I’ve been pretty unrestrained in my criticisms for MLSLI.Com in the past. One of the things I’ve constantly harped on is the design, which looks pretty much like it used to back in 1997 when I worked for the now defunct Long Island Savings Bank and used to do updates and tweaks on it.

About two weeks ago they upgraded the look to what you see now in the screen shot. It’s not a bad design, although it looks a lot like web sites I designed back in 2002. The design isn’t very visually interesting, but it’s functional and doesn’t look something from before the dotcom crash, so at least that’s something.

Something else I’d like you to note in the screen shot is the white box in the middle of the map that says “searching”. It’s a little hard to make out, but trust me, it’s there. I’ve seen the searching box a lot lately in the last two weeks because ever since they changed the design I haven’t been able to get results from the Sold Properties search tool.

The availability of the Sold Properties search has always been intermittent, but intermittent is much better than nonexistent or nonfunctional, which is what it is now. I sent a complaint in via their contact form, but I still haven’t heard back. I was looking forward to doing a September sold homes post, but I’m going to have to wait until either they bring the tool back online or I find another way to get the data.

One more complaint, as long as I’m off on a rant here. While I like the search by map feature of the Sold Properties tool, it would be nice if we could have a regular search form without the map so that I could drill down by zip code or number of bedrooms or price or whatever. With the map search I’m constantly trying to get the zoom and pan on the map just right so that I can get all of Babylon in without getting too much of West Islip or West Babylon.