"His Rain City Guide set the foundation for the rest of us," Swann said. Bloodhound Blog's focus is national and the audience is the industry, but the site, which sees 1,200 unique hits a day, definitely has a nose for the news and is written with some bite.
An excerpt: "Are you looking for a mission statement? . . . BloodhoundBlog is everything you wish were in Realtor magazine -- but isn't."
The latest rage in the realty blog world is social networking sites. Think YouTube or Facebook but about real estate.
In that arena, Bigger Pockets deserves a mention. It includes a blog written in Denver by Joshua Dorkin, 32, a onetime real estate agent in L.A. Dorkin showed what people connecting on the Web could do. Back in 2006, he blogged about a Ponzi scheme involving Atlanta-based Pinnacle Development Partners LLC. Word spread like blogfire, and soon complete strangers from across the country were coming together on Bigger Pockets and talking to one another.
Making a connection
The site became the informal home of Pinnacle's victims. S. Gregory Hays, the court-appointed receiver in the resulting court case, was able to post notices to the investors on the site to keep them updated. In September 2007, Pinnacle head Gene A. O'Neal was sentenced to 12 years in federal prison for defrauding investors of nearly $20 million.
And then there are the blogs that exist to entertain. They report on celebrity transactions with the passion of People magazine and E!. And once again, the anonymity of the Internet may be a key.
Your Mama, proprietor of the celebrity-realty transaction blog the Real Estalker, isn't a mama at all, but a man. Mark David -- who goes by his first and middle names -- covers Hollywood like white on rice, although the blog is actually generated from an apartment in Manhattan's Chelsea district. Talk about ripping away the curtain from the Wizard of Oz.
But no matter, Your Mama provides a steady stream of scoops, those hard-to-come-by interior photos of celebrity homes and caustic comments on how the rich and famous live and sell their properties.
Mark David admits that the blog has exceeded his expectations and seems to have taken on a life of its own. It's led to other paid writing assignments and TV appearances.
Competitor -- and that's using the term loosely because the two blogs engage in a regular love fest, congratulating each other on their entries -- Big Time Listings (www.bergproperties.com/blog/.com) has more of the same but with less attitude.
Throw in Luxist -- an online sort-of Architectural Digest of beautiful homes for sale across the nation, some non-celebrity-owned -- and you have the realty world's online celebrity triumvirate.
Even some agents have caught the "amuse them and they will come" fever.
Kris Berg's San Diego Home Blog is a "must read" because of her Erma Bombeck-like voice.
She once blogged about shopping in a brick-and-mortar bookstore that was out of the books she wanted and realizing that online booksellers are always stocked: "We departed like two people who just remembered they left their children on the stove. . . ."
Her point of the post was, of course, real estate. The brick-and-mortar bookseller was yesterday's storefront realty office and the Internet is where you'll find your housing needs met today -- most likely on someone's blog.
ann.brenoff@latimes.com
