Brownstoner Profiled in The New York Sun

BY JULIE SATOW – Staff Reporter of the Sun
January 27, 2005

The Brownstoner is obsessed with real estate. He surfs Web sites for information to use on his blog, walks the streets with a camera to find pictures to post on his blog, and scans the classifieds for ads to list on his blog. He also owns a brownstone in Clinton Hill, which he is renovating one original tile at a time, and he is detailing his progress on – you guessed it – his blog.

Brownstoner: A Real Estate Fanatic [NY Sun-Subscription]

The man behind the real estate Weblog Brownstoner.com holds a day job as a financier, and in a bid to keep his time-consuming real estate fixation hidden from his boss, has requested that his identity remain anonymous.

He did share some personal details. He is married, has a young daughter, and is in his mid-30s. He began keeping his Weblog in October after buying his Brooklyn home.

“The blog is akin to dating,” he said. “It is like when you find someone and settle down, and you miss the thrill of the chase. This provides me with that thrill.”

Brownstoner averages about 1,500 hits a day on his site, which was redesigned this week and provides a fountain of useful information, including proprietary data he has gathered on the Brooklyn market. A favorite of other real estate blogs such as Curbed and apartment therapy, he is getting more widely noticed by the real estate industry.

Brownstoner’s painstaking effort to create original information – for example, the Excel spreadsheet he makes to track houses by price that are listed in the New York Times classifieds – makes him appear to be one of those creatures of New York: a real estate fanatic.

“Most blogs are recycled content or off-the-top-of-the-head stream of consciousness,” Brownstoner said. “I try to think about proprietary information, although I have no idea if, for instance, that New York Times classified chart is going to result in any important information.”

The blog also offers value-added services such as where to buy replacement landmark windows or when a building permit is required. There is also a listing area on the site where buyers and sellers can see what is on the market and can share comments on the listings, such as whether they think the condition or size of a building is misrepresented in a listing.

“We are trying to bring greater accountability to brokers, where currently there is none, and save buyers from wasting time because of bait-and-switch listing tactics by brokers,” Brownstoner said.

One part of the blog tracks Brownstoner’s efforts at renovating his own home, an 1870s Clinton Hill brownstone. A recent entry read, “The house has nine fireplaces. Six are marble (all of which need to be stripped) and three are wood … One issue we’re having is that none of the fireplaces work right now. We don’t want to have to rip open the walls above the fireplaces so we are considering installing gas fireplaces. Any thoughts?”

The blog includes a history of Clinton Hill and a floor plan of the brownstone. A new addition to the site is a running question-and-answer exchange with the brownstone historian and author of Bricks and Brownstones, Charles Lockwood.

And, since it is a Weblog, the site has featured exchanges over pressing questions, such as one popular posting asking readers about Brooklyn neighborhoods: “What do you think will be the highest returning neighborhood in 2005 (or the least likely to depreciate in a down market)? And if you had to short (that is, bet against) one neighborhood, what would it be?”

The post returned a whopping 56 comments from readers, who took out their mortgage calculators and came up with a variety of answers. Some shorted Bedford-Stuyvesant and went long on Park Slope, or were going long on Fort Greene and Clinton Hill while shorting Cobble Hill.

“My day job doesn’t have that creative outlet, so this gives me that tangible creative release, while combining with my entrepreneurial business background,” he said.