theFrontSteps – San Francisco

Have a look at what hit our email in the past couple months, and the companies heavily marketing “pocket listings”, “off market” property, or “not on MLS” opportunities. You, the buyer, would probably like to know about these opportunities, wouldn’t you? Well…you can’t. Not until these brokerages wake up and join the year 2013, move [...]

Pocket listings, “not on MLS” listings, “off market” property for sale, you’ve heard it all. They exist…in droves. Every single (yes, every single) brokerage has them, every single real estate agent would love to know about them, and the public is becoming more aware of them. They’ve been a part of our industry for decades, [...]

We’re starting to see a much larger number of San Francisco real estate agents incorporate a home’s WalkScore into their marketing materials (not that a walk score really matters, because hopefully you’ll either research or already know the area you’re investing a few hundred thousand dollars of your hard earned cash, and not rely on [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Real Estate technology is absolutely booming (judging by the daily emails we get pitching new products), and every so often we come across something clever enough to post and share with you. This application (website) is definitely not something that is going to change the world of real estate (we’ve been known to be wrong), [...]

We’ve been told, and we acknowledge this has absolutely nothing to do with San Francisco real estate (unless the Google founders took the Google bus to get to port), that one, if not both, Google founders are enjoying the fruits of their labor and declining company value with a nice cruise on their gigantic “dark [...]