- November 3rd, 2010
- by Galen
- New Features, real estate
Estately Smart Schools: A New Way to Find a Home
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!
Join the discussion »- October 29th, 2010
- by Galen
- Interface Design
The Best Way to Use It
“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.”
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.
Join the discussion »- October 28th, 2010
- by Galen
- real estate
Completing The Trilogy
Early this summer, we made a goal to move through Estately, rip out things that were no longer necessary and double down on making what works work even harder. We started with the homepage because it gave us the chance to rethink our brand and it was technically the least difficult part of the site to update.
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.
Bigger Photos
If our old pictures told 1,000 words, our new photos tell around 2,500 words. Photos now take up the majority of the real estate (pun intended) when you come to a home for sale page. We have also made the photo gallery even easier to peruse: clicking anywhere on the gallery takes you to the next photo.
Cleaner Layout
We have eliminated the search results that used to clutter up the side of the page to make room for bigger photos and better structured information. This is a surprisingly controversial – we’ve had some customers ask for the sidebar back – but we think we have a solution that will please both the die-hard options-galore-loving junky (sort of the prototypical Windows XP user) and the laser-focused home viewer.
We also joined the rest of the internet and fully committed to a fixed-width details page, meaning it looks pretty similar no matter how big or small your monitor is.
More Compact Amenities
The amenities used to take up over half a page. No longer! We pulled out my parents’ old can crusher and packed the amenities into a concise little list. We still have some organizing to do with the new list, but yowza, people uninterested in unsexy-but-very-important septic systems who just want to see the closest school can get there much faster now.
Faster loading
As usual, there are a bunch of behind-the-scenes improvements with this release that make Estately’s search snappier and let us make changes faster. When you click on a link from a saved search email or when you send a listing to your friend, the details page will load faster than ever. Give it a whirl in DC. Ding!
But That’s Not All!
We have a few more releases – including an industry first – that we are excited to be releasing in the coming two weeks.
- October 17th, 2010
- by Galen
- real estate
Holy Search Improvements, Batman!
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.
Join the discussion »- August 16th, 2010
- by Galen
- real estate
How the Greek Debt Crisis Saved Americans $12 Billion
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.
