On the heels of this year’s big Oscar festivities, we’re proud to announce that BoomTown has been officially approved as a STAR POWER Star-Recommended Supplier!  STAR POWER is a sort of powerhouse think-tank for elite real estate professionals across the United States.  From their website,

“STAR POWER Systems is a time-proven idea sharing network that continuously offers leading-edge systems and techniques…“

Our good buddy down in Hilton Head, Chip Collins of Collins Group Realty,  is a Star member and he very graciously introduced us to this forward-thinking group of agents and brokers.  As a Star-Recommended Supplier, we’ll have the opportunity to introduce BoomTown to some serious real estate heavyweights.  Needless to say, we’re excited to be on board and hope that we’re able to grow some strong relationships out of the program.  That’s it for now… more to come.

Recently, while rolling out a new BoomTown site for Exit First Realty, in Maryland, I came across this neat history of the MLS in the DC/Baltimore area: http://www.mris.com/about/history/index.cfm. I like the shoebox method of IDX distribution!

Via the excellent Shorpy.com site, a photo of downtown Charleston, SC from 1865. Way back in the back there, is the Faber House, aka BoomTown HQ. It’s neat enough to look at old photos (for me anyhow..), but extra neat when you’re sitting in that house 150 years from when the pic was taken.

BoomTown HQ 150 Years Ago - Click for Hi res

We’ve been a bunch of headless chickens over here at BoomTown HQ. We’re proud to annouce our new Jacksonville, FL client Exit Real Estate Gallery. They’ve been an absolute pleasure to work with, and were a great test of the BoomTown system. Most of the system updates we’ve made over the last month or so were to the Leads Management System, so nothing really pubicly visible, but we did come across an enlightening article from MIT recently: MIT Lead Response Management Study. It’s amazing how quickly your chances for success drop as each minute goes by.

We decided early on that we’d use the data we had in the system in ways that we don’t normally see in the broker website arena. One feature is Market Trends. Since we have all the listing data, why not average it out and see what it’s doing over time to give folks a snapshot of an area? We’re set up so that we can run these trend reports on areas as small as a neighborhood, or the entire MLS area. It really gets fun when you get into things like average price per bedrooms, and most viewed properties.

We see more and more buyers starting their house hunting process early, and over a year or more gathering info on what areas they like, and what types of houses are available in a certain price range. The Market Trends are a great tool for this scenario and help to quickly get the lay of the land for an area and I can imagine we’ll start seeing this sort of thing more and more often as broker websites get more advanced.

One of the things I’ve always disliked when searching for real estate is how clunky the whole process is. First you fill out a form that’s nine miles long, then get blitzed by a grid full of stats and a tiny little thumbnail of the property. Then you basically have to open each result to really get a feel for that particular listing – pictures, details that you care about. Our solution is the Preview Pane.

Clicking on a search result shows you a preview of the property that has all the pictures, and the key stats that someone’s likely to be looking at to decide if this place warrants further investigation. This way you can quickly get a feel for a listing, and move on if it’s not what you’re looking for.

We try to gather as many stats as we can about how the website’s performing and how folks are using it. One stat we track is the ratio previews to views, and we’re glad to see that the number of previews is far higher than the number of views. This means that people are using the preview and it’s helping them filter the results and get to the listings that mean something.

From a technical standpoint, it was important to make the preview fast, so we use Ajax to fetch the preview data, and Javascript to scroll through the photos. Not necessarily bleeding-edge stuff, but the quicker someone can see the preview and size up a property the better, and it’s been a great success so far.

The broker website is one of the major pieces of the BoomTown system. You can see an example at www.TheCassinaGroup.com. Over the next few posts, I’ll be talking about some of the innovative things we did that are unlike most real estate websites.

Because the major use of a real estate website is to search listings, making the search easy and powerful was the main goal. This can be tough at times, because a power search means filling out dozens of form fields, and that takes away from ease of use. So, with respect to area, we wrote a custom .NET control that allows for a scrollable list of checkboxes. Rather than having a huge list take up half the page, we can keep the screen real estate down, and since we had a few different types of area filters, like Area, City, and Zip Code, we grouped ‘em together with tabs.

That upper area packs quite a punch for occupying so little area. We’ve tried to build it so that if you’re looking to search by a certain thing (Zip Code, Neighborhood, etc.) it’s there for you, but if not, it gets out of your way. Progressive Disclosure in Jakob Nielsen’s parlance.

First shot across the bow as they say…

We’ll be using this blog for a variety of things: reflections on the real estate industry and where it’s heading, technology that’s available and what impact it might have, features and services that we offer or will be offering in the near future. I might as well apologize upfront for any rambling, incoherent posts that are sure to issue forth.

With all that said, if there was some way to virtually christen a blog, I’d be doing it now. A picture will have to suffice: