Welcome - dear readers - to the 43rd edition of the carnival of real estate. This week thirty nine entries flowed into our inbox and of which, five made it through our highly biased opinion filter of excellence.

The mostly-poisonous reaction to a highly-favorable 60-minutes piece on online real estate brokerage startup Redfin permeated throughout a lot of this week’s entries. Broker Bryant provided not only an excellent recount of the coverage but also looked at the root cause as to why Redfin is gaining attention and a solution dear to my heart. Specifically, there are too many agents in the industry which causes a variable level of service and allows a few bad apples to tarnish the reputation of an industry of professionals that are on the whole good. And his solution? Making it harder to become a Realtor and lifting the bar on admission. I couldn’t agree more.

Along the lines of promoting solutions rather than lonely-criticism-without-recommendation, our favorite post of the week came from Athol Kay of RE Agent in CT. Athol proposes that instead of Realtors simply criticizing Zillow’s zestimates, they put their words of attack in context. Every comment around the accuracy of a Zestimate should be accompanied by something like “When I do a CMA I get within 5% of an actual sales price 90% of the time”. As Athol concludes “Just the facts ma’am. Just the facts.”

Now, back to Redfin. Hot on the heels of the 60 minutes segment, the NWMLS fined the company $50,000 because its “Sweet Digs” property review blog broke a rule barring an agent to “advertise” another agent’s listing without their express permission. Greg Swann, of Bloodhound Blog, had the best analysis of the event, including both a history of the rule’s intent and secondly around the definition of advertising.

Greg points out the rule is a legacy from the times of ’sub-agency’ and effectively prevents a buy-side agent from representing the interests of the home buyer. And then, the extremely long-bowed interpretation that a review of a property is an advertisement. I am not sure what the editorial gatekeepers of media properties around the world would say about that.

Jim Cronin of the Real Estate Tomato kicked off an interesting experiment around collaborative editing. The endeavor hopes to take a look at the mechanics of Real Estate teams - both from a business perspective and a blogging one. The post already has a number of good comments, and be sure to add yours before tomorrow (Tues, 22nd May).

Finally, Peter Comitini of the Corcoran Group has an excellent article on the weird and wonderful world of Manhattan real estate, and specifically on buying an apartment in new condominium projects that are sprouting up along the west side of Manhattan.

Not in New York and thinking about what you’re missing out on? How about a 10% deposit for a floorplan, 2 year wait, higher closing costs and risks? The onerous terms are a by product of surging prices and demand in Manhattan. If we didn’t need more evidence that Manhattan is a world into itself, there’s some more. And a brief shout out to Sean Black of Trulia who is among the happy many about to move into a new condo project in Manhattan.

That’s all from me. Next week’s carnival is hosted by the North Fulton County RE Blog.

A lot of the improvements we have been working on Homethinking in recent months had to do with the Realtor side of things. So we’re pleased to announce today the introduction of property pages on Homethinking.

Property pages aren’t listing pages but instead answer two simple questions: is the listing price high or low (as compared to Zillow’s estimate) and should you buy the house or would you be better off renting it (according to housemath.us calculations).

Here’s a sample:

And here’s a link to a page about a home in Phoenix, Arizona. We hope you enjoy and if you have any suggestions as to how we should make it better - let us know (feedback at homethinking dot com)!