We both notified the media of important news on the Friday before Memorial Day Weekend. John McCain actually released his news (John McCain and his 1,500 pages of his medical records), but we did manage to inform reporters of our Tuesday release at about the worst time to deliver news all year - just as they were cracking their beers and lighting their barbecues. Really - we weren’t trying to fool anyone. So our Portland release was picked up (35,000 more homes on Estately!) by the msm (that’s the mainstream media if you aren’t hip to the acronyms) not quite on the release date, but close enough.

Yes, it’s another feature improvement made to Estately! As you may or may not know, Seattle isn’t exactly known for its mass transit. The buses—or “road slugs,” as I sometimes call them—are good, but they’re no light rail. On our move south to Oregon, we knew we had to do something more take advantage of the many transit options available in Portland: bus, MAX light rail lines, aerial tram, streetcar, and trolley.

So what did we do? We added rail line to the “Near Transit” search option, allowing you to find houses and condos up to 2 miles away from specified bus and/or rail routes! Be one of the many who are leaving the gas pumps behind for public transit. If a mile-long walk sounds daunting, keep in mind that it takes the average person only 17 minutes to walk one mile. You can use that bus or train ride to get some good reading in, as well. Convinced yet?

This feature isn’t limited to just Portland - you can use it in Seattle and cities-soon-to-be-disclosed, too.

Sometimes, it’s not about the choice of schools nearby, or how close major lines of mass transit are (a bit more on that early next week), and sometimes it’s not even about being a couple blocks away from a good coffee shop (although, admittedly, sometimes it really is about that).

No, sometimes it’s all about the extras (Google agrees with me a half million times). Sometimes, it’s about owning a home with an airstrip! That’s right, you read correctly. An airstrip. At the time of posting, Estately has 50 properties for sale throughout Washington and Oregon that have an airstrip, starting at a mere $160k (you can perform this search yourself by doing a Text Search for “airstrip”). Now you, too, can own a home with airstrip, without paying that airstrip premium. The money you save can easily go toward filling up the ol’ Cessna.

Estately can help you find some real gems. You just have to look.

Estately first launched as ShackPrices a year and a few days ago and we’ve been improving ever since. We’re looking forward to continuing to improve Estately’s real estate search in the coming year.

Thanks for all the support!

People often ask us why we don’t “just put some ads on Estately.” In part, because we don’t click on ads. In fact, we don’t know anyone who clicks on ads, probably because we don’t know that many middle aged women in the Midwest. We built Estately to solve real-world problems; to help people find and sell homes and to help them find great professionals to guide them along the way. Rather than promote this process, we feel ads would get in the way. Ads demand more page views (ever see those sites with a 10 page story and each page has 2 paragraphs - the need to place more ads makes that possible), which, in our case, means less user-friendly interface.

Doug has been working on invisible-to-you backend stuff recently to help us lay the groundwork for some exciting future releases, but he spent some time yesterday tweaking things on Estately. You should find that the bubbles and property information pages load even faster than they did before. Like the gmail team, we are fanatical about speed. We just don’t have quite their man- and woman-power.

I have unfortunately been bogged down in non-development work, but it too should pay off in making the site better in the long (medium?) run. Oh, and we made the View It, Save It, Mail It buttons a little more obvious, so you can stop emailing us asking us how to send a property to a friend or family member. So I guess I have done something useful recently.

Isn’t there a word for something that’s both more and better? Mobetta? If so, we are today launching mobetta neighborhood and city information pages to give potential home buyers a real feel for the neighborhood and to give sellers marketing points they didn’t know existed. I’ll just jump to what’s both more and better:

Best and worst schools for every neighborhood and city in Washington. Check out the schools in West Seattle for instance. Also included in this release are detail pages for every school in Washington.

Once you find the school you absolutely must live near (lets say Ballard High School) you’re only one click away from seeing the properties for sale within walking distance.

For instance:

We’ve boiled schools down to three simple things: where they are, what school district they are in, and the math and school scores for the student body. We hope to encourage conversation about the specifics of each school and district (like posts about which loony toons were elected to the board) sometime soon.

Just remember, school scores aren’t everything - they should be used as a starting point (Bellevue students are better at reading and they have the International Baccalaureate, for the record). We can recommend local Realtors who really know the local schools if you want to know more about your local schools.

We also added information about parks and places (restaurants, statues, anything of interest) for every neighborhood and city. Thanks to the Robots at Forty Three Places, you can see that Paseo is the best reason to live in Fremont. My recommendation: live two miles away so you can walk through Ross Playground and work off half of the meal.

We’re ironing out a couple of bugs as I type. Let us know if you have any questions or suggestions in the comments.

I attended Mind Camp, a local “unconference” this weekend and met a bunch of interesting people who talked about interesting (and geeky) concepts. Mind Camp could have been more aptly named iPhonistan; there were easily more iPhones present than any other make of cell phone. So what’s the first thing I wanted to see? The interface, but Estately on the iPhone was a close second.

Next time you’re driving around and you see a house for sale, you know where to go to see the interior pictures and the details (just type the address into the search box).

Today we’re launching Estately Agent Match, a program to help Washington State home buyers and sellers find the best real estate agent for them. In a nutshell, you tell us what you need in an agent and we match you with 3 real estate agents who are a good match. Each agent will send you a personal introduction and you’ll be able to see reviews and ratings from their past clients. You interview your favorites and you’re ready to pair the power of Estately real estate search with expert advice from a great agent.

Why Agent Match? Ever since we launched the best Seattle-area real estate search site in December, we’ve had users emailing us asking how they can visit properties on the site and wondering if we could recommend any great agents. We had a great search, but at some point our users wanted to bridge over into the real world and get some professional advice. Since then, we’ve produced some happy beta testers and selectively recruited some of the best agents in Western Washington to partner with us. They come from big-name brokerages and small, intimate brokerages and have a variety of approaches to buying and selling properties, but they have some things in common: a commitment to their clients, businesses built on referrals from previous clients, and passionate clients who have nothing but good things to say about their agents.

Why do we match people with three agents? We’re confident that we matching each client with great agents, but personality is important in buying or selling a home. You should be really be able to trust your agent, so we want to be sure that you really get the right agent for you.

We’re excited to be the first site to really focus on helping people find the best agent for them. We’ve recruited a rock-star team of agents, many of whom do so much business from past clients and personal recommendations that we’re the first site they’ve worked with.

We’re very excited to announce our new name today: Estately. After some soul searching, we decided that ShackPrices was fun, but didn’t always convey how good our real estate search is, the variety of homes available on our site, and the vast amount of information available on our site.

We are absolutely smitten with Estately. It’s quick, easy to pronounce, and easily conveys “things concerning real estate.” We realize that entirely meaningless names are all the rage right now, but we’re bucking the trend: Estately. Can you tell how much I like typing it?
We remain focussed on making it easier consumers to find and buy the right home for them. Estately offers the same easy -yet-powerful search interface.

We’re still debating a tag-line, so we propose a contest: If you suggest the tag line we end up using, we’ll give you the very first Estately mug ever to come off the printing press along with a rare and out of print ShackPrices mug. We’ll take suggestions in the comments or on our contact page.

And yes, you can use Estately to search for properties on your iPhone.