Where the heck did that “Nearby” tab go under Listing Details? I’ll tell you where: on the details page! All the same information is there: nearby schools, transit, parks, and places; however, you can now view where there nearby places are relative to the home you’re looking at right on the neighborhood overview map! If you’re not really in to green grass, trees, and nature, you can quickly hide parks from the neighborhood map by clicking on the parks tab and unchecking “Show Parks on the Neighborhood Map”. You can, of course, do this with the other three nearby categories. As Rachael Ray of Food Network fame would say, “How cool is that?” Unfortunately, no part of this update is “Yum-o!” (Another Rachael Ray saying. Sorry…)

See it in action on a random home in Seattle, Bellevue or Portland. Yes, Hung Far Low is just 1.8 miles, or a brisk 35 minute walk from that Portland home.

Yes, it’s another feature improvement made to Estately! As you may or may not know, Seattle isn’t exactly known for its mass transit. The buses—or “road slugs,” as I sometimes call them—are good, but they’re no light rail. On our move south to Oregon, we knew we had to do something more take advantage of the many transit options available in Portland: bus, MAX light rail lines, aerial tram, streetcar, and trolley.

So what did we do? We added rail line to the “Near Transit” search option, allowing you to find houses and condos up to 2 miles away from specified bus and/or rail routes! Be one of the many who are leaving the gas pumps behind for public transit. If a mile-long walk sounds daunting, keep in mind that it takes the average person only 17 minutes to walk one mile. You can use that bus or train ride to get some good reading in, as well. Convinced yet?

This feature isn’t limited to just Portland - you can use it in Seattle and cities-soon-to-be-disclosed, too.

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.

Isn’t there a word for something that’s both more and better? Mobetta? If so, we are today launching mobetta neighborhood and city information pages to give potential home buyers a real feel for the neighborhood and to give sellers marketing points they didn’t know existed. I’ll just jump to what’s both more and better:

Best and worst schools for every neighborhood and city in Washington. Check out the schools in West Seattle for instance. Also included in this release are detail pages for every school in Washington.

Once you find the school you absolutely must live near (lets say Ballard High School) you’re only one click away from seeing the properties for sale within walking distance.

For instance:

We’ve boiled schools down to three simple things: where they are, what school district they are in, and the math and school scores for the student body. We hope to encourage conversation about the specifics of each school and district (like posts about which loony toons were elected to the board) sometime soon.

Just remember, school scores aren’t everything - they should be used as a starting point (Bellevue students are better at reading and they have the International Baccalaureate, for the record). We can recommend local Realtors who really know the local schools if you want to know more about your local schools.

We also added information about parks and places (restaurants, statues, anything of interest) for every neighborhood and city. Thanks to the Robots at Forty Three Places, you can see that Paseo is the best reason to live in Fremont. My recommendation: live two miles away so you can walk through Ross Playground and work off half of the meal.

We’re ironing out a couple of bugs as I type. Let us know if you have any questions or suggestions in the comments.

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.

Whenever Doug and I show people ShackPrices, they sit down and begin typing their address into the search box, causing us to apologetically explain that, while ShackPrices is powerful, it can only send you to neighborhoods, cities, and zip codes (did you know that you can type a neighborhood name in the search box?).

Today ShackPrices has become a little smarter. You can now search for an address or a listing number and the gerbils in our server will look it up in their tiny gerbil atlases and send you to that address. Virtually and (nearly) instantly! If there’s a house for sale at that address, we’ll let you know, otherwise we show you the homes nearby.

Does it work the way you want it to? Let us know!

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.