During a recent week, I came across stories about a new real estate dictionary app for the iPhone; the game-changing nature of social media; Christopher Gardner, whose story inspired the Will Smith movie "The Pursuit of Happyness"; the re-emergence of tax-exempt bonds as a way to fund affordable mortgages; the continued frustrations surrounding short sales; and the controversy surrounding virtual staging. And I never had to leave REALTOR® magazine online. Each of these stories was discussed by our own editors or Young Professionals Network bloggers on one of our four blogs—Speaking of Real Estate; The Weekly Book Scan; Styled, Staged and Sold; and YPN Lounge.

We recently moved all our blogs to the WordPress platform; happily, we’ve seen significant growth in traffic and comments. In "Letters" each issue (page 8), we now publish highlights from the blogs. This month, we feature two divergent topics: health-insurance reform and teaming up with stagers.

Sometimes, our print and online coverage converge to capture the cultural zeitgeist. In our back-page interview, Atlanta architect Ellen Dunham-Jones gives ideas for making suburbs more walkable (page 40) and our REALTORS® Conference & Expo preview (beginning on page 22) includes a Q&A with conference speaker John Tuccillo, who offers his take on the generational shift that’s making walkability trend. Meanwhile, a recent blog post looked at a study, released by a group called CEOs for Cities, showing a correlation between walkable cities and higher home prices.

So if you thought our Web site was just a regurgitation of the magazine, why not scan our online contents page (page 4) and spend some time exploring the site? In addition to our blogs and daily news summaries, we have videos, regular architecture and sales columns, stories about closing hard-to-sell properties ("How I Sold It"), a new "Quick Scripts" feature that can help you tackle tough buyer and seller questions with aplomb—and much more. Sign up for RSS feeds so that you can be alerted to new blog posts, and check out our webinar page to see what’s in the pipeline. Since March, more than 40,000 members have taken advantage of our free webinars by registering for, playing back, or downloading a session. And we’re just one slice of the value offered through REALTOR.org, our "parent" Web site.

I don’t mean to suggest that you should never go anywhere else for your real estate news. I’m all over the Internet every day. But I do hope you’ll take some time to participate in your association Web sites, REALTOR® magazine online, and REALTOR.org.

Pay Us A Visit

The magazine’s Web site is REALTOR.org/realtormag.