Erik Hersman, whose day job is with eppraisal, is a blogaholic (like me). As a side project, he has decided to launch a consumer-facing real estate blog for his place of residence — Orlando, Florida. He recruited Pam Johnson, a local real estate investor, to help with editorial. The site is named Roofable and aims to give a “A rooftop view of Orlando’s real estate market, trends and neighborhoods.” The goal seems to be a local community blog much in the way Curbed covers happenings in NYC, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
I decided it would be interesting to get Erik’s thoughts and motivations behind the new blog, so I conducted an e-mail interview with him to publish here:
Q: What inspired you and (other founders) to start this blog?
Roofable is a new real estate and neighborhood blog for the Orlando area.
As you know, I’ve been blogging about real estate for a while at RealtyThoughts.com, and because I live in Orlando I keep looking for good local real estate blogs. You see great real estate blogging communities growing up around San Francisco, Seattle, Phoenix, New York and a few other areas. I want to help that happen here in Orlando
On top of that, I run seminars on real estate blogging for the local REALTOR organization, and keep telling people that they should be doing this on the hyper-local level – they are the experts in their communities after all. I wanted to make the meta-real estate blog for Orlando and use that to grow the hyper-local real estate agent blogs that should be coming up around the area in the near future. Something like this can really grow the local blogging community.
One last thing to note is that there are certain things that real estate agents can’t talk about. I’m not a real estate agent, therefore I’m not bound by those same restrictions .
Q: What target market are you aiming to hit?
If you’re talking about real estate in Orlando, we want Roofable to be part of your conversation. Roofable is for people who are interested in their neighborhood, their homes and who want to know what’s going on locally as it relates to real estate.
An old adage is that, “politics and real estate are local.” Our goal is to eventually drop down beneath the broader Orlando level and actually help facilitate neighborhood discussions around real estate within the hyper-local community. I might live in East Orlando, so don’t really care about downtown or Winter Park. Roofable will soon start segmenting content at those levels.
Q: How are you thinking about consumer versus industry content?
This is a change-up for me, as I’ve written mostly about the real estate industry in the past. Instead, Roofable is for the consumer and thus will have more information that they will care about. Since I can’t change completely, I’m sure you’ll find me injecting a few industry opinions into the mix, but with an angle that might actually interest non-real estate professionals.
I have recruited someone with a pure consumer mindset to help me write the blog – Pam Johnson. Her ability to give us an even keel when it comes to consumer content is very important. It’s too easy for us “industry people” to veer off into insider language and topics that don’t interest anyone else.
Q: What benefits are you aiming to get out of this blog, either for yourself or your company?
I’d like to be part of the real estate conversation here in Orlando. This is a great area to live in, has strong growth and continued economic strength indicators. As more people realize that they can find the conversations online about the local market, I want to position Roofable to be the place they do that at.
Honestly, I’m not sure where the blog will go over time, or what will happen with it. Right now I’m committed to finding good interesting stories that people here want to read. Luckily I can look to some of the other great real estate bloggers who do this around the country to see what works well for them and then try and incorporate that with an Orlando twist.
This afternoon, I had the chance to talk with Danilo Bogdanovic, who hosted the 
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