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…

After using ShackPrices and emailing us a couple of questions, Astha Parmar decided to interview Doug to find out more about how ShackPrices came to be and how it works behind the scenes. She highlighted my favorite quote:

I like to believe that a year from now we’ll be better off if we spend most of our time improving the site and letting people discover it on their own, rather than letting the site stagnate while we spend our time trying to market it.

Update: Here’s a link to the story if you were hoping to read more.