Blog Your Real Estate Coverage for Greater Exposure

By Chris Roush
May 8, 2006

How many of you have ever seen a newspaper real estate reporter blogging? I've looked and can't find any.

Blogging is where real estate reporting should be headed. It allows you the immediacy of communicating with your audience on an almost instantaneous basis, and it also allows you the leeway to write about real estate in a way that the traditional newspaper format doesn't.

When I look at the future of real estate reporting, I see blogs like www.curbed.com, which focuses on New York real estate and neighborhoods. It is not affiliated with any newspaper, but Curbed.com has become the must-read Web site if you are interested in New York real estate. Since its launch in May 2004, Curbed has established itself as a virtual conversation about real estate in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and beyond. Sales and rental prices, celebrity deals, new developments, amusing broker stories, hot restaurants, and the latest neighborhood gossip - it's all on Curbed.

Curbed is now expanding into new markets. Curbed LA launched in the fall, and Curbed San Francisco rolled out in March. Other locations on Curbed founder Lockhart Steele's expansion list include Boston, Washington and south Florida. How long will it be until Curbed starts a site in your market and takes readers away from your newspaper and your real estate section?

There are dozens of other well-known real estate blogs, including Brownstoner in New York and The Real Deal and The Real Estate. One of the best is called The Matrix, and it looks at the real estate economy country-wide.

How do journalists combat such competition? Curbed is not pure journalism. Curbed is a gossip site, and the site publishes rumors, conjecture and opinions about local real estate, as well as accurately reported factual information.

So, I see space where a newspaper real estate reporter or editor can carve a niche on the Internet. Real estate is such a vast and expansive beat in most markets that it's impossible for Web sites like Curbed to compete against a fact-based Web site run by journalists that includes great tidbits of real estate information. My ideal newspaper real estate Web blog would include such information as the average selling prices for homes in every neighborhood in the market and the top 10 highest-priced homes currently on the market. There would also be a heavy commercial real estate section on the blog, and I'd encourage the local commercial brokers to post what their clients are looking for on the blog as well.

I also see areas in which a newspaper blog on the real estate market can add items, such as coverage of the local apartment market, that are being virtually ignored in both traditional newspapers and on the Internet.

If you are not currently blogging, I think it's time that you go back to your newsroom and have a serious talk with your editor about starting a real estate blog before it gets to be too late.