Guest Post: Real Estate Blogging has not jumped the shark

If you live in San Fransisco, New York, or Seattle, you may have come to the conclusion that blogging has jumped the shark. After all, your RSS reader is filled with local blogs galore, plus an assortment of feeds from blogs around the country. It's easy for the most tech savvy among us to conclude that real estate blogging is reaching critical mass. Lately, I've talked to a few bloggers who are leaning this way. The reality is, Fonzie hasn't even strapped on his water skies.

I've probably visited more real estate blogs than any human on Earth. In searching for additions to my REMBEX search engine, rarely a day goes by where I'm not visiting a new blog that covers real estate. Lately, I've been gathering data on the 50 largest cities in the U.S., and what sort of blogging activity is occurring in each market. This data is going into an interactive page for REMBEX that should debut in the next few weeks, but I thought I would share some of my basic findings.

Houston, the fifth largest city in the U.S., has no consistent blog coverage from a real estate agent. There are a few blogs, but none have been updated in the last month. Philadelphia (7th largest) is in the same boat. San Antonio, Dallas, Memphis, El Paso, and Detroit offer no more than one real estate blogger who consistently covers real estate in their city. I bet I may have missed some, but we are talking about a handful of bloggers talking to nearly 10 million people.

Regions that cater to vacation or retirement homes like Phoenix, San Diego, and throughout Florida fare much better. I think these agents likely embraced the idea of selling real estate through the Internet early on, and a higher number of bloggers does not come as a surprise to me.

Technology-laden cites fared the best. Seattle, San Fransisco and San Jose, offer a wealth of local RE blogging. Austin and Denver do as well, on a per capita basis. But none of these markets is really "over blogged."

Seattle is the most highly blogged real estate market. I count at least 16 blogs that cover real estate. Think about that. Sixteen blogs for a city of half of a million people. One blog for every 36,000 people. That doesn't even count the suburbs.

There could be 10 times as many blogs about real estate in Seattle, and I still don't think the entire market would be satisfied. I started my blog for the benefit of 27 clients. An agent that did business with even 12 of their readers a year would likely be earning a nice living.

I hearken back to the days of the Dot Bomb, when the experts said that the best days of the Internet were behind us. They were wrong then, and I think RE 2.0's critics are wrong today.

--Todd Carpenter - lenderama

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