Can a condo be a shack?

Thought I’d point folks to updates over at ShackPrices.com. We’ve added permalinks, address search and condos, so now you can see official King County information about every condo that has sold in the last 3 months, 6 months, year, or 5 years in any part of King County. If you want to show someone across the country where the pricy condos in Kirkland are, you can click on permalink in the lower right hand corner and voila! Pricy condos. Perhaps your buddy in Los Angeles wants to see where the pricy houses are – voila! Pricy houses.

Lets say you want to know general prices for Medina houses and condos that have one to three beds, one to three baths and less than 3,000 square feet. The last 30 sales that match that description averaged over a half million dollars in price.

You ask, what can I do with the information on ShackPrices.com? Why is sold data useful? To answer these questions, I refer you to 3 Reasons to Use ShackPrices.com.

So is this the future of real estate search? I sincerely doubt it. I believe that online real estate search is a sliver of what it could be today, let alone what it could be tomorrow. We’re in the “glorified book” stage of search, where real estate sites basically make a big book of listings and sold data easy to page through, but beyond making it easier to go to page 256 (and telling you quickly that’s where you should go), they don’t actually add that much value. This update puts ShackPrices.com in the “glorified book with maps” stage. Perhaps I’m overstating my case, but I genuinely believe that in a few years, people will be ask “how on earth did people find a good home in 2006 without _____?”

I for one am excited to participate in developing the features that will fill in the blank.

-Galen