Real estate blog network gets investors

Dan Mitchell of The New York Times writes Tuesday that the real estate blog network Curbed.com has received $1.5 from investors that include Gawker Media.

Mitchell wrote, “Nick Denton, Mr. Steele’s boss when he was managing editor of the Gawker Media blog network, and Zach Nelson, chief executive of NetSuite, a maker of business software, are among the individual investors. Gawker Media also invested.

“In some respects, sites like Curbed are insulated from the woes of the real estate market in a way that traditional sites may not be. ‘We’re not just about real estate,’ Mr. Steele said. ‘People come to the site to talk about their neighborhoods and about life in the city.’ This wide focus has helped Curbed draw advertisers like American Express and Volkswagen, Mr. Steele said.

“At greater potential risk are national-focused sites like Zillow.com and Realtor.com that depend on an active market of buyers and sellers to thrive. Nonetheless, Zillow, which estimates home values, last month obtained $30 million in its latest round of financing, bringing the total to $87 million for the site, which was started less than two years ago. And its traffic in the third quarter was 20 percent higher than in the period a year earlier, according to Spencer Rascoff, Zillow’s vice president for marketing and chief financial officer.”

Read more here.