Photo by pinhole

I really dig this. New York based broker Halstead Property partnered with New York Magazine to provide its online reviews to the real estate company’s web site.

Check out their neighborhood profiles for Soho or Greenwich Village, for example. Great information that’s very valuable to the consumer. I think this brilliant move for Halstead and it’s an interesting trend for a few reasons.

First, it seems that brokers are increasingly interested in aligning themselves with established publications to bring a degree of authenticity and consumer name-brand recognition to their destination sites. Case in point – Realogy is in the midsts of rebuilding an entire real estate company around the Better Homes and Gardens brand. Why do this? Quite simply, because these brands resonate with consumers.

The reality is that, to many, there is still some cachet to “dead tree
media” – and the brokers may be waking up to that. These sorts of deals
are a natural differentiator in any market.

It also signals to me that more brokers are waking to the reality that they themselves are media publishers and therefore need to start acting like them. Inking content deals for their sites is part of that, but so is exploring trends like syndication and distribution for their own content (i.e. listings).

Secondly, it’s a brand new revenue stream for local media publishers. With the real estate brokers, they have found new customers who are hungry for neighborhood content to add to the on-site experience for their web visitors. I fully expect to see many more examples of this in the future, as media look to mine their archives for syndication opportunities as their advertising revenue scales back; Portland Monthly magazine could decide to license its Best Neighborhoods reports (PDF) to a Portland broker, for example.

It’ll be interesting to see where this all goes.

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by photomagister

Developers looking for new ways to mashup data on a neighborhood level (two of my current favorite applications are Walk Score and Drive Score) have a couple new options this week.

First, Urban Mapping released its free Neighborhood boundary API and now Zillow has followed suit, releasing over 7000 individual boundary files.

What’s in it for Zillow? Well, it’s a perfect example of crowdsourcing their development. Zillow hopes the folks that use the definitions can in turn refine them and then pitch them back into the mix.

From ZillowBlog:

We’ll add them to the database of neighborhoods available for download and will work to eventually integrate them into Zillow.

Makes perfect sense – especially since their neighborhood definitions (at least where I live) are not exactly perfect (see Zillow Launches New Smart Search Feature).

Nevertheless, kudos to both for releasing this kind of valuable geo-data to the wild. It’s way above my head, but I’m sure someone out there will have some ideas on how to use it.

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