Rain City Guide

Google is now predicting traffic in the future to help you avoid nasty Seattle traffic on freeways, but that is nothing compared to…
Microsoft’s Clear Flow doesn’t just tell you that traffic usually sucks on Thursdays at 5:30 (because if you’ve driven on I5 twice at rush hour, you already know that). It tells you the [...]

Seriously. Real estate agents have known this forever: people aren’t very interested in buying or selling a home during the holidays. Do you really want to put in an offer and then manage it from your in-laws house in Florida?
Search volumes for Real Estate, Christmas Day, and Thanksgiving Day. Christmas and Thanksgiving alone (without “day”) [...]

I know from the comments and emails that a lot of people enjoy the occasional SEO tweak and update. My latest change (as of 10 minutes ago) was to replace the words “Home” in the main tab with “Seattle Real Estate” (Thank you Tim for the inspiration!).
As usual, [...]

eBay and Google kind of make up – sort of
Nearly 2 weeks ago, I relayed the story of eBay & Google’s corporate cat fight. Well, eBay has decided resume their advertising on Google, but they will be relying on alternative advertising services to a greater degree. This is good news for Yahoo and Microsoft and [...]

Every once in a while, a corporate cat fight in the tech world breaks out that demands my attention. Recently, eBay pulled all of its advertising from Google’s U.S. network. Apparently, Google crashed eBay’s user conference, eBay Live, and went about hawking its online payment service, Google Checkout. They’ve also been lobbying eBay to start [...]

Yesterday, Google Maps introduced Street View Maps for 5 major cities (alas, Seattle wasn’t one of them). The implementation of the Street View feature rocks even though the image quality isn’t as good as it could be. Jim and Galen have already blogged about Google’s new release, so I’ll avoid repeating what they’ve already said.
What [...]

[Editor's Note: I first met Jim Reppond when he moderated the MIT Real Estate Forum (remember that?) when the MIT Alumni Association brought together people from Zillow, Redfin, HouseValues and a prominent local broker, to talk about the future of real estate... It was a fascinating evening that was followed up by [...]

Maplets now let you search for real estate via the traditional Google maps interface. More from Google on the subject. (Get your listings into Google Base to be included). Joel has wondered aloud about Google Real Estate in the past.
If you’re a developer, you can build your own maplet on Google maps, but you’re giving [...]

After a Wacky Wednesday, I thought it might be time to return to real estate technology…
ShackPrices adds mass transit to their listing search and Greg continues to be impressed… (so am I)
USA Today provides an idea for a potential update to ShackPrices… What if Galen included the emotional map of each area?
Speaking of [...]

You can create and link to custom maps on Google now. It’s an easy to use slick interface that would be useful for real estate agents interested in making a tour of their neighborhood. Parts of your tour will also pop up in searchers results, so don’t forget to put a link to your [...]