No firm plans to sell out to an MLS or the National Association of Realtors as of today. We are always flattered when we’re lumped into a group of companies that have invested exponentially more money than us and have exponentially more employees working for them.

Before we get started in earnest, I want you to take a look at this map-based MLS search interface. Estately.com is my current pet, in no small measure because it integrates all kinds of neighborhood and transit information into its visual representation of MLS data. There are other cool tools out there: Windermere has a very sexy map-based search. RE/Max has a national MLS system, and Keller-Williams can’t be far behind in that regard. Even so, the market leaders for all of these very cool tools are third-party start-ups like Zillow.com and Trulia.com.

So this is a long lead in to an apology to our regular visitors: we haven’t been cranking out the sexy new features recently. Two man shops like us (heck, even ten man shops) cannot even look in the wrong direction for fear of getting distracted and wasting time. We might have glanced out of the corner of our eyes, but we refocused and now I can happily say that new things are on the way. Soon…

We just launched Estately True Area Search today to let you search within an area or nearby an area or an address. You’ll see the outline of the neighborhood, zip code or city you’re searching for on the map now. If you look up in the upper left, you’ll be able to limit your search to that area or to within a distance of the neighborhood, city, zip code or address.

Want to live within walking distance of Amazon? Near the Microsoft neighborhood? Share a zip code with Bill Gates? Now you can.

All the normal search options still work just the same. To recap how it works:

1. Go to Estately.com
2. Search for an area (like Ballard)
3. Go to the upper left and limit your search to homes within a distance of Ballard (half mile? don’t go much farther or you’ll miss out on the “feel” of Ballard and end up in Doug’s neighborhood, Greenwood)

Here is Queen Anne:

We’re pretty excited about this feature (as we are with every feature, I suppose). It’s our response to the variety of requests for eliminating the east side (or the west side) from people searches - most Seattle-area home buyers seem to pick one side of Lake Washington and stick to it. It also make subscribing to the actual search you want easier: no longer will homes from Fremont seep into your Ballard search unless you want them to.

Where are the dynamically updated stats showing the average price and size of every home that matches your search? Fear not: they’re over in the upper right hand corner of the map. Just click the plus symbol.

I know I’m probably the only person in Seattle who also lived here in 1993, but we’re looking the slightly worn “Out of the Box” phrase in the eye and giving it new a new, Web 2.1 look and feel (that’s means it’s reflective and has sparkles). Estately True Areas: Search Beyond the Box.

We’ve been so busy we forgot to mention our latest update: you can now see only the homes you have saved on the map. Just click more options and you’ll see it there at the bottom. This was one of our most requested features and we’re glad to get it out for everyone to use.

If you save homes for a variety or reasons like I do, you can filter your saved properties using the normal search criteria. My saved properties could be broken into two groups: “interesting million dollar plus homes in my area (and how much will they sell for?)” and “homes I can possibly afford in my area (and how quickly will they sell?)”.

(You can always subscribe to get emails or an rss feed notifying you when your saved properties change in price, status or sell).

I was busy dealing with boring paperwork stuff last week, but Doug was cranking out features like a madman. They’ve been coming so quickly that we haven’t been able to let you, our dedicated users, know about them.

On to the feature of the day: your saved properties now show up with a neato little star on the map, which means you don’t have to click on the house to remember if that house is the one that you saved - you can just see it there. We also just added stars alongside the listing summaries down the left side of the map. Click to save, click again to unsave. I really like this feature - it extends our “info at a glance” map marker styling so you can quickly get back to a saved property if you’re looking for it.

We just added a search box on ShackPrices that lets you limit your search to any piece of text that is in a listing. That means the marketing remarks (from the seller), the amenities, the status, everything. Type in a word to try it out. Include a minus sign in front of it to avoid a word (-townhouse).
Seriously, it’s more powerful than you think.

Who will this help? All you niche buyers who have been asking us for very specific search options should now be happy for starters. But also pet owners, do-it-your-selfers, view needers, and water lovers. Here are some examples:

• Homebuyers who are looking for a loft
• Condos that are dog or cat friendly
• Houses that are fenced (or fully fenced) for your dog
• Fixers that need your help (and are cheaper because they need some work)
• Shacks with a garage
• Shacks with a mother in law apartment
• Shacks with a mountain or sound view
• Waterfront shacks and houseboats so you have somewhere to park your kayak.
• Shacks with a pool so you can relax after working on the fixer
• Shacks with hardwood floors (or houses without -carpets) for the allergen-sensitive

Thanks to Larry for being the first to request this feature and also to everyone else who chimed in - our feature list is long and user requests help us prioritize. We’ll do a couple more posts focusing on specific uses soon.

We just rolled out another feature update today: we now show math and reading scores for all schools (shown on the nearby page for each house) along with links to super-detailed school information. Grade levels and student population are thrown in (small school proponents rejoice!). Additionally, we tell you each school’s district, so you’ll won’t get stuck buying a house next door to a great school, but sending your kids across the city to a crummy one.

We are showing the school scores with some reservations - there are many great schools with middling scores and many unfortunately less quantifiable factors that could make a school great for you. That said, scores are one of the best measures we have for comparing schools and we feel that the links to detailed information will help you find the right school for you.

Part of the upgrade is a much prettier nearby page - we were never totally happy with the layout of the old page. We think you’ll like the new nearby page (you have to click on them to see the new layout).

Thought I’d point folks to updates over at ShackPrices.com. We’ve added permalinks, address search and condos, so now you can see official King County information about every condo that has sold in the last 3 months, 6 months, year, or 5 years in any part of King County. If you want to show someone across the country where the pricy condos in Kirkland are, you can click on permalink in the lower right hand corner and voila! Pricy condos. Perhaps your buddy in Los Angeles wants to see where the pricy houses are - voila! Pricy houses.

Lets say you want to know general prices for Medina houses and condos that have one to three beds, one to three baths and less than 3,000 square feet. The last 30 sales that match that description averaged over a half million dollars in price.

You ask, what can I do with the information on ShackPrices.com? Why is sold data useful? To answer these questions, I refer you to 3 Reasons to Use ShackPrices.com.

So is this the future of real estate search? I sincerely doubt it. I believe that online real estate search is a sliver of what it could be today, let alone what it could be tomorrow. We’re in the “glorified book” stage of search, where real estate sites basically make a big book of listings and sold data easy to page through, but beyond making it easier to go to page 256 (and telling you quickly that’s where you should go), they don’t actually add that much value. This update puts ShackPrices.com in the “glorified book with maps” stage. Perhaps I’m overstating my case, but I genuinely believe that in a few years, people will be ask “how on earth did people find a good home in 2006 without _____?”

I for one am excited to participate in developing the features that will fill in the blank.

-Galen

As you may have noticed the site was updated this weekend. There were a host of small improvements, so I’ll only mention the big ones. First is a search by address feature, that simplifies the task of searching for a specific house, you can find it under the search tab. Second we redesigned the paging system, removing the arbitrary 100 house limit on returned results, so you can page through as many houses as you want. There are plenty of other changes that you’ll probably notice as you use the site. As always we appreciate your feedback and suggestions, so, let us know what you think of the update.

Is your neighbor’s house for sale and you want to know what it sells for? Of course, but, if you’re like me, you don’t really want to come to our site, find the place, zoom in, and change the number of bedrooms etc. just to find that it hasn’t completely closed yet. Enter the “link to this page” button.
If you want to send a page to your buddy or bookmark a view for future use, click on “link to this page” in the lower right (or just copy and paste it into an email). Then you can copy the link from the address bar.