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.

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!

But we’ve gone further: in the last 9 months, we’ve launched:

• faster search and pageloads
• better balloons on the map search (with buttons to quickly view all photos for a home)
• auto-complete for addresses, neighborhoods, and cities from the search box
• a new easy-to-use search interface
• and the capacity to scroll through condos in the window on the map

Behind the scenes we ripped out and refactored tons of our code, so Estately is more stable and we can make changes even faster. Right now we ship improvements and updates 3-4 times a day (seriously: we release new code multiple times a day).

At the beginning of July we were at a crossroads: we have some features we are really excited about in our pipeline, but our front page really made people think the site was created by a couple of guys in their basement. And let the record show that we are bigger and better than that: we are now a handful of guys (and a lady!) in some of Seattle’s cheapest office space.

More importantly, the homepage wasn’t representative of the experience. We are proud of Estately (and are eager to continue building on it), but until today it was hard to fight your way past the front-page experience.  which is not a good starting point in an industry where people judge you in 5 seconds.

It was time for our front page to reflect how good the rest of the site is. Behold our new front page! It looks incrementally better as you move from Internet Explorer 6 to 7 to 8 and then to Firefox / Safari or Chrome.

The primary objective of our front page is still the same: get people to search as quickly as possible. For our visitors who have never seen or heard of Estately, we now aim to be more informative, to let people know which markets we are in, that we have the most comprehensive index of homes for sale, updated many times a day from the MLS, and, in a softer sense, that we care about details.

Our aim was to make the front page look as elegant as the rest of the site works (if that makes any sense).

We’d love your feedback.

About a year ago, after launching New York and Chicago, we looked at the year ahead and realized that:

1. The capital markets were hosed – the “raise more” door was closed
2. There was a chance we weren’t going to make *quite* enough on our existing trajectory to make it into the black

It was time to get creative.

What Did We Do Right?

Get Even Leaner

We looked high and low to find every expense we could cut. We couldn’t save much by cutting the co-founders’ “living wage” (aka “insulting wage”). So we slowed down our geographic expansion because new markets require upfront investment. We also froze technology purchases and skipped a couple of business trips.

Then we set out to improve the bottom line.

Test. Test Again

By last winter, we began A/B testing on a weekly basis. We started by making it easier for anyone who wanted to tour a home on Estately to do so – and increased our “property tour rate” by 200%. The changes we made were significant and are the reason we are successful today. The awesome thing is that we can improve further: Our most recent A/B test improved our conversion rate by over 30%.

1) Introduce Distractions. 2) … 3) Profit!

We chose this route in a very round-about way. We get a lot of inquiries from people who want a white-label Estately, but until this year we considered white labeling to be a potentially fatal distraction. Andy Liu’s story on NetConversions, the company he started right in the midst of the dotcom crash and eventually sold to aQuantive, changed our thinking. During a conversation he probably doesn’t remember, he told me they did “semi-related and pretty-unrelated” side projects to keep the lights after the dotcom crash. We realized we could do that, add some more revenues to the bottom line, and not lose sight of other priorities.

We were lucky enough to find Sutton West Coast, a Vancouver-area real estate brokerage that wanted a world-class real estate search product, but didn’t want to build it in-house. We penned a deal in the spring and we launched Sutton’s Vancouver Real Estate search service early this month. We also worked out an arrangement with Findwell, an awesome Seattle-area brokerage, to power their search.

Our white label deals are only a small part of our revenues. We probably would have been better off financially if we had focused solely on Estately, but we we weren’t in a position to risk some downside for a bigger upside. Regular and predictable revenues from the white label sites reduced the risk of running out of money.

What Can We Do Better?

Our real estate search product is already fantastic, but we know dozens of ways we can improve – and become the de facto real estate search in the markets we operate in. We just need to execute.

We Forgot To Tell the Story

We haven’t introduced ourselves to people who want to write about us. When we do, we don’t always tell them about our awesome snappy map search, our compelling features like transit-search (think convenient to BART), or the ability to search within a distance of an area (like West Babylon).

We got involved in feature releases and improvements, leaving fantastic new features un-blogged and unmentioned. The most popular feature request was for sales history on every home – a feature we launched without any fanfare in the spring (see it live on this Naperville home). We need to keep people better informed of what we’re doing!

Consumers who have used Estately love it – most of them have just never tried it.

Our Agents are Awesome – But you’d have to ask us to find out

We collect feedback from everyone who interacts with one of our agents and we have aggressively promoted our best agents. Thousands of people have worked with an Estately partner agent and people rave about our agents. There is no sign of this on Estately.

OK, we got a little distracted

We launched with what was hands-down the best search interface in the industry, but we’ve been working on so many new features and projects that we have occasionally lost sight of the core mission: search. User interface, speed and data accuracy are what have kept consumers coming back to us – we need to keep it that way.

What is next?

Seeing the end of your “runway” lengthen and eventually disappear into the horizon is liberating.

This winter will see us back on the road – expanding into new territories – and, more importantly, back to our product-development, user interface-obsessed roots. We’re taking Estately from being very useful to indispensable for people searching for a home.

We are now the best place for home buyers to find a home to fit a healthy lifestyle that takes advantage of nearby access to local shops, parks, public transit, schools, workplaces and more. Washington residents of pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods weigh 7 pounds less than residents of sprawling neighborhoods, residents of walkable neighborhoods drive less and suffer fewer car accidents, and studies show that every 10 minutes added to commute time results in 10% less time spent in community activities.

In addition to the health benefits of living in a walkable neighborhood, eliminating a car can save homeowners as much as $8,000 a year according to AAA and, in the words of Christopher Leinberger, author of Option of Urbanism, home buyers who eliminate a car can use their savings to buy a home that costs approximately $135,000 more.

Want to take a look at our new Walk Score search feature first hand? Here are some stats we’ve gathered, along with links to each search (ordered by walk friendliness):

• San Francisco – 49% of all homes (940 of 1890)
• Chicago – 34% of all homes (4,429 of 12,932)
• Seattle – 20% of all homes (692 of 3,320)
• Portland -12% of all homes (491 of 3,998)
• San Diego -11% of all homes (577 of 5,019)
• Los Angeles – 8% of all homes (901 of 10,190)

You can read the full press release here.

The speed increase can be noticed when loading up our map page. Take a look for yourself in Chicago! Don’t say we aren’t good to you.

As you may have already noticed, this week sees the release of our new map and property page interface design! We’ve been hard at work on this interface for the past few weeks, and I think it really paid off. While the physical—well, virtual—act of ripping out and replacing code started just recently, the road to this new interface design really began once ShackPrices transformed to Estately a year and a half ago.

Once the logo had been developed, the task of shifting the look and feel of ShackPrices to Estately was underway. A brand new style framework was created for our supplemental pages, such as the About section, and the rest of Estately’s pages were gradually transitioned to the new framework. With that transition nearly complete, it was time to tackle the heart of Estately: the map page.

The goals for the map transition were fairly clear: adopt the new look and feel of the Estately brand, transition to the new style framework, and simplify the interface.

One of the most striking changes you’ll notice is that the search sidebar has been moved to the right side of the page. This change allowed us to utilize the full height of the browser window, giving us more white-space to work with in the design, and the ability to more clearly separate search filters from search results. Color also plays an important role in the new interface by aiding in this separation as well, with blues for portions of the interface related to your search, and greens for portions related to the properties that match the search. We also decided to simplify the search filter mechanism, giving users one-click access to all of the filtering options we provide.

The second biggest change is to the property pages; gone is the frame that once contained home information, it is now allowed to stretch the full length of the browser window. The various tabs that lined the top of the page are now gone, with only one simple “Return to Map” tab remaining. The other tabs have now been integrated in to the property page, efficiently making use of its newly found page real estate.

A few technical changes also allowed us to streamline our work, among those being the implementation of SASS to programatically generate stylesheets, and HAML to speed up and simplify the process of creating page markup (more information about SASS and HAML here).

As always, we’d absolutely love to hear your feedback on the new layout. You can share your thoughts with us in a few ways: comment on this blog post, send us an email using our contact form, or get in touch with us on Twitter.