BlankSlate’s local technology and sales solution was launched in April 2011 when it signed its first customer, the leading Brooklyn blog Brownstoner. Brownstoner was launched more than seven years ago, and generates more traffic than all of Brooklyn’s local newspapers combined. BlankSlate has grown Brownstoner’s advertiser count to more than 400, with solutions for advertisers starting at only $24.95 per month.

Says BlankSlate’s CEO and Founder Kael Goodman: “We’re thrilled at how well Brownstoner has done and we’re sure Prince of Petworth will do just as well. We think our approach of providing the technology and ad sales allows bloggers to do what they love – write and engage with people in the community. We’ll be announcing additional customers soon too.”

Says Dan Silverman, Prince of Petworth’s publisher: “I’m super excited to be working with Blankslate.  I’ve already transitioned my advertisers and am looking forward to the site’s new capabilities with the November re-launch.  What started as a hobby five years ago has exceeded all expectations – I can’t wait to see where the next five years takes it with Blankslate as a partner.

BlankSlate has been working with Times Review for several months, first helping with web strategy, then migrating their CMS to WordPress from a proprietary system, and now adding the BlankSlate real estate solution. At 500,000 monthly pageviews, Times Review already has one of the most trafficked sites in eastern Long Island.

From The Suffolk Times:

“We are very excited about offering our readers the ability to easily search local real estate listings and find open houses all in one place,” said Times/Review publisher Andrew Olsen. “The feedback from brokers and readers has been very positive. People love to search real estate listings whether they are in the market to purchase or not.”

You can find the new real estate site on all of Times Review’s sites: The Suffolk Times, Riverhead News-Review, North Shore Sun, and Shelter Island Reporter.

Raw, open, unfinished space…

Classic DUMBO view of Manhattan bridge…

All set up…

Thanks to Movers Not Shakers for making the move easy.

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.

The AWS Solution Providers Program serves a growing community of Independent Software Vendors… that offer a rich set of solutions… on AWS. The AWS Solution Providers Program is designed to help companies expand the capabilities and marketing potential of their solutions… through exposure by AWS and building relationships with fellow providers in the AWS ecosystem.

For more information, check out our listing in the AWS Directory.

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.

With BlankSlate, even though real estate listings are data intensive, we don’t even have to think about a data model. As we are going thru iterations, we can just add and subtract data elements to the database by just changing the UI. The pages that collect data simply connect to a BlankSlate API, which automatically creates and updates the data structures.

Because BlankSlate handles user management, we don’t have to deal with user permissioning either. We just grab the login and account management screens from our library, style and organize them for Brownstoner, connect them to our API and we’re all set.

BlankSlate enables us to focus on what’s important: making a great real estate listings site that we can easily modify over time as the site grows.