We’re adding one more contributor to our roster today:
Ronan Doyle lives in Boston and works as an advertising agency creative executive. He loves distinctive homes and is building his wealth house by house: Search, buy, improve, enjoy, sell — then repeat the process.
Ronan know more about houses — about what makes a house work — than anyone I’ve ever met. Between Restoration Hardware and the two-year capital gains income tax exclusion, he is a one-man urban renewal project.
Jim Duncan at Real Central VA wonders if I might be wrong about the audience for real estate weblogs. In fact I could be. There may be more real estate consumers out there than I suppose, and they may be more persistent in their reading than I surmise.
For my own part, I don’t see them — very much the contrary. As I argued a week-and-a-half ago:
If you’re writing a real estate weblog, you’re blogging for people who are fanatical about real estate. Who would that be? Realtors, lenders and the vendors who live off their business. Bubbleheads and people on the bubble about bubbleheadedness. Real estate investors. That’s it. There might be some peeking-in/checking-up traffic from past clients, and perhaps some dedicated fans. There will be drop-ins from people shopping for Realtors, but they will not become dedicated readers. How do I know this? Because they don’t care. You can tell who cares about your weblog by looking at your Technorati links. There are 55 million weblogs out there, but the only ones linking to you are produced by other real estate fanatics. That’s not a wave. That’s the water…
Even so, the simple fact is that we are focused the way we are because this is what is interesting to us. I don’t tell other people what to do, and I may be completely wrong about locally-focused, consumer-oriented real estate weblogs. We actually have a nascent weblog devoted to those kinds of ideas, but we don’t give it any time.
In any case, it may turn out that Ronan Doyle is our brave initiative to straddle the line. Ronan is truly a real estate fanatic, but we wanted to bring him aboard to provide the consumer perspective. If we get too carried away, it could be he’ll bring us back to our senses…
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate marketing
Larry Cragun says:
I am certain only a small percent of home shoppers are consciously reading blogs as part of their research. I am also certain that this will change. To me it will be similar to email. Some, like my wife, refused to participate. What was a mental block has changed. She loves her email now. She even writes a blog. The same change will take place with blog research. So you thought you were making a waves, in fact you are part of a Sunami. Larry Cragun
November 28, 2006 — 1:37 pm