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.

We’ve been so busy we forgot to mention our latest update: you can now see only the homes you have saved on the map. Just click more options and you’ll see it there at the bottom. This was one of our most requested features and we’re glad to get it out for everyone to use.

If you save homes for a variety or reasons like I do, you can filter your saved properties using the normal search criteria. My saved properties could be broken into two groups: “interesting million dollar plus homes in my area (and how much will they sell for?)” and “homes I can possibly afford in my area (and how quickly will they sell?)”.

(You can always subscribe to get emails or an rss feed notifying you when your saved properties change in price, status or sell).

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.