"Welcome" and "You're Welcome"

Brooklyn is one of the best places on the planet. And yet it's missing one of the simplest, most useful things on the planet: a search engine. That's right. All over the country, if you're looking to buy a house there's a Multiple Listing Service (MLS) that you can search. This is a place where all the real estate agents or realtors put all the houses they have for sale. In most places, this list is open to the public, like in Florida. Guess who doesn't do this? Brooklyn! It's as if they didn't have a unified phone book in Brooklyn, but 20 partial phone books that you could only find 12 of. Okay, bad example, no one uses phone books anymore.

It's as if Bing, Kayak, Orbitz, and Travelocity all stopped searching for & selling tickets to JFK. Could you imagine having to track down tickets the old-fashioned way, for one of the biggest, busiest airports in the country?

Well, in fact Brooklyn real estate is even more bootleg, fractured, and Wild West than that. Take a look at this listing from St. Louis and this listing from Brooklyn. Do you notice any differences? Well, the St. Louis listing has the property's address, 20 high rez pictures, a paragraph description, the dimensions of the rooms, a date and time for the open house, a map, a printable flyer, and clearly labelled contact info for the listing agent. The Brooklyn listing has no address, few details, and a grainy picture that my camera phone would run laps around. I've seen missing cat flyers taped to trees with more information than this listing for a $2 million building. Adding insult to injury, agents are usually paid 3%-6% of the property's sale price, depending on the listing and whether they co-broke. So that means, the guy in St. Louis who stands to make no more than $14,000 for his services is doing all this much more to market his property than the Brooklyn agent who stands to make over $125,000 for his services. Can you imagine?

So how does one go about finding real estate in Brooklyn? You can go to nytimes.com/realestate, Google maps has a real estate function, streeteasy is good, trulia aggregates pretty well, the big brokers are out there (Corocran, Halstead, etc), the volume brokers are out there (Filmore), and there's countless mom and pop local brokers. Again, no one place. And even the existing places aren't comprehensive.

So, as a guy who's been frustrated by the splintered state of Brooklyn real estate, I bring you "BK to the Fullest". We're devoted to multi-family buildings in Brooklyn in the $500K-$2M price range in our favorite hoods Ft. Greene, Clinton Hill, Prospect Heights, Park Slope, Carroll Gardens, Boerum Hill, and Cobble Hill. Sorry, that's all I care about. But if that's your bag, baby, you're gonna love this site! Great houses that are for sale shouldn't live under a rock! Let them out into the light of day. Plus, we've got insight from some of the top people in the business from renovation experts, real estate attorneys, real estate investors, real estate agents, and tenants. Consider your finger on the pulse!