Hot on the heels of the West African “missionary” leasing out a house that isn’t his (and is for sale, not rent) in Ballard (send your check now!), we spotted a story about squatters offering leases on bank-owned (foreclosed) properties they have “colonized.” I like that term. Sounds so much better than “breaking and entering.”

Here’s the deal: they break into the home, then they charge you monthly rent for the new locks they put on the doors. You, dear renter, are now technically a squatter too. You’re just a sucka-squatter who is paying for the privilege. You live in said home, paying rent, until the bank shows up and puts it on the market.

Seems like a nasty scam, but at least someone is home, right? A renter has to be no worse than a bank at doing upkeep on a foreclosure. Presumably they leave the pipes in place.

Hot Tipper Erika let us know that Robin Beaty is renting out this Ballard, Seattle house for a mere $900 a month. Seriously, he’ll send you the keys if you’ll just send $900 for the first month’s rent. Erika says:

“I SERIOUSLY HOPE THAT PEOPLE HAVE THE COMMON SENSE NOT TO FALL FOR THIS BUT JUST WANTED MAKE SURE YOU WERE AWARE OF WHATS GOING ON.”

Perhaps the reverend is aware that a 30 year loan with 20% down and a 5% interest rate, his rental pricing comes out to nearly exactly half of the $1,868 a month our brand spanking new mortgage calculator predicts you’d pay for your payments if you bought it.

Apparently the missionary Mr. Beaty owns real estate up and down the West Coast - Ballard real estate is just part of his master plan. He has also been spotted in Sacramento. If you do decide to rent from Mr. Beaty (or his alter-ego, Rev. Robin Bruce), please get in touch with me; I have a very cheap bridge that you might be interested in buying.

Seriously - a 30 year was recently over 6% (up from 4.25% a month ago) and rates are changing every day. It’s not as dramatic, but you could also say that the 30 year rate is slightly higher than it was in December or lower than it was in August. (OK, so rates have dropped some since then).

(what, did you expect a picture of girls in bikinis?) Source: BankRate.com.

So you might ask yourself “how much house can I afford today?” or “What would the monthly cost be on this house?” And now you have answers: there is now a mortgage calculator built into every property listing. See it? It’s right below the price. If you click on it, you can change your interest rate (like if you have bad credit or still have a lot of payments on your Porsche) or try it with a different down payment.

Click on this sucker to change your parameters (not here - when you’re viewing a listing like this one in Redmond):

Once you’ve popped it open, change your rate, your downpayment, or put in a monthly payment to see your downpayment:

If you want to get all deep on some wacky non-standard mortgage, this won’t quite cut it for you. If you can recommend a good tool for non-standard mortgages, give us a shout out in the comments.

If you aren’t asking yourself “how much house can I afford?” You may be asking yourself “How did I get here?”

Here is an illustrated answer (with some strong language):

Here is the talking heads sympathizing with you:

Estately.com’s home page has grown up from the old blue box and random text. Today the front page gives you a look at the newest properties being added to Estately, describes Estately Agent Match (and actually features it), and still has that versatile search box that accepts addresses, MLS numbers, neighborhoods, zip codes, and cities.

Like Google, Doug and I created the original front page as an afterthought - we knew we needed a search box, but we weren’t much for designing something attractive or informative. We could however design something functional: a box with a button. All of our design-related efforts went into the map layout, which was much more about user-interface than about design. And so it was until this morning, when Shaun’s new design went live (did I mention we have a new front-end / designer dude dedicated to making Estately more usable?).

Also! It’s always been there, but now you can actually tell how easy it is to sort properties by price, square footage, bedrooms, or the number of days the property has been on, ahem, Estately. Just click the headers in the results list.

More changes! The photo browser still has nice big photos, but we’ve also added nice big arrows for navigating through the images. Nice big click areas are still there for clumsy clickers like myself.

(that’s sorting by days, in case you wondered)

We still have neighborhood outlines, the capacity to search by neighborhood, zip code or city, tons of information about local schools and parks, and suggested and comparable properties for all 40,000+ homes for sale on Estately.

(in case you didn’t catch the reference, see 2:20 into this clip)

We normally reserve this space to discuss our real estate, online technology, or our website, but today I’m going to make an exception to discuss Estately the company - we’re growing! We’ve reached a point where the two of us and our broker can’t keep up with the number of clients asking to be matched with agents while still having time to continue to improve the site.

We’ve decided it’s time to hire someone who is dedicated to Estately’s AgentMatch program, the full job description can be found here:

http://seattle.craigslist.org/see/rej/554863288.html

There is a lot of flexibility in this position, we want to find someone who shares our vision for AgentMatch and let them carve out their own role at Estately and ultimately help steer the AgentMatch program as it continues to grow. If this sounds interesting to you or you know someone who might be interested drop us an email at jobs@estately.com

(recreated from memory)

Dude: “We don’t have a lot of furrboes in New York.”
Me: “Furrboes?”
Dude: “Yeah, For Rent By Owners - F-R-B-Os. Brokers control all the rentals. If you want to rent an apartment, you have to pay a broker a fee.”
Me: “Right. FRBOs. I’ve heard about the setup here. I guess it’s no skin off the landlord’s back if you’re paying the fees.”
Dude: “Well, the FRBOs that you can find on Craigslist are all way overpriced because the landlord knows that people will pay more to avoid the broker fee.”
Me: “Bizarre.”

It does seem strange that the landlords in New York make consumers pay their marketing costs, but with rents continuing their upward march, perhaps the landlords don’t notice the money they could be capturing in higher rents.

I’ve always thought of America as a disposable nation; we seem to have the capacity to make even the most permanent things, from dishware to cameras, into disposable objects. And, looking at a lot of recent housing developments (and ignoring assurances about vastly improved housing codes from an architect friend), I just assumed we led the world in disposable housing.

But we aren’t.

Due to a history riddled with earthquakes, fires and perverse pro-new housing tax incentives, Japan razes homes faster than casino developers in Vegas. After about 30 years, homes are replaced and because of the disposable mindset, new homes are built with cheap materials, prolonging the cycle. So few “used” homes are sold that there is little infrastructure, from surveyors to appraisers, for second-hand homes (sorry Eppraisal!).

Statistics from the Economist. The full story is behind a paywall at the Economist.

Useless Bay, in Langley, Washington. Washington has a lot of ridiculous names, but Useless Bay is my new favorite.

We didn’t get all web 3.0 on you and add tags and notes and ratings and widgets to every property, but for the folksonomy lovers out there, you can get all the benefits of tagging without the buzzwords or user interface clutter.

Tagging Step 1: Write a note with your tag (”keeper“)

Tagging Step 2: Use the same keyword in other notes

Tagging Step 3: Search for the keyword (this is the useful part)

Tagging Step 4: Peruse your list of “keepers”

We worked hard to make Estately exceedingly easy to jump into and start searching for homes, yet also extremely powerful. This means we limited the myriad of search options we could have added, combined other options, and made the options that only 0.1% of the users in this world “absolutely need” accessible via the text search box. Our goal is to get people to searching and refining in seconds. When we recently added notes, we made some design choices to keep this ease of use.

Make it easy to add a note. And another.

No links, no separate pages. Just click in a box at the bottom of the page, write a note, and post. If you want to add another note, do it again.

Type and add - pure and simple

Make notes accessible

New, unregistered users and old logged in users alike can add notes - we skipped the forced login screens. People who stumble on the site can write as many notes as they want. Of course, we don’t want people to accidentally abandon their notes and lose them to the ether, so we encourage them to sign up or log in. Notes are permanently saved when people log in.

The log in warning appears when you create a note

Make notes easy to search

Don’t add more clutter to the interface - we let you search your notes through the text search interface that a lot of people are using already.