Brownstoner and Blank Slate announced today a new real estate listings site called the Brownstoner Marketplace. The new marketplace enables Brownstoner’s customers to advertise their real estate listings directly to the site’s large Brooklyn audience.

From Brownstoner:

For years, we’ve received inquiries from brokers and property owners wanting to be able to advertise real estate listings on Brownstoner but we haven’t had a platform to make such a thing feasible at a widespread scale and at a price that made sense. Now we do.

With the help of software company Blank Slate, today we are announcing a new real estate listings site called the Brownstoner Marketplace. Owners and brokers, now you can create your own sales listing ($25 per month) or rental listing ($10 per month). The Marketplace also incorporates the Directory that we launched last fall. So now you can look for an apartment and find a lawyer to do the closing and a painter to spiff the place up before you move in all in one place.

A big thanks to all the brokers who stepped up pre-launch. Some of the initial listings on the site include this huge loft at 1 Main Street listed by Karen Heyman of Sotheby’s, this one-bedroom at 101 Lafayette Avenue listed by Louis Belisario of Fillmore, and this loft at 1311 Pacific Street listed by Fouad Rahme of Triumph. We’re also really hoping that the Marketplace becomes the go-to spot for For Sale By Owner listings like this one at 60 Oxford Street.

In working with this small group for the launch, what has struck us already is the level at which they are using the web to get the word out. Putting a web site up is one thing, but marketing listings on the web is quite a different thing. It takes know-how and clearly this group has it. So, we think some of the marketing features in the marketplace will be put to good use:

* search engine optimized pages for every listing
* syndication of listings to other sites like Google Base
* performance tracking by adding Google Analytics to listings
* mini-sites that can be used on other sites like Craigslist that accept HTML
* and, of course, social sharing on Twitter, Facebook and across the web

There has been a lot of talk about ‘hyper-local’ on the web these days. One of the things that makes Brownstoner is its Brooklyn focus and organization by neighborhood. With that in mind, the Brownstoner Marketplace includes only Brooklyn listings and organizes them by neighborhood too.

The Brownstoner Marketplace expands the site with a place for real estate sellers to showcase their stuff and for buyers to shop their Brooklyn-obsessed hearts out.

In a couple of weeks we’ll be launching a real estate listings marketplace for the site Brownstoner that is built on BlankSlate.

We’ve been working with Brownstoner since last fall and that’s given us the opportunity to learn a few things about its audience. First, there is a really personal conversation going on with the readers, some of whom are famously vocal on the site. It’s an unmistakably Brooklyn conversation and people in Brooklyn love it. That’s why the site gets more than 1.5 million pageviews per month. Second, people come to the site looking for all kinds of information about real estate — and one of those things is listings.

Using BlankSlate we are able to make a custom real estate listings application in just a few weeks.

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