The Estately team ends up explaining what we do to people – we’re small and we don’t have the name recognition that millions of dollars of venture capitol will bring you. People always seem to ask a few of the same questions though:

Q. How are you different than, uh, what’s it called, uh, Zillow?

A. We have nearly every home that is for sale in Washington and we have tons of local information to let you know what is nearby every home. Estately is a member of the North West MLS so there are over 45,000 Western Washington homes for sale on Estately, while there are only about 150,000 for sale nationwide on Zillow. If you’re looking to buy a home, you should look on Estately or you might miss the best one for you.

Q. So are you like Redfin?

A. In some ways we are: like Redfin, we have an innovative map search interface and we use the comprehensive database of MLS listings. But in some ways we aren’t: we have loads of local information about every home in our database, including which bus and transit stops are nearby, which parks and schools are nearby. We also have information about every neighborhood and city in Western Washington (and pictures for many!). We also have unique search features like text search (’hardwood floors’ anyone?), “transit search” (don’t like driving to work?) and true area search so you can narrow your search to only the homes in or near the neighborhood you’re interested in. But the biggest difference is that we don’t employ real estate agents. There are so many great real estate agents with years of experience out there (and many more mediocre ones!) that we decided the best way we could help people buy and sell homes and get the hyper-local advice and support they need was to match them with great agents in their area through Estately Agent Match.

Q. How many people work at Estately?

A. There are two of us.

Q. You mean like two business people and a bunch of developers?

A. Nope. Two of us. We both work on strategy, coding and our feature roadmap. Galen does most of the design and the interviews and Doug works on the heavy lifting code tasks. We have both interview real estate agents for Agent Match.

Q. What’s next?

A. Our road map is chalk full of great features, some continuing to focus on finding a home (our specialty!) and some that continue to extend our mission (making finding, buying and selling a home easier). Our most recent innovation, Agent Match, is along those lines: once you’re ready for expert help, we recommend great agents who really know the area and can meet your needs.

There is an ongoing debate over divorcing commissions in the real estate blog world that hasn’t yet jumped into the mainstream media. Divorced commissions doesn’t refer to the consumer divorcing the agent of their pay and it will certainly need a better name to get any traction (pay for representation?). In a word, it means you as a consumer pay your agent for representing you as a buyer or as a seller.

As it stands, sellers pay both their own agent and the buyer’s agent. They typically pay 2-3% to the agent who helps them put their house on the market, advertises it, advises them on offers, and negotiates on their behalf at closing. They then offer 2.5+% to the agent of the person who wants to buy the property. That’s to pay the “buyer’s agent” for dragging you to a bunch of properties, helping you figure out what’s right for you, advising you about each property, helping you put together an offer, and negotiating on your behalf through closing.

I’ve been racking my brain trying to find an appropriate analogy for this. Maybe it’s like bringing your lawyer to a divorce hearing (real divorce, not commission divorce) and having your soon-to-be ex-spouse pay your lawyer’s bill.

But it’s not really like that, because you as a buyer end up paying the commission. Say you just paid your agent yourself: The seller would probably pocket some of that 2.5+% they were offering your agent, but they’d probably also reduce the price of the house somewhat, leaving you with a choice about how much service you wanted from your agent and how much you wanted to pay for that service.

So when will commission divorce be just as common as the marital variety? Probably no time soon: banks are not used to it, so they would be wary of paying your agent from your end. Additionally, no one is going to go first: if you’re selling your your house, you don’t want to be the cheapo who offers $0 commission to buyers agents (because some of them will discriminate against you).

Jeff Kempe cogently argues that the perception of free buyers commissions makes consumers lazy about finding a good agent. Since divorced commissions are really an academic discussion in the short term, buyers should focus on finding good agents who will work on their behalf regardless of who is paying. Like in any industry, there are good real estate agents who focus on the long-term business and there are not-so-great agents who focus on the best buck today.

Interview a couple of great agents who can meet your needs and really know their stuff, describing what you need from them and what you’re looking for in a property, ask to talk to previous clients, and figure out if they are someone you would want to work with. Ask questions and ask more questions.

Did you see it yet? In 5 selected cities you can now see a street view, spin around, zoom in and out, watch your neighbor taking out the trash, look through people’s windows and even wander through the streets by clicking on the arrows. Amazon A9 had a similar feature, but the interface was lacking (only side shots) and clunky (no dragging the little dude around to see another area).

This was announced at the same time as Google’s real estate mashup yesterday. Obviously we’ll add this to ShackPrices the moment we’re allowed to use it. What great context it could bring to real estate search!

Seattle is a middle-of-the-road city when it comes to mass transit: we have a good bus system, but not much in the way of rail (our first line is coming in the next couple of years). Middle of the road on transit, but definitely on the slow-to-stopped end of car transit, especially if you commute across the lake. The crummy driving conditions make our bus system pretty attractive for some folks.

Recently we’ve had a couple of users tell us they don’t just want to see what bus stops are near each home - they want to live near a specific bus line. We debated the clutter it would add to our search options (not another option unless it’s going to be used!) a little, but decided it would be a fun project, so we cooked up transit search on Friday. Now you can type in the bus routes you would like to live near, select how far from the stops you would like to be, and presto!, only homes near those stops are shown.

Living near mass transit is probably good for property values. And it seems like an especially good idea in the wake of the San Francisco freeway melt down (and the chance it could happen in Seattle). And the impending removal of or the endless construction on the viaduct.

We can’t guarantee that buses will stop for you or that they’ll be on time (but they are faster since the downtown bus tunnel was closed).

Read more about Seattle transit from the transit junkies at the Seattle Transit blog and from the Bus Chick.
(You can search for homes near metro and Sound Transit bus stops and Sound Transit light rail. Other lines not included at this time.)

We forgot to post this video tour of ShackPrices when it came out. It’s missing some of our newest features (saved homes from the listings page and text search for instance), but it’s a great introduction to the site. It’s from Screeniac, an all screencast review site (what an interesting concept!).

This is just a quick post to warn everyone who has an rss feed that we made some changes in the way our feeds work that will cause most readers to show a bunch recent entries as new, even though you’ve seen them before. This is a one time occurrence, sorry for any inconvenience!

We just rolled out a new set of features under My ShackPrices. Saved Shacks have a history now, Saved Searches are prettier and more functional, and you can now see more shacks on the map at a time.

Saved Shacks

When you save a shack, you can keep track of price changes, status changes (if they’ve accepted an offer or the house has sold), and if the shack is removed from market or if it sells. The complete history of each saved shack, starting the day you saved it, is under the saved shacks tab. You can sign up for daily or weekly emails of changes OR you can subscribe to an RSS feed. We’ve even set it up so that you can subscribe directly to your Google Homepage, My Yahoo or to a few other online RSS readers (I use Google Homepage for my top 15 feeds, Google Reader for the other 50 or so). It’s easy to save a shack - just click the little star next to it.

Saved Searches

You can now get instant updates on your saved searches from Google, My Yahoo, Netvibes, and others - just click the arrow next to RSS to subscribe. We’ve also cleaned up the look and feel of saved searches - take a look.

More Shacks on the Map

By popular request we’re doubling the default number of shacks on the map to 100 at a time and we added the option to increase or decrease the number. If you’re feeling brave (and you have a fast, modern computer), you can now display up to 600 shacks at a time on the map (Yowza!). You can change the number under account settings.

Also, did you notice the property count on the front page? As of this posting, there have been 358 new shacks listed for sale since midnight.

If you’re looking for nerd insights, you should head over to StartupsOnRails.com, a blog devoted to Ruby on Rails and the life of coding at a small startup. Both Doug and myself are posting there along with folks from a few other Ruby on Rails-based startups.

We’ll let you know about some new features soon. I promise!

Say you’re driving to work and you see a cool house for sale along the way. Say you’re also like me - you generally know what street you’re on, but by the time you get to work, you’ve entirely forgotten the cross street the house was on.

This is one of the home buyer’s problems that can be helped by our text search box. If you saw the home on Roosevelt while in the University District, just type “Roosevelt” in the search box. Only homes with “Roosevelt” in their descriptions will show up.

This will also work if you know the street you want to live on - just type in that street name and your search will be refined. Also! if you want to see who’s selling their home on your street, type in your street name (or number) in the search box when you are zoomed in on your area.

You can even save text searches (just like any others) and subscribe to a daily email digest of new properties on the market on your street, present or future.

Inman News, sort of the premier real estate news site, covers our launch and some of our features in an article today:

The site also gives info on neighborhood market conditions such as number of homes currently on the market, average price, average square footage, and average time on the market, among other details. Each neighborhood includes links to popular places and commentary on the area from 43places.com.

They failed to mention Brian Reschke, our excellent broker, in the story.
With a large readership comes privilege: unless you’re a paying member the article goes behind Inman’s wall tomorrow.

-Galen