The New York Times has an article today about NY-based real estate blog network Curbed and their new $1.5 million round of financing. Think weblogs, b5media, gawker but for real estate. They appear to serve approximately five regions currently and the money will be used to expand the network. Lockhart Steele, the network’s publisher is a former Gawker employees and Gawker was one of the investors.

Author Dan notes, "At greater potential risk are national-focused sites like Zillow.com and Realtor.com that depend on an active market of buyers and sellers to thrive. Nonetheless, Zillow, which estimates home values, last month obtained $30 million in its latest round of financing, bringing the total to $87 million for the site, which was started less than two years ago. And its traffic in the third quarter was 20 percent higher than in the period a year earlier, according to Spencer Rascoff, Zillow’s vice president for marketing and chief financial officer."

The question is whether a real estate blog network competes with sites such as Zillow and NY-based StreetEasy. And will these application sites add user-generated content blogs and expand that way thereby moving into Curbed's territory. At this point I think there is plenty of room for both.

Also check out my interview with Jeremy Wright, CEO b5media, another blog network who raised a round of financing to expand.