information that merely selecting “90210” from a drop down and looking at a list of results doesn’t provide. Our users often tell us that they don’t care about arbitrary zip code boundaries or neighborhood boundaries – they want to see the homes for sale on a map and pick which ones they are interested in for themselves (they do care about school boundaries though). When users do care about zip code or city boundaries, they still want to see if homes are on major streets or near parks before they decide to learn more about them.
Maps are not the logical search medium for most other industries. Hotels need to be in the area, but factors like major vs. minor street, corner vs. middle of the street and proximity to parks and amenities aren’t nearly as important for hotel seekers. Restaurants are in the same category – the price is primarily for the food and sometimes the view, and eating a block from the freeway isn’t as scary as living there. But in real estate, a marker on a map tells you more about a house or condo than a thousand words could.
So why do most of our competitors stick to list search – and even go so far as to say that their internal testing shows that list search is better for users?
Three reasons:
- Map search is extremely hard to get right. Getting map search right is like cooking a chicken – half baked isn’t half as good, it just makes you sick. Map search unfortunately defies a lot of the incremental, iterative Lean Startup advice; there is no incremental shift from list search to map search that is useful or an improvement until you have fully made the leap.
- Another problem with map search is that it’s difficult to figure out if you got it right. A lot of traditional usability studies involve testing with people off the street or people who are in your target audience (i.e., thinking of buying a home). Map search is typically best for consumers who are dedicated to buying a home or being a real estate junkie; it annoys dilettantes.
- Lastly, maps just aren’t conducive to wall-to-wall ads. Our competitors attempt to help real estate agents and others wiggle into people’s psyches while they’re trying to find a home they want. Our business on the other hand is driven by helping people find and buy homes online.
We believe maps-done-right are a core part of what has helped Estately grow and prosper. We are glad that they’re hard to get right and we are very excited about the improvements we have in the pipeline. The fact that our competition is dropping out of the game – along with consistent growth we’re seeing in new and return traffic – just helps confirm that our hard work is paying off.
Join the discussion »New neighborhood, city, and zip code boundaries
Quick update: we just added more accurate (and beautiful) neighborhood and zip codes boundaries to Estately, so you can see every curve and bump of 90210 and the precise contours of Hollywood, LA. More importantly, you can be more confident than ever that you’re seeing every property in the area.
I find these fascinating (I’m a geo nerd). I like knowing that 98102 includes a little parcel north of the water. I find the San Francisco’s Mission’s tail interesting.
Obviously neighborhoods are a lot more subjective than zip codes. We continue to let you add some distance (just to the right of the search box) or just outright remove the boundary and limit your search only by what you can see on the entire map.
I want to thank our friends at Maponics for making it dead simple to bring this to you. They obsess over getting the boundaries just right (that’s all they do!) so we can obsess over making it easier for you to find and buy homes online.
Join the discussion »