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!

Like Indiana Jones, but a little better

We followed with an update of our map search, making the map bigger, moving the search options, making the balloon that pops up on search results use every pixel effectively – we actually rolled our own balloon so we could get larger photos and more information while actually taking up less space on the map – and bringing beautiful, photo-rich results to the sidebar.

The “Return of the King” page we are updating today gets as many eyeballs as our search pages and our homepage: it’s the “detail page” – the page that shows every little detail of a single property right down to the type of furnace and the nearby bus stops.

So without further ado, here is what is new.

Holy Search Improvements, Batman!

We’ve been so busy updating Estately that we haven’t even blogged about many of the recent improvements. We’re so behind that we’re going to cram THREE feature releases into one blog post.

Holy Maps with Holes!

Once upon a time we not only outlined your search area on the map, but shaded it in as well. The downside of this approach was that it obscured the actual maps that you were searching on – we grayed out the area where the homes were. Thanks to some javascript jujitsu and Google Maps V3, we “punched out” the area you are searching for (ka-POW!) and shade the area OUTSIDE the area you are searching for and leave your search area unobscured and easy to read.  One small step towards making searching for a home easier, one big step for map search beauty.

Brenda, Brandon, Kelly, Dylan, and Steve want you to live here

Holy Search Results With Photos!

Our search results on a map page used to be crammed into rows on the right side of the map – more than one person compared that area to an excel spreadsheet. They were ignored by users in our usability tests. Now our search results are expanded, so you can actually get a thumbnail-view of the property and really digest the listing from the sidebar. They’re useful: you can actually browse through the properties, sorted by time on Estately, price, square feet, and more.

Holy Born Again Search Menu!

We had to make room for those sidebar photos and we have always been annoyed that the search options just hung around on the screen even when they weren’t in use. We decided to make them super-powerful and easy to use for the first 5% of your search, then tucked away for your panning and zooming pleasure. The new search options menu is elegantly available to you when you want to change it and is compactly hidden once you’ve created your search. We now devote the whole (holy?) screen to the homes you’re looking for once you’re done refining your search.

As always, we want your feedback. Is there something we could have done even better? Something not working quite the way you want it? Let us know in the comments.

The take away is that the Greek debt crisis has saved US homebuyers an immense amount of money: the average person buying a home will save $11,000 over the first 10 years of a 30 year loan versus what they would have spent before the crisis. Taken as a whole, people who bought homes since the crisis began will save over $12 billion over the first 10 years of owning their homes.

While housing starts – the number of homes on which construction has been started – have gone up and down since 1959, no year has come close to being as low as 2009. While predictions for 2010 are somewhat improved, you can count on fewer new homes being available in 2010 and 2011.

Embed the above image on your site:
<a href=”http://blog.estately.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/Housing-Starts-1959-20092.png” mce_href=”http://blog.estately.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/Housing-Starts-1959-20092.png”><img src=”http://blog.estately.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/Housing-Starts-1959-20092.png” mce_src=”http://blog.estately.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/Housing-Starts-1959-20092.png” alt=”" title=”Housing-Starts-1959-2009″ width=”580″ /></a><br /><a href=”http://www.estately.com” mce_href=”http://www.estately.com”>Homes for Sale</a> – – Estately

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!

From late summer through October 2009, Uncle Sam offered first-time buyers $8,000 if they bought a home by the end of November. As a country we “brought sales forward” – we convinced people who would otherwise have bought in December or January to buy in November.

How Sweet?

When the November numbers were released, the National Association of Realtors and the media feigned surprise that sales were so strong (up 7.4%). (“November home sales leap,” “November existing-home sales surge“).  But it was no surprise. Everyone watching the market knew it was going to happen.

Then in December, existing sales plunged 16.7%, even though the tax credit had been extended. This wasn’t a surprise to anyone watching the industry either. People who wanted to buy did so in November and by the time the extension was announced — just 34 days before it would’ve expired — nearly every person who could’ve used the credit had already made an offer. But “plunged” makes for good headlines.

Our prediction:

We have a crystal ball here at Estately: Home search traffic.

See, before prospective homebuyers apply for mortgages, or choose agents, or go to open houses, they dip their toes in the market by searching for homes on our site. When our traffic spikes, we see spikes in home buying a few months later. And we finally have some good news to report!

2010 will start slow–January sales will be off. (Estately’s partner agents helped a lot of people buy homes this January – many more so than last year – but we’re fairly certain that has more to do with us than the market.)

Sales will be low because people who would have put in an offer that would close this winter already did so in the fall — they wanted that $8,000. (Note: that means less competition if you are buying a home right now.) We also expect low sales for January because we saw soft traffic in November/December.

Spring and summer of 2010 will be different! Every year, there is an annual increase in people searching for real estate from December to January. But this year we are seeing a much bigger bump – 80% bigger.  This year we are seeing 40% more people searching for homes on Estately in January than we were in December. That’s a huge change in homebuyer sentiment.

Home search traffic is a leading indicator: we saw traffic really jump last August – three months before sales jumped in November.  Based on previous annual trends, this dramatically increased interest and traffic will translate to strong home sales this spring and summer.

Regionally, the Big Winners are Chicago, Atlanta, San Diego and Seattle with huge bumps. The rest of California – and especially Sacramento - not so great.

Here is a table ranking the markets we are in:

Disclaimer: This is a short-term prediction. I’ve personally been a pessimist about the real estate market since 2004. But back then I jumped the gun, since the market continued to rise for 2 years. And I didn’t quite expect the magnitude of the 2006 correction, either (what a ride!).  Whatever happens in 2010, long term, I believe we’re in a holding pattern for stocks and home prices – there will be upward swings and downward swings. The Case Schiller index seems to show way less room for prices to go down than it did at the peak of the bubble and thankfully homebuilders have virtually stopped building. Mid- to Long-term home prices and sales are stabilizing.

And a nod to the contrary evidence out there is warranted: While Google Trends seem to contradict me (see Seattle Bubble for analysis), I’m skeptical of Google Trends as a measurement tool here – buzz about real estate, home prices, and mortgages can cause “real estate” searches, but browsing homes on an MLS-based search site like Estately means business.

… and Bellevue and Tacoma and Renton and Edmonds. Even Carnation.

Google (and Estately) just flipped the switch on StreetView in Seattle. That means you can now quickly see every home for sale (often in it’s pre-prettified state) in context and you can pan up and down the block to see the neighboring homes and you can now answer the all-important “will I be looking out of my window at a crack house?” question. Or at least you can check to see if the house across the street looks like a crack house.

Take a look, click and grab to rotate, use the arrows to move up and down the street. Here is Google’s map of the area covered.

See also: Capitol Hill blog, One Rainy Day, and Live Journal.

We have a lot to announce in the coming two weeks – keep your eyes peeled for more announcements.

Bonus Troll:

View Larger Map

The other choice for a home seeker was an even spookier road: to search on non-MLS affiliated sites. These sites show homes that are no longer for sale (Aaaaaah! A scary tease!) and loads of homes that are for sale are lurking there on their pretty maps unmarked. The spooky thing: these homes won’t even jump out at you – they are there, lurking in the shadows like Freddy, but unlike Freddy, they’ll never show their face.

The RMLS (Oregon’s biggest MLS) was one of the last major MLSes to allow the display of addresses and we’re pleased to be the first website in Portland with no compromises: you can see the most comprehensive list of homes for sale AND you can see the addresses on those homes. As promised, we are going live with addresses for Oregon at midnight tonight.

HHWWAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

It actually has nothing to do with “Bank Owned.” In the cut-off, use-every-available-letter-in-the-description-allowed world of real estate listings, BOM is shorthand for “Back On Market.” It means someone was trying to sell their home, got an offer on it and accepted it, and for whatever reason the person who was going to buy the home backed out.

Why would someone disclose BOM when it could mean that the inspection found something nasty? By their very nature, BOM homes have high DOM (Days On Market). The days in escrow still count against the CDOM (Cumulative Days On Market).

By disclosing that it is Back On Market, the person selling their home is saying “it hasn’t been sitting on the market for weeks and weeks because it’s a bad deal, it is because the person who was going to buy it backed out.”

A quick look down the West Coast shows that the use of BOM is regional. It’s a lot more popular in Los Angeles than anywhere else – I’m seeing 66 properties with “BOM” in the description there as of today. I’m only seeing 3 “BOM” properties in the Puget Sound area.