The Rat and Mouse is reaching out. From now on, some Mondays (not including Bank Holidays Mondays, Black Mondays, or Mondays when the sheer pressure of my other work means I simply haven't got it together) will feature an interview. And I'm delighted to be kicking off this series with Lockhart Steele - founder of New York's powerhouse property blog Curbed (currently in rapid-expansion mode and centrepiece of the Curbed Network) and editorial director for Gawker Media. Curbed is great, and if you've any interest whatsoever in the changing shape of Manhattan you should be reading it. Here's the interview:
Could you could give a little background about Curbed? When? Why? How? And what about that name?
Curbed grew out of my personal blog, LockhartSteele.com, which I started in 2001. I ended up blogging a lot about the Lower East Side, the neighborhood in downtown Manhattan where I lived. As people in the neighborhood came to read the site, I figured it might be fun to broaden things a bit and try to tell the story of all the city's neighbourhoods. That's how Curbed came about.
No great story behind the name. I came up with it during a brainstorm session, and our tech genius Eliot Shepard told me it was the best of an otherwise pretty shitty list.
Was there a business plan behind the website right from the start? If so, how has it (and the nature of the site) changed since you launched it?
Well, I'd say I had the hope that if all went well with the site, it would generate some income down the road. But that wasn't the primary reason for doing it - I really thought it would be fun. I ran the site the entire first year without advertising, but a dear old friend of mine, Alexis Palmer, was a partner in Curbed from Day 1 for the day when advertisers came calling. That started to happen in the spring of 2005.
Besides adding ads to the site, not much has changed on Curbed New York, though we've expanded to Los Angeles and San Francisco, and added spinoff sites including Eater (restaurant news for NYC, LA, and, soon, San Francisco), and The Beach (a sort of combo Curbed-Eater for the Hamptons), plus a new NYC spinoff launching later this month.
Lock answers the tough ones, after the jump...
Technorati Tags: blogging, Curbed, New York, property, real estate, Web2, Web2.0
Can you give some idea of how traffic has grown since launch? And what do you know about your readership? Who are they?
Alexis has all this great data for our New York Site from a reader's survey we did last year that over 1,000 Curbed readers participated in. Surprise, most of them live in New York. Something else that's surprised people, but didn't surprise me, is that only 8% of our readership works in the real estate industry. The site is mostly read by regular New Yorkers with a fascination in their neighborhood and in real estate. A survey on Eater showed that the Curbed and Eater audiences are largely similar in demographic makeup.
The Curbed Network as a whole does over 2 million pageviews a month these days. That's up from about 40,000 pageviews our first month.
Did you already have... or go out to find... contacts in the real estate industry? How does the industry treat you? Are you getting regular tips from real estate agents... developers... etc? If so, again, what do you think is their motivation?
I'd done some freelance real estate writing, but so much of Curbed is generated organically that it's been more them reaching out to Curbed than the other way around. The industry seems to vacillate between bemusement and annoyance, though mostly people seem to be coming around.
Real estate professionals don't tip us all that often, actually. I think they're afraid we'll make fun of them if they do. On that, I have no comment.
A real estate blog's relationship with the mainstream press is a strange one. We link to them, comment on their stories, mock them but rely on them... do you think the next evolutionary stage for a commercial blog is to stop linking to the newspapers and limit coverage to its own stories? If not, do you think it's important to somehow delineate original Curbed stories from linkage? Or is linking and aggregating the beauty of a blog?
This is a great question facing blogging in general right now. It's in flux enough that I won't pretend to know the course ahead, but I think a good blog serves two key purposes: aggregating the intelligence that's already out there, and generating our own intel to share with readers. Ben Leventhal, the editorial director of the Curbed Network, is makes the point that both forms of intel can be incredibly valuable - aggregation especially if you're going beyond linking the obvious publications and instead constantly keeping tabs on relevant message boards, blogs, and smaller publications.
Stories original to Curbed, which is well over half our content these days, tends to stand out of its own accord, no flashing lights necessary.
I can remember when you were doing all the writing for Curbed. It was always fresh and busy, and it's always looked great. How the hell did you find the time, while holding down a full-time job? What is it with you guys? Are there more hours in an American day?
Ha, thanks, I'm flattered. My secret is that I write quickly and I'm not afraid to put pure crap out there from time to time.
You've blogged through a boom and a bust. What's best for real estate blog traffic?
Well, I always describe Curbed as a neighborhood blog first, and a property blog second. Because people are interested in their neighborhood no matter what the conditions of the real estate market, I don't think it has much to do with traffic.
Will Curbed take ads from anybody? Blog readers can get really fierce about editorial independence. How do you protect your reputation for independence and yet ensure you can fund what must now be an expensive site to run?
I think the idea that blog readers are somehow allergic to advertising is a holdover from a few years ago. Curbed readers seem to understand that in return for looking at (usually quite relevant) ads, they get our stuff for free.
How's the expansion going? At first, Curbed was all about New Yorkers' relationship with property. Have you find it's much the same in LA, SF etc.
Similar, but not exactly the same. Each city has a different story to tell, and the challenge for us is finding the right writers to tell it.
Give me some links to your favourite Curbed posts of recent times.
My favorite posts would probably bore you—I go for the really obscure, random neighborhood stuff. A story about men selling raw meat out of the back of a truck in Park Slope—that's classic Curbed to me.
And to some of your favourite non-Curbed real estate blogs.
I don't read a ton of real estate blogs, actually. Brownstoner here in NYC does a nice job, as does Jonathan Miller, who writes Matrix and is Curbed's graph guy. And of course the Rat and Mouse.
Finally, how do you fancy making some wild speculation about the future of real estate blogging? Are we going to combine with some of these clever Googlemap-mashup real estate search engines to become webtops for movers? Where's our web2.0 future?
Nice try, but all so far beyond my poor powers I daren't even venture a guess. I do suspect, however, that it'll be fun.
Lock
