Estately Smart Schools: A New Way to Find a Home

Today we are creating a new way for people to find a home: Estately Smart Schools. For people who want to live in a certain school area, Estately Smart Schools will help search only the homes for sale in any school’s attendance area.

We think this is a dramatic improvement in the way people find a home. Until today, people had to do an awkward multi-website + IRL (In Real Life) dance wherein they looked at homes, then had look at obscure school district maps and/or find someone who knows to ask, then go back and eliminate the homes that serve the wrong school, then look at a new batch of homes that fit within the bounds as they remembered them. Phew! All in all, it was a time-consuming and crummy way to make decisions.

Now you can pick the school or schools you want in your service area, type the name into Estately (we’ll help you spell it correctly with auto-complete) and we will show you every home for sale in that school’s area. Estately’s home listings come from MLS data, updated many times every day – we are hyper comprehensive and up-to-date. Additionally, you can combine the school search with any other criteria that are important to you – number of bedrooms, price range, the size of the yard or more.

Nearly a quarter (21%) of respondents to a survey of homebuyers conducted by the National Association of Realtors in 2008 indicated that school related issues are a deciding factor in their selection of a home. Estately is proud to offer our new Smart Schools feature as a tool for all homebuyers, regardless of their preferences for certain school districts or their familial status.

This has been one of our most requested features since the day we launched, but I think the reason it isn’t even more requested is because people don’t imagine that something like Smart Schools is possible. We’re going to be rolling out some improvements over the coming week to help people find Smart Schools even if they aren’t looking for it.

Estately Smart Schools is available now in (along with a randomly selected school from our database):

• Atlanta (like Riverwood High School)
• Baltimore (like Pikesville High)
• Bethesda (like Walt Whitman High)
• Chicago (like Kenwood Academy High School)
• Los Angeles (like Eagle Rock High)
• Oakland (like Skyline High)
• Portland (like Grant High School)
• Sacramento (like Mira Loma High)
• Seattle (like Roosevelt High School)
• San Diego (like Rancho Bernardo High)
• And a number of smaller markets (like Addison Elementary in Marietta, GA,  Lincoln High in Stockton, CA or Western High in Anaheim, CA)

I’m incredibly proud of the Estately team for producing such an easy-to-use solution to what was until now such a hard problem for people looking for a home. May the upgrades continue!

Giving the Presidents What They Want: DC Real Estate

Today we are celebrating a 15% expansion in our geographic breadth: the greater Washington DC area. After waiting for over 1 million photos to download, today we are announcing that we now have over half a million homes listed for sale on Estately. And we are welcoming Washington, DC and Baltimore. Having spent some time there, we will also give a shout-out to beautiful Annapolis and having not spent any time there, we will note that you can now search for homes for sale near Murderland Alley – a street made famous in The Wire.

Whether you are searching for a $39+ million manse (the most expensive home in the greater DC area) or a home in Baltimore (we are serious when we say greater DC area), where the average listing price is $150,000, you browse from any of our new 70,000+ listings with the flick of a mouse or the zoom of a map. I always like using text search to show all the waterfront homes for sale in a new area.

Each listing includes all of our trademark information: local schools with school scores, mass transit information for the Metrorail (Example: homes on the Red Line), past sale prices, past listing prices and much, much more.

With this release, we are also rolling out a host of other improvements:

Google Maps Balloon

We’ve “fixed” the google maps balloon. It used to move the map when you clicked on a home near top of the screen – it always opens north (it still does this on Google maps). It got very annoying when you had to pan back to your search area dozens of times. Now: the balloon is smart – it goes where there is room. We permit Google to integrate this improved (and prettier) user interface improvement into Google Maps.

Did you know we cover 6 states? Our home page now makes it easier to navigate straight to those states. Sure, that isn’t really a search improvement per se, but it does make starting a search a one-click experience.

Auto-Suggestions on Search

Also! Our search box is smarter than ever. Start typing in a neighborhood, city, state, or zip code – or even an address or listing number of a home that is for sale – and our box will suggest places and homes that match. Now you don’t have to know how to spell Skokie, Illinois or Dunwoody, Georgia.

After:

Price Drop Search

Once you’re there, check out all the price drops from the last day, two days, week, or even longer with our price drop search. There are a lot of them – even in the Long Beach California (aka, the LBC) (or try: the the LBNY or the one price drop in the LBW. The LBI (that’s Indiana!?!) has had no price drops in the last week. Snoop, do not limit your search to the LBC! With our help, broaden your horizons to the LBOthers!

We’re HIRING!

Help us keep rolling out real estate search goodness by referring your fantastic designer friend. See our ad here and send it on!