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 »Looking as Good as You Work
Estately has an award-winning map search (thank you Inman News and others!), but our front page has never been a contender for a beauty contest: until now we’ve been too busy making the functionality of Estately phenomenal with a limited team. The ugly search box sat there while we pushed out a series of only-on-Estately features like: search for homes in a geography or let them add a mile or two (here are homes for sale within a mile of Avondale, Chicago). We show you local transit stops for all 500,000+ homes in our database (including Seattle’s new Link Light Rail line) and even include the environmental one-two punch of letting you search for high walk score properties near transit.
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.
Join the discussion »Estately Offers New Way to Search for Homes With Walkability
We’re very proud indeed to announce that our newest release allows consumers to search for homes for sale using FrontSeat’s award winning Walk Score home ratings. Truly environmentally conscious home buyers who want to live right in the midst of shops, parks, public transit, schools, and workplaces can use Estately to search for a “Walkers Paradise†home – a home with a WalkScore over 90.
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.
Join the discussion »- January 7th, 2009
- by Galen
- Estately, Features, Interface Design
Estately’s Got a Brand New Bag
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.
Join the discussion »- August 14th, 2008
- by Galen
- Features, Interface Design, New Features, real estate
My Estately — Extreme Makeover!
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.
Join the discussion »