Damon Darlin

This past weekend, the New York Times published the first issue of Key, a quarterly real estate magazine packed with 150 pages of features and full-page color ads of new condominiums and modern furniture.

Today, the paper officially killed The Walk Through, its real estate blog. The decision to discontinue the blog does not come as a complete surprise: There have been no new posts since Aug. 7.

Launched in November 2005, the blog has seen the number of posts declinining this summer. There were 58 posts in June, 20 in July, and just 2 in the August. That is, until today's goodbye post.

Deputy managing editor Jonathan Landman, the Times' online czar, said that the newspaper is dedicated to trying out different blogs.

"We're experimenting, growing them, seeing what happens, what works, what doesn't work, what gets people engaged," Landman said.

But despite the increased focus and space given to real estate at the Times, the Walk Through didn't work out.

"The real estate blog was a national real estate blog," Landman said. "The real estate that seems to really get people involved is local. It's the local that grabs you by the throat."

The Walk Through was primarily written by Damon Darlin, a technology reporter based out of San Francisco who's been breaking Hewlett Packard news this past week on the front page, leaving little time for real estate blogging.

"The nature of ours was that we were not doing as much of the breaking stuff," Darlin said a few weeks before the blog was terminated. "It tended to be more of an aggregation site than a scoop-oriented blog."

So will the Times launch a local real estate site, in an effort to grab New York's property voyeurs?

"Possibly," said Mr. Landman. "We're trying different things. We've had some success with sports blogs. We've launched a couple political blogs. The idea is to spread out around the paper."

-Michael Calderone

We're a little late on this today, but then we've known about it for a while:

The National Association of Realtors, a national lobby of real-estate brokers, is a bad place to get information about the real estate market.

So at least reports The Walk-Through, the Times' brand-new baby blog about the real-estate market, in a pretty nice little smack-down.

And as always, Jonathan Miller has the definitive take:

Over the years we have relied on this near monopoly of information to gain insight as to the direction of the real estate market. Of course we recognize that this is a trade group and its purpose is to look out for its membership. However, its not the statistics that are creating the gap, its the hard sell that goes along with it.

Our question is pettier: How will Damon Darlin's analysis go over at the Times real-estate desk? Because they've been relying on the NAR a lot lately:

• "After married couples, single women now make up the largest segment of home buyers -- 21 percent in 2005, up from 18 percent the year before, in contrast to single men, who make up 9 percent of home buyers, according to a survey published this month by the National Association of Realtors." (The New York Times, "Our Equity, Ourselves," Jan. 26, 2006)
• "Sales of existing homes fell or stayed flat in all four regions of the country, while the total inventory of homes for sale dipped slightly, the National Association of Realtors reported." (The New York Times, "Home Sales Fell Again In December," Jan. 26, 2006)
• "Part of the reason more people divide their time between homes is that more people own second homes. According to the National Association of Realtors, buyers purchased 2.82 million second homes in 2004, up 16 percent from a year earlier."(The New York Times, "Double Nesters," Jan. 19, 2006)

Maybe now the word "Realtor" can finally be scrapped, since it's the N.A.R.-enforced term of art (which is why we try, insofar as we can control anything, to stick with the words "broker" or "agent"--not that you won't catch us out on that.)

- Tom McGeveran