- December 19th, 2007
- by Galen
- Features, Interface Design, New Features
Notable new feature on Estately
I have always had a horrible memory, but recently technology has made it even worse. I only remember keywords now and whenever I want to remember something, I search my computer or my gmail (I write myself memory emails). I think a lot of people are like me in this respect. So when I look at one of the 42,643 homes for sale in Washington (or the 3,388 homes for sale in Seattle alone), I only remember the ones with dramatic photos (good or bad).
There is a better way
Add a note to the property. Once you learn more about it, add another. As you go along, you’ll collect a nice inventory of information about the homes in a neighborhood and you’ll (almost) never forget what you know about a house.
Questions you can now answer:
- “Was this the one that could politely be described as a “fixer?” “Yep!”
- “What did we think of this one when we saw it? It says here we liked it, but our agent thought it was priced about $40,000 too high.”
Your notes are searchable
Full text search already let you search pretty much everything you see on the details page for a home – the agent comments, the amenities, and pretty much everything else. Your notes are included in text search too. Take notes with the confidence you can find them again through a quick, dynamic search.
Step 1: Find a house and type a note
Step 2: Add a note. Rinse and repeat if necessary
You don’t have to be logged in to give it a try – just pull up a home and add a note.
Join the discussion »Estately turns one year old
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!
Join the discussion »- November 20th, 2007
- by Galen
- Estately, Features, Uncategorized
Estately: Tryptophan free for Thanksgiving
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.
Join the discussion »- October 12th, 2007
- by Galen
- Features, Maps, real estate
Maps demand more screen real estate
If you have a big screen, Estately is one of the only real estate search sites that will fill it up with real estate search goodness. Small screen? We shrink to your level unless it’s tiny. Seriously: go to Estately’s Seattle real estate page now and try resizing your browser – see how everything scales to fit your needs? Regardless, some people have asked us for even more map and even more room for photos and today we deliver, but only if they really want it.
Hanging out between the map and the search options is a little triangle in a long thin bar. Click on it and Huzzah! the map is full screen. Once you’ve set up your search, you can shrink that sucker down and just cruise the map, going from listings to photos to neighborhood information. Want it back? The same bar is still hanging out on the left side of the map. Click it again and Huzzah! it’s like it was never gone.
Before:
After:
Apparently we should be an MLS takeover target
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…
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