The rectangle box on the map seems to only allow you to select an area that keeps the same ratio between height and width. You could allow an area to be draw a "pencil" tool. You could keep it simpler to code by only using simple shapes. e.g. create a search area by drawing a circle around town A, a circle around town B and a Tall thin rectangle around the main road between them.

I don't know what your application is written in but there is an example of what I mean writen in java at http://www.lamatek.com/GoogleMaps/example_12.jsp

You could improve on the refresh to make it automatic.

Many people seem to want very specific search criteria, when they simply couldn't be bothered to go through the results. I get the impression that your wonderful search engine trawls the web for properties and just displays them. This amazing feature in itself is fantastic and has saved us many hours of searching going through all the well known sites like Primelocation, rightmove, fish etc... one at a time.

Yes I guess it would always be possible to find houses listed between 3.15 and 3.20 on a Monday, just after the banks have announced a rate cut, when its sunny and the postman delivered after lunch but the majority of people I think are happy with the site the way it is. Don't fix what ain't broke!

Great site by the way.

You Can enter a place of work and maximum commute time. Using googles route finder (or AA or equivalent) you can get the time it takes from one place to another and only show houses that are within the time allowed. You could also extend this to allow two or more places of work/school etc.. to be added and only the houses that were within all the commute times were shown.

Every so often - seems about 3 minutes or less, or perhaps after clicking on a halfdozen properties the map resets to full uk view.

Pretty annoying.

Also sometimes the house image links to a new window, but sometimes opens in current. This is extremely irritating as back takes you to search criteria -- not where you were last looking on the map!

I have found the ability to hide properties very useful. I can discard them for whatever reason, and not have to see them on the map each time I come back. Very nice. It also allows me to spot clusters of interesting properties. However. If for some reason I manage to hide a property that I didn't mean to, or my requirements change, I see no way to review and re-instate those properties.

Every now and then you get one estate agent listing all their properties at their office location. This means that you have to trail through lots of properties only to find out that they are nowhere near the area you have specified. For example search Beckenham Junction and see how many results are returned from Longford Russell at Kelsey Park Road that are actually nowhere near Beckenham Junction. This is increasingly frustrating in the search for a property.