After literally months of working long days and longer nights, I think I’m about ready to launch our new website!

It’s been a couple of years since I’ve really updated the site, and of course a lot has changed. You can look at the old one and it just looks dated – hopefully the new one looks better, although I have to say up front I am not a designer guy. I built it to provide content, and while I hope it’s not too ugly, I know I need to work on improving the visual appeal.

But for now my focus has been on adding new features, with everything based on what someone looking for (or even a current homeowner of) real estate in Anderson County would want to know. Here is a run down of some of the new features that hopefully you’ll find helpful:

• Updates Every Two Hours
  This is one of the biggest upgrades, and one that took me a long time to figure out how to do. Every other agent website that I know of only updates once per day, which usually involves taking a feed from the local MLS every night of all the current listings as of that time. But new homes are added all through the day, as are price reductions. What I do is create a download of new listings and price reductions every two hours and update the site. That means if a new home is entered into the MLS at 9:00Am Monday morning, most sites won’t have any information on it until sometime Tuesday morning. But we’ll have it posted by 11:00AM Monday – a full day ahead of everyone else. The update is performed on each even hour, which means the listing database is refreshed at (approximately) 8AM, 10AM, Noon, 2PM, etc.
• Better Home Search Capabilities
  While we had pretty complete home search capabilities before, I’ve tried to add some things that people might want to look for, and have removed some things that nobody seemed to use. One nice feature is the ability to search by street name. So if you see a new home for sale on Brackenberry Drive in the Harpers Ridge neighborhood but don’t remember or didn’t see the address, you can just enter “BRACKENBERRY” (or any part like “BRACK”) into the Street Search box on our home page, and you’ll get a list of all homes for sale on Brackenberry.
  We’ve also included fields that will let you find only homes that have the master bedroom on the main level, or have been added within the last 7 days.
• Tracking Of Days On List and Price Reductions
  We’ve also started tracking the day a listing first appears in the MLS. While agents have access to a field called “Days On Market” that will tell you exactly how many days since the home was first listed, the MLS won’t allow agents to post it on websites accessible to the public. (They are crazy tight with the MLS data, which is a topic for a whole other blog one day!) But they don’t say I can’t track when it first appears on the feed they send out. So that’s what we started doing as of February 1st, 2009. So if a listing came on our list after that day, we can tell you how long. If it came on before, we can only tell you that its been “at least 107 days” or whatever the time period is since February 1st. Maybe one day the MLS will let us publish that information.
  Same thing with price reductions. The MLS won’t let us use the price history that is available to agents, but I can track in our feed when a price has changed and record it. So if a listing has come across with a different price, you’ll be able to see that when you look at the home details. Again, we starting tracking that on February 1st.
• Detailed Up-To-The-Minute (OK, really every 2 hours) Sales Information
  Since I update every 2 hours, I can also pull sales information too. I used to do it once a month and publish a recap of how many homes have sold this month versus the same month last year, average prices, etc. But now you can see sales stats as of the last update practically in real time. So you can see how many homes have sold in May, and that includes everything that has been closed and turned in to the MLS since maybe two hours ago. Same way with sales in a neighborhood. Say you are interested in homes in Rivendell, since maybe you want to buy there or maybe you already own a home there. You can check out the Rivendell subdivision in our Neighborhood section, and if a home has sold within the last 36 months, you’ll find all the information you need to know about it.
• More Home Pictures
  This is one area lots of agents had leaped-frogged me on. When I last did our website, the MLS only allow 9 pictures per home. So I hard coded this into my web page. Then they went and allowed up to 25 pictures. There was no easy way to redesign everything on my site to take advantage of the extra pictures, so I just went on showing the first 9. Now you can see all 25 or whatever number the listing agent has entered into the MLS. And if it’s our listing, I use my high resolution pictures instead of the grainer ones the MLS gives us.
• Email A Friend
  Send an email to a friend with a link to any home you find on our website.
• Home maps using Microsoft Live Mapping instead of Google
  In case you haven’t seen Microsoft’s new “Birds Eye View”, you’ve got to see it. Instead of satellite view, Microsoft Live maps use low altitude airplane photos that are very clear and close. Almost creepy. It doesn’t cover all of Anderson County, most notably some Hartwell Lake areas, but if it’s available, you’ll see it when you select the “Map This Home” icon on a home details page.
• Home Features
  More details about a home, such as heating and cooling, interior features, foundation type, and more are now available if the listing agent has included them.

Anyway, I hope these new features and our website in general will be helpful to you, whether you’re buying, selling or just owning a home in Anderson, South Carolina. I’d love to get your feedback, so either leave a comment to this post, or see our Leave A Comment link on the website.

Thanks,

Tom