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!

We’re very excited to announce our new name today: Estately. After some soul searching, we decided that ShackPrices was fun, but didn’t always convey how good our real estate search is, the variety of homes available on our site, and the vast amount of information available on our site.

We are absolutely smitten with Estately. It’s quick, easy to pronounce, and easily conveys “things concerning real estate.” We realize that entirely meaningless names are all the rage right now, but we’re bucking the trend: Estately. Can you tell how much I like typing it?
We remain focussed on making it easier consumers to find and buy the right home for them. Estately offers the same easy -yet-powerful search interface.

We’re still debating a tag-line, so we propose a contest: If you suggest the tag line we end up using, we’ll give you the very first Estately mug ever to come off the printing press along with a rare and out of print ShackPrices mug. We’ll take suggestions in the comments or on our contact page.

And yes, you can use Estately to search for properties on your iPhone.

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.

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…

After getting great feedback from our beta testers, improving the site and squashing bugs, we’re opening our doors to let the public start searching for homes on our map-based real estate search site, ShackPrices.com.

What is ShackPrices?

ShackPrices.com is a snappy Google maps-based real estate search site that makes finding a home better by augmenting each real estate listing with data about what is nearby, including the distances to nearby landmarks, nearby schools and nearby bus stops. ShackPrices also helps home buyers learn about cities and neighborhoods through reviews, statistics and photos. Home buyers can search for shacks (shabby to chic, of course) across all of Western Washington on ShackPrices.com.

What makes ShackPrices.com different?

You’ll spot some obvious things that differentiate ShackPrices.com right off the bat, including information about what is nearby every listing (check out the surroundings near this Fremont listing) and Suggested Shacks, which predicts houses home buyers might be interested in if they like any of the 20,000+ houses for sale on ShackPrices.com.Once you get past the obvious differences, the subtle features that set ShackPrices apart will become more apparent including:

• Fast searches
• Statistics about the shacks that match each search (for instance, older, 2+ bedroom homes in Clyde Hill average $534,000)
• RSS feeds for saved searches
• Daily or weekly emails of new homes that match your saved searches
• Information about the real estate market in every city and neighborhood in Washington (Ballard, Seattle for instance)
• Photos of selected neighborhoods and cities (like Fremont, Seattle)
• The ability to search by neighborhood

ShackPrices is still in its infancy, so expect more handy features in the coming year and please let us know how we can improve your experience.

-The Shack Team

Since our last post in June, you may have been asking yourself “has ShackPrices dropped off the face of the earth?” But you would be asking the wrong question. The right question is “what kind of awesome real estate search site has the ShackPrices team been working on?” Our totally unbiased answer to that question: pretty awesome.

Currently a bunch of home buyers are poking and prodding the site while they feverishly search for the perfect shack (shabby to chic, of course). We’re pretty satisfied with what we’re hearing from them, so look forward to a public site soon, John Q. Public. Then you, dear reader, will get to start searching for homes (ahem, shacks) on our site. What will you find? Hopefully an intuitive interface, neat things you never knew about homes (more on this soon), and lots of details about homes.

-The Shack Team