As I transition out of a full time role in real estate software development, I’m doing some cleaning up of my RSS feeds. (Yes, Virginia, people still use RSS readers. I’m a big fan of NewsBlur.)
If you are a software developer in the real estate space, here are some useful blogs to follow to understand the industry.
- 1000 Watt is a consultancy that focuses on brokerages and realtors. If you like inside baseball, this is the blog to read. If you want to know about politics between portals and realtors, or high level strategies that 1000 Watt thinks will work for local brokers, or brokerage branding ideas, you should read this blog. They also do a good job of featuring the latest software startup to rock the real estate world. This blog is written by several members of the consultancy, but they all get bylines.
- Calculated Risk is all about the big picture, the numbers and graphs. Bill McBride monitors the economy so you don’t have to. His real estate focus tends to be either nationwide or California, so he’s probably not going to write a post that is useful to your specific market, but his overall analysis of economic trends, whether positive or negative, is required reading. For instance, check out his job chart, which shows just how bad the great recession was, or the list of troubled banks (done by a contributor) or his graphs of other economic indicators like restaurant or trucking indices. If you are interested as a person or a developer in the mortgage market, read all of Tanta’s articles about mortgages–there’s a lot of money and lot of of complexity in that business (she passed away, but was a contributor for years).
- The Geek Estate Blog is a unique fusion of technology and real restate. Drew Meyers was with Zillow and has done few startups outside of the real estate space. Because of this experience, he has a unique perspective on the real estate space and startups therein, and shares his perspective. Drew also takes guest posts (I’ve written a couple) and while sometimes they seem like thinly veiled sales pitches, other times they can clue you in to other technologies, startups or trends in the real estate world. I haven’t found a better source of real estate news that is focused on technology.
- Your local excellent real estate blogger. In Boulder, that’s Osman Parvez of House Einstein, and no one else (I really like 8z’s market updates, but that only comes out once a month). I can’t tell you how to find this blog beyond searching for ‘[your location] real estate blogger’. They will most likely be a realtor (but they could be someone else–Dave Fratello wasn’t a realtor for a long time). They are using blogging as a bizdev tool and can give you a great view of your local market (for instance, check out this post about poptops in south Boulder, and this sample of his market stats).
Bonus read if you are a software developer looking to get into real estate: Game Plan is a book, not a blog, but I found it tremendously useful because it covers the recent history of the real estate business and will serve as a primer to get you up to speed on the various players and their concerns.
Finally, I also subscribed to some of the big tech giant tech blogs (Redfin, Zillow) but didn’t find much value in their sporadic posts.
If you are a software developer who is working in the real estate space, I’d love to know what you read.
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