The universe of map-based listings portals was upended last week with the announcement that Zillow.com was coming into the game, along with 58 million of its little green friends. Whatever long-term effects this might have, the short-term consequence has been a deafening silence from all directions. We haven’t even heard the blustering ‘guy talk’ one might expect in these circumstances (“Two legs?! Only losers need two legs!”).
But there is in fact a place even harder than the hard place the Realty.bots found themselves in last week: Imagine being on the verge of rolling out your brand new map-based listings portal when Zillow made its announcement.
This is the predicament Galen Ward and Doug Cole found themselves in last week as they prepared to go live with ShackPrices.com, a brand new listings portal based in and (for now) devoted to Washington state.
Here’s the company’s official press announcement:
ShackPrices.com is a snappy Google maps-based real estate search site that makes finding a home better by augmenting each real estate listing with data about what is nearby, including the distances to nearby landmarks, nearby schools and nearby bus stops. ShackPrices also helps home buyers learn about cities and neighborhoods through links to reviews, statistics and photos.
We cover all of Washington State right now and we plan to expand to other states in the coming year. As part of our mission to make finding and buying real estate easier and better, we will be introducing a service to help home buyers find the best local real estate agents in the coming year.
Readers here will know Galen Ward from his contributions to Rain City Guide. And the site is everything we would expect from Galen, fast and robust, esthetically beautiful and rich in practical details. The fit and finish is beyond excellent, in stark contrast to Zillow’s offering, and the extra features — neighborhood details, nearby amenities, etc. — are the best I’ve ever seen.
The site draws upon MLS listings, so the inventory is very large from day one. The browser window is tab-based for maximum information density with a minimum of confusion. The underlying AJAX programming makes the system behave like a stand-alone desktop application, rather than a web-based service. Screen refresh is refreshingly rapid.
The question of the hour is, can this David take on a Fifty-Eight Million Dollar Goliath? ShackPrices.com brings a lot of value in its sling: A very slick map-based interface that tabs out to excellent detail pages, including neighborhood details that no other search portal is documenting. It includes community-oriented features absent from other Realty.bots, along with a deft implementation of Web 2.0 ideas. That’s probably not enough to fell giants, but ShackPrices.com doesn’t need to supplant its competitors, it just needs to find a niche among people who see it as a better answer to their home search needs.
At this, it may have succeeded. ShackPrices.com is a sweet implementation of the map-based search paradigm, perhaps the most complete expression of the idea so far. Give it a spin and see what you think…
Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate marketing
Greg2 says:
Oh man, it’s the attack of the braindead “Mikes” and “Gregs”. Go back to the cave you crawled out of.
The site is nice. I’d rather take a simple site with a bit of very useful info, than a huge bloat like Zillow which has a lot of very inaccurate and useless info.
December 13, 2006 — 9:10 am
Erik says:
Nice site – very nice actually.
I’ve got 2 questions:
1. I found a property I like, how do I contact a real estate agent to buy it? I found no links.
2. Does it scale? Should it? Basically, the choice is to be the BEST real estate site for Washington and continue improving what you do for just that market (like StreetEasy does in NY, or take this model and scale it nationwide.
December 13, 2006 — 9:28 am
Galen says:
Greg, thanks for interest – I’m glad you like the site. I think our competitors are focusing on ‘bling’ whereas we are intensely focused on what are users tell us they want and need to improve their search for a home.
Erik, we’ll be sure to address your questions in 2007. We’re going to be sure that we have the hands down best home search first.
December 13, 2006 — 10:49 am
Galen says:
(That should have read “Greg, thanks for your interesting post”)
December 13, 2006 — 10:50 am
REBlogGirl says:
Greg, thanks for bringing some much needed attention to this little gem. Interesting UI design and good feature set. For me, though, it lacks the “slick factor.” I think a few tweaks to the interface could give it greater visual appeal and make it feel a little more web 2.0.
December 13, 2006 — 5:08 pm
tim says:
Galen,
If want to make an offer on one of the houses how would I do that?
December 14, 2006 — 10:57 am