“55 Million Blogs, Some of Them Have to be Good.”
There used to be a tagline on Technorati that went, “55 million blogs, some of them have to be good.” We were somewhat comforted by that statement as we began to expand Sweet Digs, our local real estate blog, from Seattle to the Bay Area to Los Angeles, Orange County and San Diego. In only a year and a half, Sweet Digs had produced over 4,500 posts covering the West Coast. Some of them had to be good – and they were (so our readers tell us). Now we’re bringing Sweet Digs clear across the country to see if some of that New England win streak rubs off on us.
So we’ve hired a motley crew of real estate addicts to start covering Boston and Washington, D.C. neighborhoods. They are IT professionals, college professors, and broadcast journalists who moonlight as Redfin bloggers so they can write about whether prices have gotten out of hand or not.
One blogger is certain that when it comes to neighborhoods, up-and-coming is preferable to old-money-stagnant. I mean, who would want to live next to John Kerry or Jack Welch?
Another blogger beckons, no, dares you to abandon D.C.’s city life for the suburbs of Maryland.
It’s a good start and we promise it will get better. Get Sweet Digs delivered to your inbox by subscribing to the newsletter. If you have any feedback for us or tips on properties that you’d like our bloggers to cover send a message to tips(at)redfin(dot)com. We can even promote your open house on our blog, whether you’re a Redfin customer or not.
Let’s meet the Sweet Digs D.C. team.
Two years after schlepping across the country to marry her Prince Charming, the St. Louis, Missouri, native now calls Washington DC home.
Tavia’s current hobbies include discovering affordable and chic neighborhoods in the city, where normal working class people can still “put down roots” – places that don’t always appear on the city’s maps and usually eludes the popular press.
And when she’s not longing for an affordable single family home of her own, she loves exploring the corridor neighborhoods, people and architecture of The Capitol and getting lost in the heart of the city, only to find out that at some point, she actually crossed into Maryland.
Tracey Gold Bennett has worked as a broadcast journalist (network television news) for more than a decade. Bennett, a former columnist and freelance reporter for the Washington Examiner newspaper, is the author of two books on African American history in Washington, D.C. The Washington Post Kids-Post hailed her first book as the Book of the Week for February 25, 2007. Gold Bennett’s second book was released in March of 2007. Gold Bennett has written and produced news for television and radio stations in New York , Washington , DC, North Carolina , Maryland and Virginia.
In October 2007, The Washington Post broke news of Tracey Gold Bennett’s new book in progress “The Ben’s Chili Bowl Book,” which will be released in 2008.
Kira Mayrides is an indentured serv…errr, stay-at-home-mom to 2 delightful! glorious! perfect! (no, really) children. Prior to stepping out of the workforce, she served as a writer and editor for a variety of scientific and technical organizations. She and her family live in Lansdowne on the Potomac in Leesburg. Kira began observing (stalking) the real estate market in 2003, when she traded in her townhouse for a fixer-upper single family in Reston, Va. After spending 2 and 1/2 long, painful years preparing the second house to be flipped, and after much research, Kira and her husband found the deal of a lifetime on a new build in Lansdowne and pounced on it. Since then, Kira has become a true Loudoun County convert and continues to obsess over the real estate market in Leesburg and the surrounding areas. Kira is also a big believer in (and has dabbled in) home staging, and hopes to share (but will try not to lecture about) what she’s learned about staging and its benefits for both buyers and sellers.
Allison Scuriatti has lived in Washington, D.C. since 1996. She is a former corporate communications executive but “on an open-ended sabbatical” from corporate life to focus on family, her local community and various creative pursuits. Allison claims to have missed her true calling to be a residential architect. She makes up for it in her spare time by studying the real estate market and dreaming up remodeling plans for all the houses in her neighborhood, including her own 1938 brick colonial. She also has a penchant for creating highly edible scale-model gingerbread buildings, where a bit of sugary frosting can cure any structural maintenance woe.
