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).

I’d like to thank everyone who has given us such excellent feedback over the nearly two weeks since we launched. We thought you’d be pretty busy with Christmas and whatnot, so we saved the good post-launch news until life slowed down a little.

So what’s new? In the time since we launched, we’ve been covered all over the web, including such places as:

The Robot Coop
Sellsius Blog
3 Oceans Blog
Bloodhound Blog
Entering Startup
Seattle PI and their real estate blog (wow!)
and The Future of Real Estate Marketing

Just because we launched doesn’t mean that we’re done. We’re rolling out features and tweaking the site like crazy right now. What’s happened since we launched? We’ve already forgotten a bunch of the tweaks and changes, but here are a few:

• Better photo information – if we’re expecting image, we let you know and if there aren’t any, we let you know about that too. (Thanks for pointing this out Ardell!)
• Bigger images in the bubbles – the old images were just too small (thanks anonymous!)
• 

  Save Shacks more easily - there’s a star in the upper right hand corner of the photo. Click it to save, click it again to unsave (thanks for asking us to make it clearer, anonymous!). You can review all your saved properties under the My ShackPrices tab.

Our favorite note from a user so far is:

What I like about your website is that it is straight forward while having many features; this makes it easy for me to move around the site to find my shacks.

Wow! Such praise AND the volunteered use of the word shack.

Is there something missing in your shack search? Send us your questions, comments or insights in the comments or via our feedback form.

PS: While the tweaks make looking for shacks an even better experience, you, dear user, should look forward to some bigger experience-improving features in the coming few weeks. Stay tuned…

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.

If you had a Mac and were desperately looking for home sale data, ShackPrices was usable, but the formatting was not pretty. Now, just like your Mac, it’s very pretty. Thanks for catching the problem, Stuart. Enjoy.