NY-based neighborhood info and real estate aggregator StreetEasy has announced the launch of their northern New Jersey site today. The initial counties in New Jersey include: Hudson, Bergen, Essex, Morris and Passaic Counties. StreetEasy North Jersey includes sale listings, open houses, a new development directory, and recorded sales.

As I went through the absolutely horrible process of locating an apartment in NYC over the past couple of months, I used StreetEasy a bit. I found that while the site had a lot of information and a good bit of Web 2.0-style features, the search was just too slow. I commented about this in another CN post and within an hour, the lead developer from StreetEasy contacted me to discuss. We had about an hour-long conversation and my guess is that the Google Maps integration is what makes the site so slow. I suggested that the map be user-selectable as I don't care much about the map as I do about the speed of the search. He took that plus my other suggestions and was very open.

There's an absolute gap here in NYC and I will have more on this topic later this week. It won't be pretty, I can assure you of that. 

Check out my behind-the-scenes interview with the StreetEasy team at their midtown office.