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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Maybe you’re a green-minded individual that doesn’t like burning jet fuel in our beautiful Northwest atmosphere. Estately can help you out, too. If you’re looking for a home that’s LEED certified (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) as being green, simply do a Text Search for “LEED”. If you’re a fan of that bright glowing ball of fire in the sky that most of us call “sun,” try doing a text search for “solar” to aid in your search for either solar-equipped or solar-ready homes.

As you can see, our Text Search can help you zero-in on that home you’re looking for, no matter how specific your needs are (ever dreamed of having a dumbwaiter? Neither have I…).

Have any cool or interesting Text Searches that you use? Share ‘em with us!

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.

Like Google, Doug and I created the original front page as an afterthought – we knew we needed a search box, but we weren’t much for designing something attractive or informative. We could however design something functional: a box with a button. All of our design-related efforts went into the map layout, which was much more about user-interface than about design. And so it was until this morning, when Shaun’s new design went live (did I mention we have a new front-end / designer dude dedicated to making Estately more usable?).

Also! It’s always been there, but now you can actually tell how easy it is to sort properties by price, square footage, bedrooms, or the number of days the property has been on, ahem, Estately. Just click the headers in the results list.

More changes! The photo browser still has nice big photos, but we’ve also added nice big arrows for navigating through the images. Nice big click areas are still there for clumsy clickers like myself.

(that’s sorting by days, in case you wondered)

We still have neighborhood outlines, the capacity to search by neighborhood, zip code or city, tons of information about local schools and parks, and suggested and comparable properties for all 40,000+ homes for sale on Estately.

(in case you didn’t catch the reference, see 2:20 into this clip)

Tagging Step 1: Write a note with your tag (“keeper“)

Tagging Step 2: Use the same keyword in other notes

Tagging Step 3: Search for the keyword (this is the useful part)

Tagging Step 4: Peruse your list of “keepers”

Make it easy to add a note. And another.

No links, no separate pages. Just click in a box at the bottom of the page, write a note, and post. If you want to add another note, do it again.

Type and add – pure and simple

Make notes accessible

New, unregistered users and old logged in users alike can add notes – we skipped the forced login screens. People who stumble on the site can write as many notes as they want. Of course, we don’t want people to accidentally abandon their notes and lose them to the ether, so we encourage them to sign up or log in. Notes are permanently saved when people log in.

The log in warning appears when you create a note

Make notes easy to search

Don’t add more clutter to the interface – we let you search your notes through the text search interface that a lot of people are using already.