theFrontSteps – San Francisco

I’ve written before about technology that is here to stay, and how the real estate industry can benefit from all the brilliant people in the world creating it, and I’ve recently come across another good example of a new company that’s applying technology to attempt to solve a big headache for buyers and agents alike: [...]

If you follow us on Twitter, you’ve already heard. There will soon be a network to post, search, and sell pocket listings (PocketListings.NET). Off-market, pocket listings, whatever…they’re out there, they’re bought and sold, and real estate agents will soon be able to share information amongst themselves on a much larger scale, which we hope will [...]

Is it us, or does the San Francisco Association of Realtors just like to make things complicated (Remember the Token Code?) www.SFRAO.com is a new web site developed by the Association to provide detailed information on tweets broadcast by the Association. It is shown as a link at the end of each tweet that requires [...]

Living in earthquake country, we get asked all the time, “Is this home on bedrock or landfill.” The next question, “Do you know if this building has been retrofitted?” Usually, we don’t, but that might be changing. Check out this new user-generated mashup where you, the visitor, can add a project that has been retrofitted. [...]

Being heavily focused on selling real estate in San Francisco, and not renting it, we’re always on the lookout for a quick and easy tool to help answer that question, “What do you think this place would rent for?” Aside from actually contacting a true expert in the field of rentals and having them go [...]

Having just spent 4:45 of our lives watching this entire spiel about “while the Zestimate’s fun to kind of get an idea…”, it’s really not accurate so don’t waste your time, we’re left with a few thoughts. 1. Sara is cute 2. Sara’s lip gloss sparkles 3. Sara’s hair shines, but how would it look [...]

To the untrained eye it might look as if our lovely city by the bay has the Chickenpox. Alas! ‘Tis not the case. It’s just Google getting into the game of real estate, and leave it up to them to do it right (maps.google.com/realestate). [Note: These below maps are embedded on this site and you [...]

Where readers ask, and we (the community) try to answer: Hi, We have a house in SF that’s been on the market for 3 weeks with minimal activity. Our agent is doing the traditional stuff but no presence on blogs, etc. Should she be using yours and/or other sites to market our house? What are [...]

A reader kindly forwarded us to a “new” website called, Neighborcity and we gotta say, aren’t Trulia, and Zillow enough? We didn’t see anything on this site worth discussing that isn’t already found elsewhere. To us, this site is a complete waste of time. Focus your time on Trulia, Zillow (if you must to get [...]