Hey Folks,

Just want to write this post and introduce ourselves to you – the Rain City Guide community. M Realty is an up and coming brokerage with strong roots in Portland Oregon. The brokerage was created by Garron Selliken on the back of our real estate software: HomeQuest. HomeQuest has been around for over 5 years, serving 6 MLS’s including Seattle -NWMLS.  The property search on this site is a new version of the HomeQuest search which will evolve over the coming weeks.  HomeQuest is spearheaded by Chris Lynch, a name familiar to most HomeQuest users in Seattle. We have been active members of our technology community here in Portland for several years, attending and sponsoring local events as well as hosting our own.

Hopefully we can become involved and get to meet all of you at upcoming seattle events like REbarCamp, Wordcamp and beyond. Our team is made up of the following people:

Garron Selliken, Founder – @garrons
Chris Lynch, Co Founder, Ops manager – @chrisinptown
Haley Baroody, Project Manager – @baroody
Simon, Site Manager / SEO – @simonHQ
Tyler, HQ Support – @whitesidet
Toby, Development Team Leader.
And a host of other contributors.

Feel free to add us on twitter or facebook, We’d love to get to know you more!

Some of the things you may have noticed on the new look RCG:  Obviously the biggest change was the addition of an IDX Property search. Although most of you wont ever use this aspect of the site, both Dustin and Garron believed it to be an important feature to have as over 60% of the visitors to the site are actually consumers, we also thought it best to separate “Industry talk” from the information consumers are searching for. We achieved this with the new top level category system, allowing easier navigation for all types of visitors without any dramatic changes to sites overall feel.

We also tried to add some new functionality to make it easier to see where the hot conversations are happening, with the introduction of a comment count per post, displayed under the post titles.

We are a long, long way from finished with the new rain city guide. What makes this site an incredible resource is the immense feedback and interaction among all the contributors  and we hope that never changes! Give us the good, the bad or the just plain ugly, we want to know exactly how we can improve this site for everyone who uses it.  We really appreciate the comments and feedback so far and hope you are as excited as we are to be working on making Rain City Guide the ultimate Seattle web resource for everything related to real estate and the local community.

@simonHQ

PS

Here are a few of the other sites we are currently working on:

portlandoctopus.com – a site about the things we do in our local neighborhoods in portland
mportlandhomes.com – corporate site for M Realty
homequestgroup.com (and realestate-idx.com)  – sites about the software we make