If you follow the Curbed blog, you probably saw Lockhart’s post today mentioning the new Curbed Marketplace. What is it? From their help page:

It’s a place for sellers and brokers to post real estate listings, and for buyers to browse and search them. But unlike some other systems, we’ve designed the Marketplace to feature big, beautiful photographs and a blog-style layout of properties perfect for perusing. We’re hoping this makes discovering a property — and selling one! — a pleasure.

The marketplace is scheduled to be officially launched after Labor Day — in the meantime, you can take a look here and browse New York city listings such as 100 Suffolk St that have been posted by the early adopters (listing a property is free until the official launch).

A couple additional answers from the Help section worth highlighting that help explain the Curbed Marketplace:

Hey, why don’t I see 10,000 listings for Murray Hill?
The idea behind the Marketplace isn’t to aggregate every listing from every random brokerage in the city. (We’re not crawling other sites for our data — it’s input by brokers or sellers themselves.) Rather, we’re aiming to create an exchange in which a lack of sheer volume is made up for in quality of the listings and the pleasure of the browsing experience.

Where are listings displayed on Curbed?
Marketplace listings appear in the Marketplace section of Curbed (where you are right now). Select listings can also appear on the homepage, by way of the purchase of an upgraded Quicklisting (see below for more about Quicklistings).

Why should I advertise in the Curbed Marketplace? My listing already appears elsewhere on the web?
Well, Curbed New York reaches over 300,000 unique visitors a month — and the entire Curbed Network, over 1 million unique visitors a month. Our audience is wealthy and real-estate obsessed, 70% of whom expect to buy the next time they move. (See full demographics here.) Plus, in the Quicklisting, there’s a special cost-effective opportunity to reach Curbed readers right on the Curbed homepage — and drive a ton of traffic to your website and property open houses.

How do I buy a listing? What’s the cost?
Buying a listing is as simple as visiting this page and choosing either a Marketplace Listing ($99) or a Marketplace Listing that includes an upgraded Quicklisting ($399). To buy a listing, you’ll first need to login or register for a free Curbed account — a process that takes about 10 seconds. If you’re a broker at a major real estate firm, your company might have arranged for bulk purchases of listings, too, which would bring down the cost for you.

What’s the difference between a Marketplace Listing and a Quicklisting?
Marketplace listings appear in the Marketplace section of Curbed, where users can browse listings, search for specific property characteristics, and save searches and listings as favorites. These listings run for 30 days.

Quicklistings are an upgrade to Marketplace Listings, which turn the crucial details of your listing into a post on Curbed’s homepage. The post, which acts exactly like a blog post (though labeled as advertising), runs once on Curbed’s homepage, then lives forever in the archives. Because of the prominent front-page placement of Quicklistings, they tend to generate hundreds, sometimes thousands, of user clicks.

With numerous free listing sites, it’s interesting they chose to make listing in the marketplace a paid service, but that’s not to say I don’t think it will work. Curbed has the desired audience already, and their Quicklistings advertising product, which allows a seller to get their listing on the FRONT page of Curbed as a blog post, is an enticing offering to get additional exposure for an individual listing. I’m fairly certain Curbed will eventually expand the marketplace to cover their other major markets — San Francisco and Los Angeles. The Manhattan real estate market is its own beast and Craigslist has proven brokers are willing to pay to advertise their properties in that market — but to be fair, the $10 charged by craigslist is a lower bar than the $99 Curbed is set to charge. The real open question in my mind is whether or not a paid listings marketplace can survive in other cities with so many free listing destinations.

While we’re on the topic of local blogs adding a listings interface, my guess is that successful local blogs moving into the listings game is going to be a growing trend in the next year or so. While Curbed is charging money to post listings, my hunch is most local blogs (most of which don’t have the audience size Curbed does) will instead find a free source of listings and add additional page view inventory as a way to further monetize their sites.