Tag Archives: Real Estate Search

More real estate mapping: MLS Maps Online

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South Lake UnionThanks to a tip from a reader, I found out about a new home search site (MLS search) that is worth highlighting:
http://www.mlsmapsonline.com

The site uses Microsoft’s Virtual Earth technology to plot MLS listings. The idea is great, but the implementation is definitely lacking some key features. For starters, if you are a Firefox user (like me), you’ll be presented with this message when entering the site:

“We’re sorry. MLSMapsOnline.com is an IE only application. Please download the latest version of Internet Explorer to continue to this website.”

What a bummer! I’m surprised that people still write programs that only work with IE. Under most circumstances, I just ignore sites that don’t support Firefox, but in this case, my curiosity for new map-related MLS searching was greater than my dislike of IE. By the way, don’t even bother to try to view this site with a Mac, I had to use my work computer (as oppose to my home computer) just to test-drive the site!. Now that I’ve acknowledged this major drawback, I’ll move on with my review…

Some things I like:

  • The mixing of flash technology and Microsoft’s mapping technology makes for some really smooth visual searching. It is extremely intuitive to navigate the site. The future of home search is definitely visual, and this site is getting us one step closer.
  • The ability to search by “Listed Date“. The rest of the search controls will be pretty familiar to anyone who has used an MLS search.
  • The ability to log-in and save search results is nice, especially since they do not require it to use the site.

Some things I dislike:

  • It is worth repeating that an IE-only tool is really pathetic, especially when it doesn’t even work on the IE version for a mac!
  • The site design really encourages the user to define a city and/or county to search, when the best way to get to an interesting area would be to zoom in on that city. In other words, if I’m searching for homes in north Seattle, why limit me to the city limits. If I scroll north of Seattle, I want to see the homes that are for sale in Shoreline.
  • The search options are pretty minimal. A user should have access to more advanced search options.

At this point in time, it is one of the better home search options for people in the State of Washington (assuming you’re working on a PC and willing to use IE). However, I happen to know that there are a few more MLS search sites that will come on-line soon that will be using similar technology, but won’t have as many of the limitations. The layout they’ve created is not all that different from the standard MLS search and would be pretty easy to duplicate, which leaves me still waiting for a break-out search site.

It’s worth repeating that I’m definitely interested in hearing about more of these technologies. (I find this topic much more interesting than bubble talk 🙂 ) If you know of another interesting home search site available for Seattle residents, I’d love to hear about it!

UPDATE:
1) MLSMapsOnline went live with a version that works well with Firefox! (that was a really fast update!)
2) The VP of Technology for Windemere emailed me to let me know that Windemere also offers a map for viewing homes for sale via their PropertyPoint software. I’ve played around with their mapping software before and it definitely impressed me a year or two ago when it came out. However, I’m pretty sure they are using an ESRI ArcServer backend and that technology seems dated. I definitely think that the future is in running a backend using Google Maps, Yahoo Maps or Microsoft’s Virtual Earth. Besides being extremely expensive to run, ESRI server-side software is way too difficult to implement for there to be much innovation using this software. Leave it to the big companies (like Windemere) and governments (like MTC) to run ESRI software, while the rest of us take advantage of the mapping wars that the big internet companies are waging!

Shack Prices

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Picture of Homes on RiverShack Prices (which I mentioned a few days ago in the comments section of this post) just went live. Their site gives the sale price of King County homes (including Seattle!). Their reason to be:

Shack Prices was created with the hope of giving people as much information about home values as possible. We realized that there were many websites that show you prices of homes on the market (i.e. homes that haven’t yet sold) and some websites that would sell you information about comparable houses nearby, but no sites that let you pick the comparables and the area. The difference between Shack Prices and realtor web sites is that Shack Prices shows the actual price that each house sold for versus the price that someone hopes their house is worth. You can use it to virtually appraise your home or a neighborhood. We hope it helps you as buyer or seller.

In playing around a little, the site seemed pretty darn intuitive. If you are interested in getting a rough idea of how much your home would be worth on the open market, just insert your bedrooms, bathrooms and square feet. If there is not a lot of data in your area, extend the time-frame out a year, instead of the default three months.

If I had to give a critique of the site, it is that they borrowed a little too heavily from the typical home search websites instead of re-thinking how an “appraisal” site might work. For example, if I’m going to appraise my home, I know precisely how many bedrooms and bathrooms are in the home. Why do they have the option for a range? Also, my experience in estimating a home’s value is that some other data fields within the County’s home sales database (like the home’s style code) is much better than the number of bedrooms at indicating the estimated value of a home. The number of bathrooms plays a minor role at best, so I wouldn’t have even bothered with that field. Granted, some of my suggestions might take some user training if they are used to the more traditional home search, but it would be a more valuable tool.

With that said, if you are living in King County and interested in an estimated value of your home, Shack Prices is a great place to start. However, if you want something a little more robust just ask any real estate agent. ANY agent looking for more business will prepare a “Comparative Market Analysis” for free and the agent will likely be more experienced at weeding through the appropriate data fields to develop a better estimate of your home’s value.

Congratulations to Galen for making this happen and check out Seattle Real Estate Talk’s post on Shack Prices…

more on real estate search technologies

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[photopress:Ballard_RR_Bridge.JPG,thumb,alignright]In researching the options for different real estate search tools, I came across an interesting site called NeighborhoodScout. The idea behind the site is that it would help people moving to a new area find an appropriate neighborhood. I think that the idea is great, but my brief investigation came across some serious flaws in their implementation. For starters, I couldn’t get their algorithms to recommend a neighborhood in Seattle despite my effort to tweak my entries to things I thought would cause their algorithms to recommend Seattle. Instead the site kept recommending Bothell, which is a nice place to live, but not the neighborhoods I was looking for… Another major flaw is their pricing mechanism. The $20 fee to use the interesting parts of their tool seems like a major momentum killer for any website. As I alluded to yesterday, data wants to be free!

I have found a few other neighborhood sites, but they tend to be pretty focused on a local market. For example, Sustainable Seattle has an excellent site that maps demographic and environmental data for Seattle neighborhoods, but my current interest is in sites that have attempted to analyze real estate demographics on a neighborhood level based on national data.

Does anyone have any experience with NeighborhoodScout? Do you know of another neighborhood finders? I’d be very interested to hear about it!

gHomes Update #2

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Bright Water SchoolAbout a week ago, Google made an update to google maps (gmaps) which caused errors to my gHomes MLS Search (built on top of gmaps).

I finally found some time to get around to making updates to my coding so that my MLS search would work. In the process, I’ve streamlined the data conversion process, so that it now only takes me a few minutes a day (if that) to update the MLS. While the MLS search is not nearly as smooth as I’d like, I still think it is one of the most interesting ways to search the homes that are currently on the market.

The current version searches all the homes listed in the City of Seattle. I’m in the process of adding additional Cities and neighborhoods. I’d also like to add “sold” information, but that will also take some time. If you are interested in seeing where I’m going, check out:

http://raincityguide.com/ghomes

gHomes Update

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Bus Tunnel StitchedI’ve been slowly making some updates to the gHomes site. Today’s improvement was to add a link from the Google minipages to more detailed information.

If you are new to my site, then definitely check out my alpha-version of gHomes … I hope you’ll find it is the best way to search for a new home in Seattle.

(Do you know where the photo from this post was taken? Here’s the satellite image…)

gHomes — Seattle Area MLS on Google Maps

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gHomesIn my continual quest to give my clients better and more useful real estate information, I’m experimenting with posting the home sale data over Google Maps and I’ve finally got an alpha version ready for limited public consumption. There are no forms to fill out or hoops to jump through, all you have to do is click on this link:

http://www.RainCityGuide.com/gHomes/

Some notes on the the project:

  • MLS data includes all of Seattle, Kirkland, Bellevue and Redmond
  • The coding is not very advanced stuff (I’m not much of a coder at all!), so be merciful in your comments!
  • The database is missing some MLS listings for a variety of reasons and is only updated once a day. Some listings are missing because the agent filled in the address wrong, while other listings are missing because the agent purposefully did not include the address (this is very common on VERY expensive listings)
  • This is meant to be a fun toy to test out the limits of what’s possible in the real estate industry. Please use it accordingly.
  • Make sure you turn on the “Satellite” view
  • The easiest way to zoom in on an area is to select and icon from that area and then use the scroll bar to zoom into it!
  • Initially, I plan to update the data on a daily basis

Other great google mapping sites include:

Improvements I’d like to make:

  • Add higher quality aerial images a la DASNET
  • Add condos
  • Provide a link to additional listing information directly from google minipages
  • Add more areas in the Puget Sound

Thank you Louis, Ken, Phil and Paul for your help and inspiration!

Of course, if you are interested in seeing any of these homes (in person!), just let me know! Enjoy!

http://www.RainCityGuide.com/gHomes/