At Estately, we wondered why no one had covered how the Greek debt crisis affected Americans. We decided that an illustration might be the best way to make what is a very complex economic story easy to digest.

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.

Estately has an award-winning map search (thank you Inman News and others!), but our front page has never been a contender for a beauty contest: until now we’ve been too busy making the functionality of Estately phenomenal with a limited team. The ugly search box sat there while we pushed out a series of only-on-Estately features like: search for homes in a geography or let them add a mile or two (here are homes for sale within a mile of Avondale, Chicago). We show you local transit stops for all 500,000+ homes in our database (including Seattle’s new Link Light Rail line) and even include the environmental one-two punch of letting you search for high walk score properties near transit.

But we’ve gone further: in the last 9 months, we’ve launched:

• faster search and pageloads
• better balloons on the map search (with buttons to quickly view all photos for a home)
• auto-complete for addresses, neighborhoods, and cities from the search box
• a new easy-to-use search interface
• and the capacity to scroll through condos in the window on the map

Behind the scenes we ripped out and refactored tons of our code, so Estately is more stable and we can make changes even faster. Right now we ship improvements and updates 3-4 times a day (seriously: we release new code multiple times a day).

At the beginning of July we were at a crossroads: we have some features we are really excited about in our pipeline, but our front page really made people think the site was created by a couple of guys in their basement. And let the record show that we are bigger and better than that: we are now a handful of guys (and a lady!) in some of Seattle’s cheapest office space.

More importantly, the homepage wasn’t representative of the experience. We are proud of Estately (and are eager to continue building on it), but until today it was hard to fight your way past the front-page experience.  which is not a good starting point in an industry where people judge you in 5 seconds.

It was time for our front page to reflect how good the rest of the site is. Behold our new front page! It looks incrementally better as you move from Internet Explorer 6 to 7 to 8 and then to Firefox / Safari or Chrome.

The primary objective of our front page is still the same: get people to search as quickly as possible. For our visitors who have never seen or heard of Estately, we now aim to be more informative, to let people know which markets we are in, that we have the most comprehensive index of homes for sale, updated many times a day from the MLS, and, in a softer sense, that we care about details.

Our aim was to make the front page look as elegant as the rest of the site works (if that makes any sense).

We’d love your feedback.

My first project after the dust settled from walking through the doors of Estately was to redesign and enrich the user experience of the property bubble. The property bubble is a super charged snap shot of information about a house or condominium that is revealed upon “click” of a map marker on the Estately search results map.

Goals for the Redesign.

The Estately team envisioned taking our current map of search results a few steps further, giving users an image carousel to preview while browsing the map in addition to the essential home facts. That’s right…a carousel of images and 30% bigger than the previous thumbnail we were loading in our prior release.

The supporting home details and functionality are there too and not at the expense of the imagery either. The developers did a wonderful job making everything load just as speedy as before. Now users have access to more imagery, highly scannable facts such as price, beds, bath, square feet, days on market and sale status. Top that with functionality to view the full listing, schedule a showing and save/hide the property and you have a hard working area of pixels.

The redesigned property bubble.

var perfection == calculatedGuess + test + userFeedback + iteration

Striving for perfection is a good trait to have but it can also paralyze you too. The team here believes in rapid prototyping and deploying features to users as quickly as possible. This process is not at the expense of design but rather in tandem with development. Honestly, anything can be made to look sweet in Fireworks or Photoshop but until it’s in the browser and being used it’s just a pile of pixels. We’ve already made improvements since the property bubble redesign launched and more are on the way so stay tuned.

Process. Right brained design thinking.

Mapmaking is an ancient art-form that I believe stems from the human desire to understand everything around us. Some maps help you find a home , while others are self portraits .

Self portrait of Paula Scher shows that maps can be metaphors and or literal translations of dimension.

While the map medium has traveled the spectrum from sheepskin to pixels the fundamentals remain consistent, maps can tell the reader something about their origin, destination and the places in-between.

Crystal balls, tarot cards and carousels

Half the time we are engineering, designing and directly caring for our customers to keep the product alive an nurtured. The other half of the day is spent in a smokey room with witch craft and sorcery chants echoing from our think tank chambers.

Seriously, we really care about helping people find homes and think of our end users as the modern day explorers akin to “X”. Part of that love is about rethinking the way people find home online. So, we have to crystal ball it’, dream and take little leaps of calculated guesses when expanding the product feature set. This is where the image carousel came to life. Why not offer users multiple photos at the map level and make this view harder working.

Listening and responding to user feedback

Now we listen and watch our users and we insert our perfection variable from time to time and incrementally improve the feature. Last week Doug and I got an email from a user who loves our site but was frustrated with the new property bubble. My ears perked up and I immediately wanted to understand and correct her pain. Well it turns out that she was confused about how to close the bubble, especially when the “close” button was obscured with other UI elements.

Check out this diagram I sent her back to make sure I understood her problem.

The diagram I sent to the end user.

User feedback is like panning for gold and this was a huge nugget. So, here our close button for the property bubble is hidden underneath the Google Maps UI. Well it just so turns out our current “Hide” button has the same icon as the close button and being located in the lower corner of the bubble it makes perfect sense our user clicked on it hoping to “hide” or close the bubble.

In the short term the fix was easy, swap the “Save” and the “Hide” buttons. This is truly a part of my craft I value deeply. Not every piece of end user feedback is as helpful as the next but having a channel open for the feedback to reach me is invaluable.

In the near future, we will be changing how the “hide” feature works a little more significantly.

Keep on keepn’ on

Design, code, test and listen. Be on the look out for more updates from behind the Estately.com curtain. This first release tackled homes and we have some surprises for the condo hunters out there too, so stay tuned for a follow-up post.

*Also note we are working hard to make sure every listing has images if they are available from the respective MLS.

Simply by swapping the save and hide buttons we were able to reduce confusion. We also demonstated that we respond to the feedback of our users and it takes our product farther! Thank you.

Source: United States Census Bureau.

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

Today we are celebrating a 15% expansion in our geographic breadth: the greater Washington DC area. After waiting for over 1 million photos to download, today we are announcing that we now have over half a million homes listed for sale on Estately. And we are welcoming Washington, DC and Baltimore. Having spent some time there, we will also give a shout-out to beautiful Annapolis and having not spent any time there, we will note that you can now search for homes for sale near Murderland Alley – a street made famous in The Wire.

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!

Some background:

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.

We are celebrating a profitable 3rd quarter at Estately this week and an October already in the black. This in spite of the market’s typical Fall-Winter dive (Google Trends illustrates it elegantly in 2008 and 2009 – so does this) and the worst housing market in my lifetime.

About a year ago, after launching New York and Chicago, we looked at the year ahead and realized that:

1. The capital markets were hosed – the “raise more” door was closed
2. There was a chance we weren’t going to make *quite* enough on our existing trajectory to make it into the black

It was time to get creative.

What Did We Do Right?

Get Even Leaner

We looked high and low to find every expense we could cut. We couldn’t save much by cutting the co-founders’ “living wage” (aka “insulting wage”). So we slowed down our geographic expansion because new markets require upfront investment. We also froze technology purchases and skipped a couple of business trips.

Then we set out to improve the bottom line.

Test. Test Again

By last winter, we began A/B testing on a weekly basis. We started by making it easier for anyone who wanted to tour a home on Estately to do so – and increased our “property tour rate” by 200%. The changes we made were significant and are the reason we are successful today. The awesome thing is that we can improve further: Our most recent A/B test improved our conversion rate by over 30%.

1) Introduce Distractions. 2) … 3) Profit!

We chose this route in a very round-about way. We get a lot of inquiries from people who want a white-label Estately, but until this year we considered white labeling to be a potentially fatal distraction. Andy Liu’s story on NetConversions, the company he started right in the midst of the dotcom crash and eventually sold to aQuantive, changed our thinking. During a conversation he probably doesn’t remember, he told me they did “semi-related and pretty-unrelated” side projects to keep the lights after the dotcom crash. We realized we could do that, add some more revenues to the bottom line, and not lose sight of other priorities.

We were lucky enough to find Sutton West Coast, a Vancouver-area real estate brokerage that wanted a world-class real estate search product, but didn’t want to build it in-house. We penned a deal in the spring and we launched Sutton’s Vancouver Real Estate search service early this month. We also worked out an arrangement with Findwell, an awesome Seattle-area brokerage, to power their search.

Our white label deals are only a small part of our revenues. We probably would have been better off financially if we had focused solely on Estately, but we we weren’t in a position to risk some downside for a bigger upside. Regular and predictable revenues from the white label sites reduced the risk of running out of money.

What Can We Do Better?

Our real estate search product is already fantastic, but we know dozens of ways we can improve – and become the de facto real estate search in the markets we operate in. We just need to execute.

We Forgot To Tell the Story

We haven’t introduced ourselves to people who want to write about us. When we do, we don’t always tell them about our awesome snappy map search, our compelling features like transit-search (think convenient to BART), or the ability to search within a distance of an area (like West Babylon).

We got involved in feature releases and improvements, leaving fantastic new features un-blogged and unmentioned. The most popular feature request was for sales history on every home – a feature we launched without any fanfare in the spring (see it live on this Naperville home). We need to keep people better informed of what we’re doing!

Consumers who have used Estately love it – most of them have just never tried it.

Our Agents are Awesome – But you’d have to ask us to find out

We collect feedback from everyone who interacts with one of our agents and we have aggressively promoted our best agents. Thousands of people have worked with an Estately partner agent and people rave about our agents. There is no sign of this on Estately.

OK, we got a little distracted

We launched with what was hands-down the best search interface in the industry, but we’ve been working on so many new features and projects that we have occasionally lost sight of the core mission: search. User interface, speed and data accuracy are what have kept consumers coming back to us – we need to keep it that way.

What is next?

Seeing the end of your “runway” lengthen and eventually disappear into the horizon is liberating.

This winter will see us back on the road – expanding into new territories – and, more importantly, back to our product-development, user interface-obsessed roots. We’re taking Estately from being very useful to indispensable for people searching for a home.

June saw some big movers in the Real Estate Blog Index. The Phoenix Real Estate Guy leaped three slots to #1, pushing Agent Genius and Bloodhound Blog into 3rd and 4th place. (Lesson: don’t mess with Jay when he makes a goal).

Tucson Real Estate Blog and Seattle Condo Blog entered the top 20, pushing San Diego Home Blog and Long Beach Real Estate out of the top 20.

Big movers included miOaklandCounty which jumped 19-spots into #25 and the Twin Cities Real Estate Blog jumped 11 spots to 34.

Here are the top 5:

Click on through to see the rest of the Top Real Estate Blogs