We have no allusions about the likelihood of our transit information on every property getting much use in Dallas, but in place where walking is unheard of, we find walkers really value having Walk Scores and high Walk Score neighborhoods do exist: Dallas only has one property available with a 95+ Walk Score, but in that building, you can go high and build out the penthouse or go for one of the other 5 units.

There are a many more listings in Dallas with 90+ Walkscores (here are a few) including one from 1865. Fort Worth also has three buildings that can play the 90+ Walkscore game (here are two).

It should be no great surprise that there are a lot more great Walk Score homes in New York. We have 95+ Walk Score listings all the way up the Hudson, from this place in Peekskill to this place in Croton-on-Hudson to this listing in Tarrytown.

We’re also bringing our (IMHO) awesome school search to Dallas and New York. Here’s an example for Bear Creek Elementary in Euless, TX:

Zoom in any where with homes for sale on Estately to see the local schools on the map. Click on any school to see its boundaries.

Backing out, I want to point out that we aren’t just launching in the big cities of Texas. You’ll find Estately to the north in Sherman, to the West in Weatherford, to the South in Midlothian and to the East in Greenville. From an outsiders view point, Texas appears to be a state rich with flavors and fragrances, from sweet-sounding Flower Mound and Grapevine to the savory Mesquite and the potentially foul smelling Sulphur Springs.

Our new New York markets that the average American may recognize include Yonkers, Poughkeepsie, and New Rochelle.

Recently some for sale listings on Estately were being removed from our map search before going off of the market. They still had dedicated pages on Estately showing all the nitty-gritty details we are known for, but they were not discoverable through our map search. I wish we could blame it on the earthquake or contagious congressional dysfunction, but I am simultaneously glad to let you know that we were able fix the problem without waiting for an antidote to political infighting and gridlock (and that as native Seattleites, we would need much more violent earth shaking to disrupt service).

New listings and old listings alike are available again in the greater DC area – from Friendly to Wolf Trap and Arnold to Bowie (and even from Germantown to Franconia). Or see every home for sale on N street in Georgetown.

Estately is backed by the most comprehensive and up-to-date database of homes available for the Greater Washington DC area – listings from the MRIS Multiple Listing Service – and we are keeping a close eye on this area to make sure this problem does not bubble up again. Please let us know if we’re missing even one listing or one iota of information on any listing – we are listening!

Estately is now the first to bring you home search by school!

Here at Estately, we’re always looking for new ways to help you find your needle in the haystack of homes for sale. Today we’ve launched our new one-click school search, so you can narrow your hunt to properties within a specific school’s attendance zone.

Whether you want to purchase a new home without switching school zones, or if you’d like to relocate to a more highly-ranked or specialized catchment area, this new feature will help you quickly refine your search alongside our existing filters for keywords, price, size, parking spaces, Walk Score, and more.

Just search for a school by name or click its icon to reveal all properties for sale in its attendance zone.

School icons now appear automatically on the map as you search, so you easily see which homes are within walking distance (or, if playground noise isn’t your thing, which homes are well out of walking distance). See a school’s grade levels served, public/private status, enrollment numbers, and GreatSchools ranking by clicking on its icon.

Estately is the only real estate search engine with school boundaries right down to the side of the street, and as school district boundaries change, our data updates in real-time thanks to our partners at Maponics.

Our school data includes all types of schools — including magnet, private, and alternately-funded schools — from kindergarten through high school. Schools without specific attendance zones, such as private schools, are also visible on the map for reference.

Search homes for sale by school district on Estately >>

If we are to believe Greg Robertson, (Another nail in the coffin for map search?), the coffin is being hammered shut on real estate map search as I type because one of our competitors pulled their map prototype after a week or two in the wild.

But Greg is blurring product type with product execution and product audience.

When a company fails to successfully execute a feature, product or business, it does not mean that feature is dead. Apple, for instance, is a company that seems to exclusively create market segments where others failed so many times that the segment was considered dead (remember these?). Weebly grew like a weed at the exact same time that Yahoo decided Geocities was a dead business. Coupon sites have existed since the dawn of the internet, but Groupon got the formula just right. Close to my heart, Home Advisor’s failure wasn’t an indicator that people didn’t want to use the internet to find homes online, it just meant they went about it the wrong way.

While maps can be tricky for novices, they provide a world of information that merely selecting “90210” from a drop down and looking at a list of results doesn’t provide. Our users often tell us that they don’t care about arbitrary zip code boundaries or neighborhood boundaries – they want to see the homes for sale on a map and pick which ones they are interested in for themselves (they do care about school boundaries though). When users do care about zip code or city boundaries, they still want to see if homes are on major streets or near parks before they decide to learn more about them.

Maps are not the logical search medium for most other industries. Hotels need to be in the area, but factors like major vs. minor street, corner vs. middle of the street and proximity to parks and amenities aren’t nearly as important for hotel seekers. Restaurants are in the same category – the price is primarily for the food and sometimes the view, and eating a block from the freeway isn’t as scary as living there. But in real estate, a marker on a map tells you more about a house or condo than a thousand words could.

So why do most of our competitors stick to list search – and even go so far as to say that their internal testing shows that list search is better for users?

Three reasons:

1. Map search is extremely hard to get right. Getting map search right is like cooking a chicken – half baked isn’t half as good, it just makes you sick. Map search unfortunately defies a lot of the incremental, iterative Lean Startup advice; there is no incremental shift from list search to map search that is useful or an improvement until you have fully made the leap.
2. Another problem with map search is that it’s difficult to figure out if you got it right. A lot of traditional usability studies involve testing with people off the street or people who are in your target audience (i.e., thinking of buying a home). Map search is typically best for consumers who are dedicated to buying a home or being a real estate junkie; it annoys dilettantes.
3. Lastly, maps just aren’t conducive to wall-to-wall ads. Our competitors attempt to help real estate agents and others wiggle into people’s psyches while they’re trying to find a home they want. Our business on the other hand is driven by helping people find and buy homes online.

We believe maps-done-right are a core part of what has helped Estately grow and prosper. We are glad that they’re hard to get right and we are very excited about the improvements we have in the pipeline. The fact that our competition is dropping out of the game – along with consistent growth we’re seeing in new and return traffic – just helps confirm that our hard work is paying off.

I find these fascinating (I’m a geo nerd). I like knowing that 98102 includes a little parcel north of the water. I find the San Francisco’s Mission’s tail interesting.

Obviously neighborhoods are a lot more subjective than zip codes. We continue to let you add some distance (just to the right of the search box) or just outright remove the boundary and limit your search only by what you can see on the entire map.

I want to thank our friends at Maponics for making it dead simple to bring this to you. They obsess over getting the boundaries just right (that’s all they do!) so we can obsess over making it easier for you to find and buy homes online.

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!

“From a technical standpoint, Microsoft has never lagged Apple. In many cases, features Apple offered in its Macs were first enjoyed by Windows users. Where Microsoft fell short was in delivering these features in the cleanest way possible. The focus was on functionality, not the best way to use it. I continue to believe that anything you can do on a Mac you can do on a PC, it’s just the manner in which you do it that separates the two.”

- Anandtech

Anders, one of our developers, dug up this quote for the Estately team and we liked it so much we put it on the blog.

In many cases, we at Estately strive to be the Apple to the real estate industry’s Microsoft. It means doing hundreds of little things incrementally better and doing a few things monumentally better.

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.