I have admired Walk Score since they launched – it is one of those deceptively simple, super-clever products that just makes sense. Walk Score is opinionated technology with a mission.

When we started Estately, it was with the premise that real estate is about more than beds, baths, price and square feet. We wanted a real estate search that would take the surroundings into account and we wanted our search to acknowledge that the location matters almost as much as the home. So we brought in local school information for every property, local transit stops, and a map search that allows every day people to do things like search for a home one or two miles from an important place for them (here are homes near Microsoft for example).

And now we’re excited to add another data point – another piece of information that can help consumers when they’re buying a house.

Estately already covers 6 of Walk Score’s 10 Most Walkable Cities (underlined for your clicking convenience).

1. San Francisco, CA
2. New York, NY
3. Boston, MA
4. Chicago, IL
5. Philadelphia, PA
6. Seattle
7. Washington D.C.
8. Long Beach
9. Los Angeles
10. Portland

We’re proud to be the first place you can get a Walk Score on virtually every remotely walkable property for sale on the West Coast.

On a personal note, I am very pleased to be moving from a Walk Score 72 (Very Walkable) to a 94 (Walker’s Paradise). I can already tell how much my quality of life is going to improve.

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…

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.