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  |  Estately, Features

Looking as Good as You Work

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.

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  |  Startups

Big Money Does Not Build Great Online Products

Or, Why Dave McClure is Right:

indeed: most VCs are Dinosaurs, and the World Wide Web is an Asteroid that hit the planet in a slow-motion cataclysmic explosion 15 years ago.  It may take another 5 years for the ash clouds & nuclear winter of Browsers, Search Engines, Social Networks, & Mobile Devices to kill all the T-Rexes, but it’s a done deal. The marsupials are taking over, and in 2015 there will be a lot more seed investors that look like Dave McClure, Jeff Clavier, First Round Capital, Y-Combinator, TechStars, Founders Co-op and Founder Collective than any Sand Hill VC.

Take it from a guy who has seen a handful of online real estate competitors raise $5-$10 million each pre-product, hole up for 18-30 months and hire an expensive PR firm to proclaim the release of their huge steaming pile: There is nothing about having a lot of money that improves the odds of a consumer internet startup creating a great product.

The fat startup backlash needs to come to terms with the fact that building a great product is cheap. There are some great examples from the Seattle area – companies like Picnic and UrbanSpoon. While both sold before they became huge companies, they both built phenomenal products that were ready to scale with small, cheap teams. Loads of other companies created in the last 2-4 years have built phenomenal, creative products on the cheap – companies like Smule, Xobni, and Chegg – all of whom went on to raise a bunch of cash after they had consumers using their awesome products.

What used to be a laughably small investment – something in the $100,000-$500,000 range – is now enough enough money to build a truly great online product and cultivate an initial base of users. Facebook is the premier example of this phenomenon: Facebook had 200,000 users before they raised a dollar.

Dave McClure, Jeff Clavier, First Round Capital, Y-Combinator, TechStars, Founders Co-op and Founder Collective know this. At the same time, they aren’t delusional – they know that their companies need more than $100,000-$500,000 to really take off. Because they are investing relatively small amounts, they can make a lot of money with a handful of “dipshit companies” that sell for talent acquisition, a handful of moderate, $20-$50 million successes and a few huge successes.

It is still expensive to grow a company into a billion dollar business. You need a lot of money to flesh out the more expensive parts of a business like marketing, PR and sales and flesh out the product (to dominate the market, per Horowitz’s advice). But because startups today have already eliminated a lot of the risk (product! users!) on a significantly smaller amount of money and dilution, they can demand better terms from VCs or raise more money from a new class of “super angels.” This is good for founders and angels.

All in all, this is good for the rest of us too. This new ecosystem will create extraordinarily more experimentation and ultimately creative destruction than the old VC model: the angel-funding boom is a Cambrian explosion of entrepreneurial life (The Arrington of the Cambrian would have bitched about all the dipshit lifeforms) and when the amount of capital needed to create an online product is so low, products can get built in spite of the VC vetting process.

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  |  Agents

The Calorie-free Purple Cow

Update: I originally wrote a much longer post, but cut a lot of it to make it more internet friendly. I unfortunately cut the part where I talked about how striking it was that only a small part of this conference was to straight marketing tricks, while a lot of it was nuts and bolts marketing that any agent really needs to succeed. What stood out is that The Purple Cow conversation was under an hour of the entire day, when it is often the substantial part of entire other conferences. I apologize if I made this sound like Ben was preaching all fluff: Ben is very much the anti-traditional real estate speaker, with a captivating, understated speaking style and real, useful tactics to help agents become better at their jobs.

Last Thursday I was a fish out of water on a Rain Camp panel hosted by Ben Kinney in Bellingham.

I left feeling exhausted and depressed. The afternoon was largely devoted to consumer-negative or neutral tactics for getting clients. Ben’s recommendations largely hinged on Seth Godin’s purple cow theory. In short, the popular understanding of the theory says that when you drive by pastures, you never remember individual cows, but if there were a purple cow in the pasture, you would not only remember it, but you would talk about it for the rest of your life. Specific purple cow marketing recommendations ranged from neon pink business cards (which reminded me of this guy) to wearing flip flops all the time. In short: be weird in your marketing.

This is not what Purple Cow marketing is supposed to be – it’s supposed to be about how you create a unique product (i.e. an unusually useful online home search product), not your marketing.

The original concept of making unusual products is good, but the Purple Cow is frankly a crappy allegory that is usually misinterpreted. Ultimately a purple cow is merely a trick. Purple cows aren’t useful and they (presumably) produce the same milk or hamburgers that black-and-white cows produce.

At the few-and-far-between real estate conferences I attend, the people on stage uniformly preach the shallowest Purple Cow interpretation possible: you must stand out physically and build a brand around being different in a functionally useless way. Do anything to be memorable as long as it doesn’t involve talking about what you actually do.

Purple Cow marketing is win-lose or win-neutral for consumers. Purple cow marketing does not help people buy the right home, avoid over-paying, get the offer in on time, or correctly answer the hundreds of questions consumers have about buying a home. This sort of gimmicky marketing is something capitalism is supposed to minimize: it is an unproductive waste of resources. It’s win-lose or win-neutral for consumers: there is nothing about their home buying experience it improves and it often obfuscates actual quality of service. Consumers would be much better off if agents spent their time and energy working on behalf of their clients.

Imagine what the real estate industry would be like if agents and brokers took half of time and money they devote to marketing – including the lectures and clubs – and spent that time and effort improving their actual service: knowing every nook and cranny of the inventory (on and off market), knowing home pricing, bringing in the best staging and photography pros for their clients, and being highly responsive.

My other beef with Purple Cow marketing is personal: as a consumer, it turns me off. Sales people who employ tricks make me feel gross. Here’s why: sales tricks indicate two things:

  1. You don’t believe your knowledge or skills are better in any way than your competition, so you have to resort to tricks to get clients.
  2. You don’t believe your knowledge or skills can be differentiated in any meaningful way, so you aren’t investing in them.

The original promise of the internet was to create a landscape where quality bubbled up. Free information was supposed to render marketing tricks useless. And it has lived up to the promise in many industries, but in the real estate industry the internet has actually  rewarded fluff over substance and has actually undermined the historical importance of quality service and personal referrals for finding real estate agents. It’s a trend that we aim to reverse, starting by putting with our current search product which contains as much MLS data as we are allowed to show, all for free with no registration.

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  |  Interface Design

Bigger is better! Pro Tooltips for the Avid Home Hunter

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.

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  |  Real estate

US Housing Starts Illustrated: 50 Year Low


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.

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