Seattle-based real estate brokerage company Redfin has expanded its Sweet Digs real estate blog network to the East Coast with the launch of Sweet Digs in Greater Boston and the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area.
The new blogs will offer local real estate market information online or via a daily e-mail newsletter for Back Bay, Cambridge and Somerville in Boston; and Bethesda, Loudoun County and McLean in the Washington, D.C., and Maryland areas.
The company hired nine writers to cover local real estate in the Boston and Washington, D.C., markets. With the addition of the new bloggers, Redfin now boasts 37 bloggers across seven markets, including Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Orange County and San Diego.
The company first launched Sweet Digs in December 2006 in Seattle, and caught controversy in May 2007 when the local multiple listing service, Northwest MLS, said Redfin was violating an MLS rule against advertising other brokers’ listings and fined the company $50,000. (See Inman News story.)
Under pressure from the MLS ruling, Redfin pulled the plug on the Sweet Digs blogs, then re-launched in June 2007 with a new format. Under the original format, the blogs included in-person reviews of local properties for sale. The new format does not include individual property reviews, but offers market data, open house information and other insights at the neighborhood level.
Redfin says its Sweet Digs teams have written more than 4,500 posts since initial launch in 2006.
“The best real estate blogs on the East Coast are written by real estate agents, and Sweet Digs’ independent bloggers will be the perfect complement,” said Bahn Lee, Sweet Digs’ managing editor. “Boston and D.C. Sweet Digs are written by college professors, award-winning journalists, stay-at-home moms and, most of all, real estate fanatics.”
The Greater Boston blog can be found at: http://boston.redfin.com/blog; and the D.C. metro area blog can be found at: http://washingtondc.redfin.com/blog.
***
Send tips or a Letter to the Editor to jessica@inman.com, or call (510) 658-9252, ext. 133.
