With all the froth and flutter about New York City startups, it’s easy to forget they’re not special creatures, free from the tyrannical pressures of the real estate market. Today comes a reminder courtesy of The New York Times, which reports that many tech companies companies, rather than waste precious rocket fuel (i.e., capital), are electing to move north–to Midtown.
Oh, dear. Read More
So you’ve somehow scraped up the cash and decided to shell out for a Manhattan apartment, but that’s about all you’re 100 percent committed to. “Well, I like the Upper West Side, but there are those two super noisy blocks and I guess I like Inwood but maybe not the part of Washington Heights with all the stairs,” you may say. Well, New York-based online real estate brokerage RealDirect has launched a new offering for buyers, and they’ve built in a fair amount of flexibility for you vacillators.
The map-based interface lets users draw a “lasso” around the general area where they’d like to look. And it doesn’t simply present every relevant listing matching a set description. Instead, results are presented as a varied series of icons, designed to signal how well a listing matches to the search criteria. So if that perfect 3-bedroom is just a touch more than you’d like, you’ll still see it. Just in case. CEO Doug Perlson told Betabeat that he saw it as “a golden opportunity for us to introduce the concept of relevancy ranking and relevancy scoring to real estate search.” Read More
