That’s how our tax link works. It shows the max with no warning, but as soon as I see the max number, I know the odds of the search equalling the max # is nil.

Ironically, I feel the exact opposite. I hate having a large area search, only to be shown an empty map saying “we’re sorry there’s too many results to show”. And then I spend the next 3 minutes or so adjusting my map so my search will be under the site’s upper limit. I prefer the approach, if you can’t show me everything, show me something.

That said, I think Redfin made a good trade off with having a large upper limit of 500 listings and no pagination. My old map search used to always show the 200 listings closest to the map center and Estately has a paginated search. I like both approaches better than the hard upper limit approach because they always show me something. I really dislike small upper limits and no pagination, since with that design, I spend more time adjusting my map control than I do looking at properties.

That said, I agree you need to have some limiting factor. I just think if the result set has 501 listings, you should display your max number of listings (w/ pagination or a warning) instead of no listings and a warning message.

Glenn blogged about our search filter usage on Bloodhound if you’re curious.

The stats button (the one I use – there is more than one) kicks out when you get over 10,000 properties. You can get the number of properties, but not the rest of the data. That’s why I was doing under $800,000 and over $800,000 in my Sunday Night Stats, to break down to under 10,000 properties.

At Redfin we’ve done extensive testing of both map platforms (Virtual Earth and Google Maps) with respect to the first time load of a large number of pushpins as well as making changes to the pushpins as the user pans the map. Unfortunately performance does degrade significantly over a limit like 500. And while your machine and browser may be capable of handling more consider that 20% of Redfin’s traffic still uses Internet Explorer 6 so we are bound by the least common denominator when designing aspects of our site.

Regardless, many MLSes have rules with respect to the number of houses you can show at any time. 500 seems to be a common limit so even if we could exceed that number with acceptable performance our agreements with many MLSes would prohibit us from doing so.

Should we paginate? I feel very strongly that map results should not paginate.

Not every vacant owner will be affected by the fear of not selling and the news reports of last month, but I think you can find enough that are that they are a much better option than dealing with a bank. Short sales are better options for better markets, where there is less inventory.

Estate sales can also be a good source for value, depending on the situation. I’d have no hesitation at looking at one of those. As to relocation properties, we looked at one a year ago that was grossly overpriced and stayed that way for months. That’s an example of only one, but I don’t usually track overpriced properties. I only remember it because we considered buying it. It was a nice house, but overpriced.