Shackprices, the Seattle based real estate search site, has relaunched itself under a new banner, now calling itself Estately (a much more dignified name, if you ask me). John Cook reports that the name change was prompted by a desire “to move away from the word ’shack’.”

The company, which is a licensed broker with the NWMLS, has been in business for just under a year and is led by Galen Ward, a blogger at Rain City Guide.

Shackprices had always had one of the more innovative map-based search tools (see ShackPrices Makes For Fast Home Searching) and Estately continues that tradition. It seems that the smaller brokers often are able to pioneer these kinds of technological advances. Blueroof.com and Movoto also come to mind.

Estately has no plans to get involved in the buying and selling of real estate (at least not yet) and is using its MLS affiliation to gain access to the IDX feeds to populate its listing database.

Launched in tandem with the rebranding, Estately has also launched an Agent Match function which hopes to pair real estate buyers with agents. A pay-for-leads based model is not surprising, though ambitious. HouseValues and HomeGain are already heavily committed in this space.

Estately promises to do it a little differently however. Agents are all prescreened by Estately and buyers can view ratings on every agent (see The Search for Perfect Agent). Buyers can identify their needs and agents can bid for their business (much like BuyerHunt). Ultimately, unlike HouseValues and HomeGain, the final decision remains with the buyer to choose the agent they want to work with. Estately gets paid a percentage of the commission for the referral.

It remains to be seen whether Estately can truly make a go with this model. Many companies have tried and failed before them. Barring that, its options are pursuing an advertising model or alternatively, it could license its technology to other brokers nationwide looking to give their web sites a facelift.

I suspect the later will ultimately be the best course for them, but in the interim, I’m rooting for them to pull it off.

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Not to be outdone by that other 800lb gorilla in the real estate space (see Zillow Asks What’s For Sale in your Hood?), Google has been quietly rolling out improvements to its real estate search and Google Base platforms and left a cryptically vague note on their official blog today that serves as a reminder to the industry that they aren’t sitting still as the online real estate space continues to evolve.

They’ve been on a quiet roll lately, methodically signing up brokers willing to feed their listings directly into the classifieds platform (see Windermere and Google Base Team Up and Trulia Lands the Big One) and it looks like they’re taking baby steps towards providing a real consumer search interface or portal for those listings – something that’s been hinted at in the past by the Mountain View giant (see Google Getting Deeper Into Real Estate Search?).

Right now they’re holding up short of calling it Google Real Estate, rather opting for the more generic terms ‘Housing search’. But is it only a matter of time?

They’ve had drop down menus on the results pages for searches like “Portland real estate” for a while, but what’s really interesting is the development that been going on as you click through.

The Housing Search page has undergone a pretty radical evolution since I last saw it, morphing closer and closer to the now almost generic user interface used by Trulia, Shackprices and other search sites. Sure, it lacks their flair and feels much more utilitarian, but it gets the job done. Standard features like the option to output the search as a RSS feed are included and are welcome (oddly, no KML/Google Earth output however).

As their Google Base inventory levels swell, and more traffic follows – real estate search becomes a much more lucrative market for them to monetize (likely through advertising – maybe even aping Zillow’s EZads?). I wouldn’t put it past them to flip the switch one day and push out a whole new portal.

Just like they did with their MyMaps release today, they’re definitely not opposed to taking out companies that have built businesses their on the API (see Social Mapping for the Masses with MyMaps). The folks at Trulia should be paying close attention.

More from Screenwerk and the Inman Blog.

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Redfin added neighborhood and school data to its listing pages today, something some of the big brokers like RealLiving and Coldwell Banker have already done (see Big Brokers Going Local).

Visiting their site, I wasn’t entirely clear at first where on the listing page to find this information, it wasn’t immediately obvious ‘above the fold‘.

Scrolling down a bit and there, wedged between the sales history and Zillow Zestimate for the property, I found what I was looking for.

Surprisingly, clicking on either of the links takes you to an external page. I was expecting it to be built into Redfin’s listing pages. You can click here to view an example. Like RealLiving, Redfin’s neighborhood data is provided through a partnership with OnBoard LLC.

Overall the implementation is pretty decent. I far prefer Redfin’s approach to RealLiving’s, as they make extensive use of graphs and charts to provide some visual impact to the data.

One frustrating thing I found with the external page, was that when I tried to click back from the neighborhood data to the listing I came from, Redfin’s site would take me back the general search results page and not to the specific home I wanted to view. This got annoying as I was shopping around looking at different homes.

Community/local information continues to be the next big push for brokers looking to add more value to their search pages. While they are steps in the right direction, I haven’t seen anything yet that come close to the depth of information that Zillow, Trulia or Shackprices are offering.

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With Shackprices.com getting a nice nod from Inman yesterday (now behind subscription paywall, unfortunately), I thought it appropriate to look at a couple of new real estate search mashups that have come across my inbox recently.

For real estate professionals or brokers looking to add a complete IDX map search to their web site, dsSearchAgent is a new product by Diverse Solutions, that can easily be white-labeled and customized for any existing website.

On first impression, dsSearchAgent has a nice simple design. It uses a tabs and sliders approach to refining search criteria that reminded me a lot of Shackyack and Blueroof.com. For me it feels like a much more intuitive way to search, as opposed to the approach taken by its closest competitor RealBird.com, which still relies on clunky drop down menus.

dsSearchAgent has a couple of nice eye-candy features too, like the slick use of Ajax-like refreshing to switch between the slider and text boxes. Map results are displayed on a generic Google Map.

Clicking on a pin take you to the details page, which incorporates a Flash slide show, an aerial map, mortgage calculator and Zillow Zestimate of the property’s value. Lots of valuable information that’s cleanly presented for a prospective buyer.

Clicking back on the Map tab it wasn’t immediately clear which pin I had clicked on or which property was highlighted. I found this a little confusing and could be solved with a simple color change on the pins. Furthermore, I found the info contained in the mouseover on the map pins a little lacking, I guess I’ve grown accustomed to seeing a small thumbnail image on each (too much time on Trulia I suspect).

While dsSearchAgent lacks the immediate visual impact of the Blueroof site and is missing the brilliant way Shackprices adds complementary information to a home search, I still think it is worthy of a closer look.

Realty Roundup, on the other hand, is a property management company that serves Sacramento County. They’ve developed a proprietary search tool called HouseHunter2.0 which I really like a lot.

What I found exciting about this site is that it truly puts the individual at the center of the search process. Moving the map marker around the map tells the site where to start the search. Using a radius search highlighted in purple, HouseHunter displays the results closest to you (up to 20 miles away).

It’s a little kludgey to get yourself started (I think I would have preferred a way to punch in your starting address and then start moving the marker around) but it was definitely a fun way to feel like you’re almost physically involved in the search process. I think it’s a function some of the other real estate search sites might be wise to emulate, at least as a secondary or alternative search method.

Check ‘em both out. I’d love to hear what you think.

P.S. BloodhoundBlog has a brief summary of the Inman News piece.

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Galen Ward took the wraps off ShackPrices today. I’ve had a chance to play with the site over the last few days and I’m impressed.

Upon first glance, ShackPrices resembles many of the other real estate search sites out there, including Trulia and Windermere’s PropertyPoint 3 (see Windermere’s Property Point hits a home run).

But digging deeper into the site, I began noticing many subtle UI choices that makes searching ShackPrices a much more pleasant experience (try adding and removing search criteria, for example).

Galen and his partner Doug Cole may be criticized for jumping into the search game late, but my guess is that they were taking their time to deliberately focus on refining the search experience. It shows.

Built around an AJAX framework, ShackPrices is definitely speedier than most sites. The design is nice and clean and very intuitive to use. I found myself moving through my property search with ease.

ShackPrices also also has a powerful algorithm at work behind the scenes. Like many other sites, when you pull up a single listing, ShackPrices shows you the property details – but where ShackPrices truly excels is the depth of secondary information it offers the consumer.

With each listing, you can quickly access similar “Shacks”, recently sold “Shacks” and more neighborhood information (pulled from 43 places) under the Shack Information tab. Because its coded in AJAX, these tabs refresh almost immediately. Pick a another property and all the information changes again. This is one of my favorite features. It’s very slick.

It’s not entirely clear what ShackPrices’ business model is at the moment; whether they plan on going an advertising/media model like Trulia or Zillow, or if it’s just a ‘proof-of-concept’ and they plan on licensing the technology to brokers for use on their web sites. I suspect it’s probably the latter.

ShackPrices is currently limited to searches in Washington State.

More coverage:

John Cook – ShackPrices unveils speedy real estate search
Kevin Boer – Shackprices launches

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