real estate

Amazon is extending its roots in Seattle.

Regulatory filings made public today show that the e-commerce giant and gadget maker entered into an $1.16 billion agreement with Paul Allen's Vulcan Real Estate to purchase the 11 office buildings in Seattle's Lake Union neighborhood that it previously held under lease.

Vulcan Real Estate put the set of buildings on the market at the end of August. Last month the group announced plans to build and lease two more buildings for Amazon, as part of a $160 million project to give the company an extra 380,000 square feet … Read more

Zillow has gone public. Trulia just announced it was going public. Redfin, another established online real estate brokerage, hasn't announced any plan to go public yet, but it is making news. The site went down for several hours Saturday morning, keeping weekend home shoppers in the dark.

The company posted a tweet to explain its troubles: "We are having a little Saturday morning tussle with our master database; we're working on it and will be back up as soon as we can."

Update, 11:05 a.m. PT: Redfin sent the following statement to CNET, referring, … Read more

Popular real-estate research site Zillow.com now has an Android app, which you can use to check real estate and home values while on the go. The app even syncs with your Zillow.com account to give you access to all of your saved homes and searches, from anywhere.

If you've never used Zillow, it's a powerful service that tracks current real-estate listings, rentals, and even recently sold properties. What's more, it uses local data and its own set of algorithms to come up with estimated values, or Zestimates, of just about any home in the U.… Read more

If you've ever been curious about the price of a particular house in America, chances are you've been to Zillow.com. That's the site that lets you type in an address to find out its estimated sale price (called a "Zestimate") along with details about the house and, in most cases, the exact date and price it last sold for as well as information about property taxes, nearby schools, and neighboring homes.

In addition to sale prices, the company also estimates rental prices and displays rentals in your area.

Curious to know what the homes in your neighborhood are worth? Or how much the current owners paid? Or the square footage or how many bedrooms and bathrooms there are? Snap a picture of a home with HomeSnap, a free iOS app, and you'll get all of this information and more. The app uses your iPhone's GPS and other sensors to figure out which house you are looking at, and then it pulls in MLS info to spit out a variety of data about a home. HomeSnap is so slick and provides so much information that you might … Read more

Google reportedly just dropped $100 million on a Mountain View office complex, continuing its real estate expansion almost as fast as it's moving into new businesses and boosting personnel.

The Contra Costa Times reported that the Web giant paid that sum for a 240,000-square-foot office center near its headquarters. A Google spokesman confirmed that it purchased the space, known as The Landmark at Shoreline. But he declined to disclose the purchase price.

"As we continue to hire it's important to find space for our new employees," David Radcliffe, Google's vice president of real estate … Read more

On Zillow's first day of trading on the Nasdaq, its shares more than doubled, soaring to $45 this morning from its initial pricing of $20 a share.

The company sold 3.46 million shares to raise $70 million. It will also complete a private placement, totaling $5 million, and will have the option of selling 500,000 additional shares, depending on demand.

The Seattle-based company, which aggregates real-estate listings and mortgage information, trades under the ticker symbol "Z." (Later in the day, shares had fallen back to just above $38.)

Zillow expects to use the proceeds for … Read more

Zillow today priced its initial public offering at $20 a share, well above the $12 to $14 range in which the online real estate aggregator expected to price earlier this month.

The Seattle-based company said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission today that it plans to sell nearly 3.5 million shares, raising about $69.2 million. The company also plans a private placement of 275,000 shares to certain existing Zillow investors, raising another $5.5 million and giving the company a total IPO of about $74.7 million and a valuation of about $540 million. … Read more

I'm not sure if Loosecubes is a clever commercial real estate play or a dating service for geeks.

In a nutshell, it's Airbnb for office space. If you're traveling and need a professional space to get some work done, you can book a desk from a Loosecubes user (a "host") who has open space. But more than just putting working butts in chairs, Loosecubes founder Campbell McKellar designed the service to put people in offices where they'll feel happy and inspired.

She wants no boring, hushed, corporate rent-a-box offices for Loosecubes. "We focus on inspiring office spaces," McKellar told me. And also on connecting compatible workers. Loosecubes makes use of Facebook to connect people together. Why not LinkedIn, the network for professional relationships? Because, McKellar says, "I'd rather work about people I'm friends with, or friends of friends."

Still, it is an open marketplace, and there are plenty of standard professional suites on the service (with standard day-rate prices to match). There are also some unusual arrangements, like a New York home office space with very low rent--provided you take the owner's dogs for a mid-day walk.

But Loosecubes' premier listings are those put up by the hip owners of cool start-ups. If you're nursing a start-up or creative project, and you can't get work done at the house you've found on Airbnb or CouchSurfing when you're traveling, Loosecubes may have a good place for you to park. McKellar says Loosecubes today has 1,464 spaces available in 323 cities around the world.

Likewise, it looks like a good service for growing companies that haven't yet filled their empty desks with employees. The risk of putting a space on the service seems low: hosts can approve applicants, or not. If you have a few open desks in your liberal think-tank office, you can disapprove the desk request from the advance man for the Bachmann campaign. Instead, you can get a stream of like-minded people coming through your office, providing healthy but manageable injections of alien culture to your usual routine. … Read more