Estately True Areas: Search Beyond the Box
Galen on 07 25, 2007
We just released Estately True Areas which lets people search “beyond the box” and inside the neighborhood, city, or zip code they’re interested in. The area outline and listings in the area are the only results displayed on the map. You can also use it to search for homes within a mile or two from an area or address.
A few people around Seattle have told me that they think real estate search is all done. They are wrong – it’s really just beginning. With 47,000+ Western Washington homes for sale on Estately right now, consumers need great tools to find the right one. At Estately, we’re just assembling the basics for letting people figure out which neighborhood is right for them and find their kind of homes within that neighborhood. Our list of future search improvements, which could just as easily be applied to our competitors, grows longer rather than shorter with each successive release.
So where do the neighborhood boundaries come from? We took the neighborhood wisdom of tens of thousands of local real estate agents to identify where each neighborhood begins and ends. In real life, neighborhood boundaries are fuzzy and they overlap – ask the people who live in Frelard – so Estately neighborhoods follow suit with organic shapes that aren’t defined by streets or city planners. I like it – the big blob-like shape of Ballard is a real contrast to the tight and compact shape of Belltown.
About the Author: Galen Ward
- Author's website: http://www.estately.com/
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9 Responses to “Estately True Areas: Search Beyond the Box”
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I agree with you that real estate search isn’t done. As long as MS & Google keep improving on the platforms on which we build web based mapping applications, they’ll be plenty of opportunity for improvement and innovation. And even if they don’t, there’s still a long list of things that JLS, Redfin, Trulia, and others will do to continue to push the envelope of what’s possible.
Nice addition. I assume arbitrary polygon search is in Estately’s future (similar to JLS)?
Thanks Robbie! We aren’t really considering arbitrary polygon search right now. We considered it, but we just don’t think people are comfortable enough with maps to make it useful to them. Between radii, boxes, neighborhoods, and cities, I think we’re offering a lot of choice without the clutter and sophistication needed to draw boundaries on maps.
Great work, Galen. Real estate search has a long way to go before it’s solved. Both from an interface and data perspective. Exciting times.
Nicely done. The “within location” feature makes your search much more useful for me.
Minor bug: if you further qualify by another search option (I tried “days on market”), then you lose the “within location” qualifier and it shows the entire map again.
“Frelard”? Thanks for the intorduction to the area…I was thinking that maybe Ballard was trying to escape Seattle!
I like that you can see the boundry of the neighborhood. Does it shift over time as property comes on and off the market and agents enter the correct (or not) community, or are the boundries more static?
Thanks Ed and Anon! Anon, I’m having trouble replicating your bug – if you ever come back, could you tell me what browser you’re using and the steps you took in creating that problem?
Deborah – Neighborhood boundaries will indeed shift over time as properties comes on and off the market and neighborhood boundaries change. We are prepared ready or frelard to become a reality.
That also means that this feature will be instantly available when we move into new markets…
Galen,
Has Estately decided on making recommendations to particular mortgage originators? I noticed that Estately will have agent recommendations, after a thoughtful and succinct interviewing process. Is there any chance competitive originators can also be recommended by accomplishing a commensurate interview process?
Obviously, as an originator, I’d love the opportunity!
My shameless self plug.
Galen, I tried to reproduce the problem on IE 6, IE 7, and Firefox 2.
Both versions of IE exhibit the bug:
1) enter “seattle, wa” as location.
2) qualify with “within location”
3) add “days on market” option
4) choose all listings on the market “- to 1 month”
Works correctly in Firefox, but shows listings outside of the selected location on IE 6 and 7. It might help if you start with cookies cleared, but I could also reproduce it by first deleting the DoM option and then re-adding it….
Hey Anon,
Well, that’s a little embarrassing, but thank you for pointing that out to us. It’s fixed now – happy house hunting!