As Zillow grows — we’ve now got an average 8.3 million unique users every month this year, up 60 percent from last year — we’re always trying to improve our site and our search experience.
Today, one of the latest improvements went into effect. If you’re searching for homes on Zillow this morning, you might notice a few changes. We’ve tweaked our search experience with the goal of making searches faster and more streamlined, and more usable for all different types of home shoppers.
If you’re a shopper who knows where you want to look, it’s now easier to constrain your search to certain neighborhoods, ZIP codes or cities. Now, when you search for a specific geography, we’ll show you ONLY homes in that geography.
Here is a search for the Ballard neighborhood in Seattle. Instead of seeing homes in Ballard as well as in other nearby neighborhoods like Sunset Hill and Magnolia, you now see homes only in Ballard. This is particularly useful if you want to set up email alerts to let you know when new homes in a certain neighborhood go on the market. This is easy to do — just set your search criteria and click on the “e-mail alerts” button in the top right corner of the map. A box will open up that will allow you to save your search.
You can then zoom in to get a closer look at the homes on the map, and can filter by price, square footage, days on market and other criteria.
If you’re curious about the surrounding neighborhoods, you can mouse over the map to see the names of the neighborhoods and the number of for-sale, recently-sold and Make Me Move homes in each. One click will move you over to that neighborhood to take a closer look at the homes there.
Moving from neighborhood to neighborhood — or even city to city — is also possible when searching for larger areas.
Here is a search in the entire city of Seattle. By mousing over the map, you can see the names of neighborhoods and the number of for-sale, recently-sold and Make Me Move homes within them. One click will zoom in on the neighborhood that interests you. You can also mouse over the surrounding cities to see their names and number of homes within them, and click to see more details.
To see the search in action, check out Zillow COO Spencer Rascoff’s video on Zillow’s new search experience.